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Identifying as a Champion
From the June 4th Danbury (CT) News-Times coverage of the Connecticut Girls Track Championships:
“Terry Miller of Bulkeley won the 100 meters in 11.72 seconds, beating the previous State Open record, set in 2004 by Shanea Calhoun of Wilbur Cross, by one-tenth of a second. She also won the 200 in 24.17 seconds, breaking thye (sic) previous State Open record of 24.24, which was set in 1997 by Shayla Wallace of Northwest Catholic. Miller also placed fourth in the 400 (57.61).”
Sounds like a pretty straight forward report, doesn’t it? Except for one thing. Terry Miller is a boy. He has the body of a boy. The entire body of a boy. He says he psychologically identifies as female but he has not undergone either hormone treatments or reassignment surgery.
Miller competed on the boys team during the indoor season this winter. And this is the second year in a row that the girls 100 and 200 meter races have been won by boys.
The Executive Director of the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference Karissa Niehoff was quoted in The Connecticut Post as saying, “A lot of people have asked, can you run a separate race, can you put an asterisk next to their name, do something that shows there is a standard that is different from that? When you get into that playing out, you have got civil rights issues.
“Then within the same gender, you are taking one population of the gender and you’re separating them and creating another class. That’s what Title IX speaks to. That’s what Office of Civil Rights guidelines speak to. You cannot discriminate based on gender. And in our case in Connecticut, gender is gender identity.”
That is the law in Connecticut. Once a child decides it wants to be something its not the adults are required to play along. Records must be altered to reflect the lie. And the press is willing to spread and protect the lie, too. The Hartford Courant explained their lack of truth thusly:
“First, there are no rules being broken… Second, the big picture issue here is the policy and the standards, not any individual athlete… Third, and this is critical — we are talking about teenagers here, not professional athletes.
Last, there are those who argue we are ignoring the fact that a transgender girl may have an “unfair” advantage. But what is fair or unfair in sports is, to a degree, subjective. Tall people have an advantage on the basketball court. Athletes whose parents can afford to send them to year-round training have a clear-cut advantage in soccer, tennis and other sports. Our notions of what is fair and unfair are often driven by our own frames of reference.”
See? We changed the rules so everything is ok to begin with. And you don’t get to tell us what’s fair or unfair. That’s just your flawed “frame of reference.”
Canadian journalist Jonathan Kay tweeted out, “Another example of how trans women aren’t letting transphobia prevent them from destroying the competition in athletics. In this case, trans women grabbed 1st AND 2nd place, leaving cis ladies to compete for bronze as they contemplated their cis privilege.”
That generated snark from Jim Slotek, the movie critic for The Toronto Sun. “Yeah, all those US Opens Renée Richards won really demoralized Chrissy and Martina,” he subtweeted.
Richards, born Richard Raskin, was the first transgender athlete who demanded to compete with women. But inadvertantly, Slotek’s tweet pointed out the absurdity of his own argument. When Richards competed against Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova he (she) was well past his (her) prime as a tennis player. Richards was 18 and 20 years their senior respectively. Still, in February of 1979 at age 45 Richards was ranked as the world’s 20th best female player. In contrast, by age 45 Evert was no longer competing and Navratilova was no longer ranked.
Tennis has a long history of staging “Battles of the Sexes.” In every one of them either the male was disadvantaged by rules or age difference. In 1998 the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, boasted that they could beat any man outside of the top 200. The German Karsten Braasch, then ranked 203rd volunteered to take them on at the Australian Open. After a round of golf and two beers, Braasch dispatched Serena 6-1 and then Venus 6-2. Then the Williams’ re-figured their challenge to anyone 350 and higher.
For Richards, he came to believe that his post operative success at that age was indicative of the unfairness of it all. In 2015 he told Slate, “Having lived for the past 30 years, I know if I’d had surgery at the age of 22, and then at 24 went on the tour, no genetic woman in the world would have been able to come close to me. And so I’ve reconsidered my opinion.”
For their part, the NCAA and the International Olympic Committee has decided that transgenders can compete after only a year of hormone therapy and no longer require surgery, despite medical findings that it may take up to 15 years for bone density to change. They only have to show a current testosterone level comparable to their biological competition.
Between the lies, the identity politics and the chemicals it has become a twisted tale, a mash-up of Orwell’s 1984 and the Soviet bloc athletic teams. Something tells me we’re about to issue an apology and reparations to a lot of former East Germans.
Published in Sports
Nope, it’s not just muscle tone. There’s a lot more — jaw and brow shape, bone structure and bulk. Do you think dudes (even if they’re hermaphrodites) should be allowed to compete with girls? Maybe we should have an “Other” category.
WestC,
So let’s sum up. We can have a male with long hair compete as a woman or we can have women, remember the East Germans, who are getting enough male hormone to destroy their reproductive organs compete as women. Isn’t that Wunderbar!
Pardon me for a few minutes, I need to go throw up.
Regards,
Jim
Serena Williams? Her female characteristics have been questioned… https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/14/serena-williams-female-athletes-femininity-police
Although that article starts out a bit snarky, it concludes with these two very decent paragraphs:
However, attractiveness to the opposite sex isn’t used to determine who the highest paid male athletes will be; articles in which male athletes talk about, compare and critique their competitor’s physique aren’t published; quotes of a male athlete referring to his competitor’s style of play as “womanly” are highly unlikely to see the light of day likely because it’s appropriately regarded as inflammatory at best, and misogynistic and transphobic at worst.
Alas, this isn’t the case. As is also pointed out in the offending article, we are currently in a world in which television shows discuss “their picks for the most attractive female athletes”. We are currently in a world in which strong women are forced to choose between sacrificing their strength – and their livelihoods – in order to be considered women, or sacrificing the public perception of appropriate womanhood to be strong.
Many people have opined in recent years that bringing “transgender” into school sports will effectively eliminate girls’ sports because the “girls’ teams” will be populated with boys pretending to be girls because they didn’t make the real boys’ team.
Well, it’s “all about me!”
Narcissism know no bounds.
Anagram of Castor Semenya
Yes a secret man
In the last Olympics, they let a South African woman run in the women’s 800 meters, even though she naturally had ten times the testosterone level of a normal woman. (The panel that OK’ed it pretended it didn’t know if that level of male hormone would give her an advantage.)
After she predictably won the gold, I got to wondering how she would have fared in the men’s 800 meters. If any woman can compete with the men, I figured, it would be she.
Turned out, her gold medal time would have put her dead last in the first heats of the men’s 800, even behind the symbolic refugee runner — though not that far behind him.
Some time later, it occurred to me that, evolutionarily speaking, it would have been easier to give men and women the same hips. Instead, hips became a sex-linked trait. Male hips evolved for running and jumping. Female hips evolved for running and jumping — and bearing big-headed children, which compromises the running and jumping, biomechanically speaking.
Then you have Alabama which forces athletes to compete against their birth gender….. https://www.bloodyelbow.com/2018/2/27/17057628/mack-beggs-wrestler-high-school-wrestling-transgender-ncaa-olympics-wrestling-texas-news
This.