“Letting men compete as women simply if they change their name and take hormones is unfair — no matter how those athletes may throw their weight around,” the 62-year-old Navratilova wrote. “[T]he rules on trans athletes reward cheats and punish the innocent.” She added: “It’s insane and it’s cheating. I am happy to address a transgender woman in whatever form she prefers, but I would not be happy to compete against her.
Athlete Ally’s response was swift and certain:
Martina Navratilova’s recent comments on trans athletes are transphobic, based on a false understanding of science and data, and perpetuate dangerous myths that lead to the ongoing targeting of trans people through discriminatory laws, hateful stereotypes and disproportionate violence.“First of all, trans women are women, period,” the organization’s statement continued. “They did not decide their gender identity any more than someone decides to be gay, or to have blue eyes. There is no evidence at all that the average trans woman is any bigger, stronger, or faster than the average cisgender woman, but there is evidence that often when athletes lower testosterone through hormone replacement therapy, performance goes down.” And that was the end of Navratilova’s eight-year stint as an outreach LGBT “ambassador” to the sports world—a strange fate for a woman who came out as gay in 1981, a time when public declarations of homosexual identity were still socially perilous, even for celebrities.
Readers need not approve of Navratilova’s lesbian lifestyle or her promotion of lesbian causes to recognize the absurdities of Athlete Ally’s assertion and the transgender ideology it is seeking to defend. There is one small problem with Athlete Ally’s declaration that “there is no evidence at all that the average trans woman is bigger, stronger, or faster than the average cisgender woman”—the mounting heap of exactly that evidence. On February 16, the day before Navratilova published her op-ed, high school juniors Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood, biological males who identify as trans girls, won first and second place in the 55-meter dash at Connecticut’s open indoor track championships. Second-placer Yearwood was nearly a full quarter of a second faster than third-place finisher Chelsea Mitchell, a biological female. A video of the sprint shows a Miller and Yearwood who both look noticeably taller, bigger-boned, and fuller-muscled than their “cisgender” competitors. High school junior Selina Soule complained to the Associated Press: “We all know the outcome of the race before it even starts; it’s demoralizing.” Parents of other girls complained even louder, but to no avail. Connecticut is one of seventeen states (along with the District of Columbia) that allow transgender athletes to compete without such restrictions as actually having undergone sex-reassignment surgery or even taking female hormones that might reduce their muscle mass.
Nor were Miller and Yearwood anomalies. In 2016 another male-to-female transgender sprinter, Nattaphon Wangyot, took home all-state honors in Alaska’s girls’ track-and-field competition. In 2018, Rachel McKinnon, a transgender philosophy professor at the College of Charleston, won first place in the women’s cycling sprint 35-39 age bracket at the Union Cycliste Internationale’s Masters Track Cycling Championship. A photo of the event shows a hulky McKinnon in bicycle shorts towering over the second- and third-place winners. Transgender mixed-martial-arts fighter Fallon Fox cracked the skull of her opponent, Tamikka Brents, in a 2014 match, culminating a brief career of five wins to one loss. In 2012 trans woman Gabrielle Ludwig, 50 years old, 6’8” in height and 220 pounds in weight, joined the women’s varsity basketball team after enrolling at Santa Clara's Mission College in California. She had fought in Operation Desert Storm as a man and had been married and divorced twice before changing her birth certificate to reflect her new female identity. Ludwig’s coach predicted to the Mercury News that she would be “the most dangerous player in the state”—a not unsurprising assessment since Ludwig was about a foot taller on average than any other woman college player at the time.
Male-to-female transgender athletes are vanishingly few in number (like male-to-female trans people in general), but as the above examples indicate, when they compete, they pose a crushing existential threat to women’s sports. That is because the very existence of women’s sports is predicated, as Martina Navratilova recognized, on the now-highly politically incorrect observation that the two sexes are radically different physically. Women on average are not only smaller than the average man, but they cannot punch as hard, lift as much weight, or run as fast, owing to the enhanced bone density and muscle mass that testosterone affords (healthy young men’s testosterone is about ten times the level of women’s, and even when male-to-female trans people take testosterone-suppressing hormones, their bone and much of their muscle structure remains). No woman, for example, has ever run a four-minute mile; the first man to do so, Roger Bannister, broke that barrier in 1954. When biological males and biological females compete with each other on the playing fields, the biological females almost always lose.
Nonetheless, current ideology demands that gender identity be regarded as utterly fluid and a matter of subjective feeling, not physiology. “Trans women are women, period” is the reigning ethos. It is an ethos heavily promoted by trans people themselves, several of whom hold prominent leadership positions in LGBT organizations (a trans woman, Barnard professor Jennifer Finney Boylan, is current co-chair of GLAAD, another leading LGBT organization). One current project is to stigmatize heterosexual men—and lesbians—who refuse to date or have sexual relations with trans women. Lesbians and other progressive women who dissent are branded TERFs—“Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists.”
One of the chief instigators of Navratilova’s expulsion from Athlete Ally's board was Rachel McKinnon. In December 2018 Navratilova had tweeted: “You can’t just proclaim yourself a female and be able to compete against women. There must be some standards, and having a penis and competing as a woman would not fit that standard.” McKinnon unleashed a barrage of Twitter invectives about Navratilova’s “transphobic” rhetoric that she redoubled after the Sunday Times op-ed. There is something ironic about a lifelong lesbian advocate being pushed out of her own movement by a biological male.
What is truly troubling, however, is the willingness of heterosexual feminists to go along with all of this. A typical sentiment is: “When those that govern sports maintain anachronistic conceptions of gender, we as society do not win and we as a society have to push back,” from Emma Tumilty of the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics. If women complain that trans women are beating them in track or cycling or mixed martial arts, the standard response is: Try harder next time. Vice magazine, surveying the wreckage wrought by Fallon Fox on Tamikka Brents’s body, called Brents a “sore loser” who needed to “get over it.”
On January 31 brand-new Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar sent a letter to USA Powerlifting on behalf of a transgender constituent (with a copy to Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison for enforcement under state anti-discrimination laws) demanding that it quit barring biological males who identify as women from women’s events. Omar called the idea that trans women athletes have a “direct competitive advantage” over biological females a “myth” unsupported by “medical science.”
For decades feminists have castigated heterosexual men for trying to “erase” women—from history, from society, from political life. But the real erasure of women these days is coming from their fellow progressives. They are being denied their distinctive female sports, their distinctive female bodies, and, ultimately, their distinctive female identities.
Charlotte Allen is a writer living in Washington, D.C.
6 comments:
Don't bother me with facts. I know I'm right.
On "Lowder with Crowder", Steve Crowder's on-line show, he once had his producer at the time, "Not Gay" Jared arm wrestle a girl. Jared is an incredibly slender young man and the girl, a regular writer on his website and sometime guest or co-host on his show, is a regular weight lifter and appears to be in very good shape strength-wise. Anyone who would look upon the two would not think it unlikely that the chick would win the contest. Frankly, Jared was concerned as well. But he won.
Related to this issue, Crowder has lamented the fantasy of the tough chick so often depicted in movies these days. Using "Atomic Blonde" as an example, he set up a few of the scenes, using the smaller NotGay Jared to stand in for Theron. What comes to mind was a scene of holding a man against the wall, pinning him by the throat with a raised, high-heeled foot as if having side-kicked the dude. Jared wore the high-heels and pinned Crowder who easily leaned forward against the foot and Jared could not maintain the pin. Another was using the shoe as a weapon, particularly hitting Crowder in the chest with it. The shoe as a weapon, as if it is a pipe or something, failed also. While it was not comfortable, an initial strike to the chest, as it was in the movie, from a seated position next to the victim, does not allow for enough force to be generated. On top of that, it as a woman trying to generate that force.
While I totally enjoy women warrior movies and shows, I'm too knowledgeable about what can or can't be done to a man by a woman that it's hard to watch without immediately seeing where fantasy overtakes realism.
Women CANNOT compete physically with men.
More importantly, women aren’t designed and physically built to physically compete with men.
If one accepts Darwinian dogma, all the traits of “toxic masculinity” are also the same traits that advance the species.
"If one accepts Darwinian dogma, all the traits of “toxic masculinity” are also the same traits that advance the species."
Hard to argue this regardless of one's opinion on Darwinian dogma. I made this very argument at a certain blog we all love and was lambasted by a troll as if I was misogynistic or something. The buffoon simply couldn't grasp the irony in the argument being made for more women in government.
Despite what some might say, making broad changes based on exceptions is bad policy.
Pointing out that 1 in 100,000,000 women might be athletic enough to compete for a spot on an NFL team means nothing.
What is being discussed is the opposite of that. It’s taking people who are biologically, physically superior and allowing them to complete against others who can’t overcome those biological advantages.
Except, science.
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