Advocacy groups use this leverage
Female athletes stab female athletes in the back.
So in the future there won’t be any Billy Jean Kings and Megan Rapinoes. All the stars of women’s sports will be men who say they are women.
Tip Jar
Female athletes stab female athletes in the back.
So in the future there won’t be any Billy Jean Kings and Megan Rapinoes. All the stars of women’s sports will be men who say they are women.
Talk about pulling the ladder up behind you.
Rapinoe should know better: In 2017, the FC-Dallas under-fifteen boy’s team beat the US women’s soccer team in a scrimmage. And surely King is aware that her fellow women’s tennis greats Serena and Venus Williams were beaten back-to-back by a man who was then the 203rd-ranked male tennis player in the world. Male bodies and female bodies are different, and the only sports (aside from events like dressage and marksmanship that have nothing to do with strength or speed) in which women *might* be able to compete equally are extreme mega-endurance sports. That’s just the way it is, and pretending otherwise robs female athletes of the chance to excel.
Given King’s 1973 ‘battle of the sexes’ tennis match with Bobby Riggs that she won, perhaps she thinks transwomen have no great advantage in tennis. I think that’s mistaken given the later controversy over Renee Richards playing professional tennis as a transwoman and later saying that it was unfair to do so. What’s glaring is how no transman is wanting to play professional tennis with men, because they’d have no chance given men’s much stronger upper-body strength when it comes to serving.
I think King probably doesn’t think that, because it was both obvious and well-known that Bobby Riggs was way past his prime.
Smoke Rises, a scrimmage is a friendly / practice match, and that particular one appears to have been organised for the benefit of the U-15 boys team – a teaching match. I would not draw much significance from the fact that the boys won for that reason.
Riggs was 55 when he challenged the #1 woman in the world, 30-year-old Margaret Court, and demolished her 6-2, 6-1, in a match called the “Mother’s Day Massacre.”
King, who had previously turned down a challenge from Riggs, then agreed to play him, and beat him 6-4, 6-3, 6-3.
Don’t get me wrong, King’s victory was very important for women’s tennis, but — as I think she has acknowledged in many interviews over the years — it was not for establishing women’s players as anything like the athletic equals of men, but more like just showing that the top women were not a joke.
It was roughly the equivalent of Stefan Edberg (currently 54) coming out of retirement and whipping Ash Barty but then losing to Naomi Osaka. (Barty and Osaka are early 20s, so it’s not quite a perfect comparison; substitute Halep and Kvitova if you like)
And yes, I’m familiar with the speculation that Riggs threw the match against King as part of a hustle/blackmail by organized crime, but I don’t take it very seriously.
From what I’ve read, I personally think Riggs threw the match:
https://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/9589625/the-match-maker
Lots of people claim to have info that he threw the match. He was a known hustler and the commentators during the match were puzzled as to why he kept making so many mistakes. And on and on.
But I don’t know for sure. Perhaps he was just old and having a very bad day.
Regardless, it’s still possible the match helped women’s tennis. Kind of a shame that such a pro-wrestling-like spectacle would prove helpful to a sports division that should have stood on its own merits, but I guess you take what you can get.
I do think this will be self-limiting. If transwomen start dominating women’s sports, the tide will turn against them. It’s already happening in some sports and areas. Once the “transwomen are just normal women with no special advantage” claim gets exposed as an obvious lie then people won’t tolerate it,