Standing tall above her competitors
Rachel McKinnon’s world championship Saturday is raising more eyebrows.
Cycling’s first transgender world champion has fired back at heated criticism surrounding her breakthrough victory at the 2018 UCI Masters track championships.
Canadian philosophy professor at South Carolina’s College of Charleston Dr Rachel McKinnon endured a torrent of online trolling after taking to social media to celebrate her world championship win in the women’s 35-44 sprint final at the Velo Sports Center in Los Angeles earlier this week.
An image of McKinnon standing tall above her competitors during the medal presentation ceremony has spread globally in the wake of her controversial victory — just as she predicted.
So McKinnon’s good at predicting as well as cycling.
But was it predictable because people are such nasty transphobic bigots? Or was it predictable because McKinnon has the body of a large man? Was it predictable because people are irrational and hostile to Difference, or because McKinnon has an unfair advantage over the women in the competition? McKinnon of course would say it’s for the first reasons, but then McKinnon has an interest.
An elated McKinnon claimed, to her knowledge, she is the first openly transgender athlete to win a world championship in any sport, after nudging past Van Herrikhuyzen on the final straight in a time of 12.903 seconds.
But it doesn’t make sense to put “transgender athlete” in one giant box, given the fact that sport is divided into men’s and women’s because women and men are sexually dimorphic and men have huge physical advantages on most criteria. It’s just not a genuine “first” for a male-bodied cyclist to win a race against female-bodied cyclists, even if it is in the literal sense “the first openly transgender athlete to win a world championship in any sport.” It’s not a genuine first because it’s not a genuine win; it is, to put it bluntly, cheating.
I would think this would be obvious even to the most ardently dogmatic trans activists. I would think that if only on pragmatic grounds – it doesn’t look good. But then I would also expect McKinnon to be able to see it, and that’s apparently a lost cause.
McKinnon hit out at the criticism immediately following her victory both on social media and in interviews.
She told velonews.com she enjoyed no physical advantage over her competitors despite being born a male.
What utter bullshit. McKinnon’s legs are like trees.
She said there is no research to suggest that testosterone and body development would in anyway enhance the physical performance of transgender athletes.
She recently told USA Today that policing the testosterone levels of transgender athletes violates their human rights — declaring that should override all debates surrounding potential unfair playing fields for transgender athletes.
“We cannot have a woman legally recognised as a trans woman in society, and not be recognized that way in sports,” McKinnon said recently.
Yes we can. We can make an exception for sports. That’s a thing we can do.
“Focusing on performance advantage is largely irrelevant because this is a rights issue. We shouldn’t be worried about trans people taking over the Olympics. We should be worried about their fairness and human rights instead.”
Oh no it is not. There is no “right” for people with male bodies to compete against women in sport. That pretend “right” is at least as absurd as the claimed “right” to have one’s chosen “identity” validated.
I love (not really) the “trans people“, as if somehow there were an equivalence with trans-women and trans-men. When the first trans-men wins a competition requiring strength and power over the natal men, that might be something to celebrate, because that would truly be a feat.
You know what? Even old and untrained, I could probably outrun most toddlers, so if I declare as a toddler, does that mean I get to compete with 3-year-olds and crow when I beat them that I am the first trans-toddler to ever win a sporting competition? Or would people immediately notice that I am 5’10”, while the average toddler is under 3′? Would they notice that my legs were longer, larger in every way, and had more muscular development? Something tells me they would, and the world would cry “foul”.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not comparing women with toddlers. Fully grown adult women do have many means for achieving success against fully grown adult men, but the mere fact of a male body gives a competitive advantage.
Perhaps we need a new category – trans-sports – where trans-women could compete with trans-women, and trans-men could compete with trans-men, thus leveling the playing field for everyone. Which is what women’s sports were supposed to do in the first place.
Does anyone know by the way why intellectual “sports” are divided by gender? I think it’s rather insulting to have separate women’s and men’s competitions in poker, chess, etc.
I know they aren’t always so divided but it’s still pretty common.
Anna, possibly because men wrote the rules, and wrote them specifically to ensure women wouldn’t be seen to be beating men at intellectual sports.
Also, many people still believe that there is some substantial difference between how women think and how men think, and believe that women cannot compete on an even playing field with men even in intellectual games (tell that to every man I’ve ever beaten at Trivial Pursuit, and also tell that to my husband, who refuses to play Scrabble with me unless we don’t score it, because he cannot beat me).
You know, it’s “more of a guy thing” and “no estrogen vibe”. Yuck.
MacKinnon insists that only trans rights are important, that we only need to consider fairness to trans people.
Sums up the whole problem, really. “Ignore women, they don’t matter.”
So what about the human rights of the women getting the shit kicked out of them in the ring or flattened on the rugby pitch by male-bodied, heavily muscled opponents?
But…they’re all women!
“Focusing on performance advantage is largely irrelevant”
What even is this thought process? The whole point of having different competition classes – sex, age, weight – is to neutralize performance advantages. McKinnon has more than enough experience in athletics to understand that.
Imagine a 250lb wrestler competing in a 180lb weight class and claiming ‘ignore my size and weight, this is about my human rights!’
Exactly. It’s pure bullshit, but the holy circle that’s been drawn around trans issues lets Saint Rachel get away with it.
I think Siobhan gives a good rundown here:
https://twitter.com/SiobhanFTB/status/1052190418404700161?s=19
Dan,
I’m not impressed by an argument that hey, she doesn’t always win, so therefore she doesn’t have an unfair advantage. And following it up by claiming that her critics are engaging in defamation and that McKinnon could totally sue them successfully if she wanted to doesn’t win my confidence. I don’t know whether the rules governing testosterone levels are sufficient to provide fairness or not. But I do know what defamation is and what it isn’t, and if you’re talking out of your ass about that, it doesn’t give me confidence that you’re a reliable source of information on anything else.
Screechy, quite. The ‘doesn’t always win’ claim could be applied to Fallon Fox, who was beaten once, by an awesome fighter who managed to gain an advantage at the end of a round and kept pummelling the shit out of them long after the bell sounded. When the next round started they took up where they had left off on a still dazed Fallon, resulting in a TKO. The fact that other women who fought Fallon said they had never been hit so hard before in their lives and that one had both eye sockets broken in the first round is apparently irrelevant.
Siobhan had some decent points (and some unfortunate accusations about this really being about a desire for trans people to disappear) but ultimately is unconvincing.
By all means, let’s collect stats on this. But if the stats come out “wrong” (showing trans women do have a large unfair advantage), then what?
She also points to how low of a testosterone level trans women have to maintain without acknowledging the recent push to do away with that.
#11 Dan
I would say she has a number of disingenuous points in that thread. Her first tweet makes a good point – a statistical analysis would certainly be interesting and informative – but her second tweet sets the tone:
“I realize those enthralled by the moral panic du jour aren’t thinking logically to begin with, because if they were they’d be asking how it’s an advantage to sustain *lower* testosterone than the rest of the competition, but honestly.”
No one is asking that question because it is not logical. The objection to McKinnon and other trans athletes is that focusing on their current testosterone levels misses the point: McKinnon’s development was male. The body pattern and size laid down by that development is male. Thus the category that body belongs to is male, and fulfills criteria originally behind all sports sex segregation. The effort to move this to current testosterone levels is an effort to sidestep the largest contributor to athletic advantage.
Note also the two insults packed into that tweet, both direct and backhanded: people that oppose Siobhan’s position regarding McKinnon are not thinking logically, and are also “enthralled” i.e. obsessed, crazed.
Tweet three (‘doesn’t always win’) was addressed by Rob, and four (‘defamation’) by Screechy.
Tweet five is a doozy.
“There’s this lovely thing called the problem of induction that you’re supposed to learn about in school, assuming you went to a school that “claimed” to actually educate you.”
Snide much? I cannot consider her to be arguing in good faith at this point.
Siobhan has blocked me – I must be too TERFy. =^_^=
Good grief, you didn’t disagree with them did you? Or was it just guilt by association?