Courage
You know who the bravest athlete in history is? I bet you don’t. Here, have a headline:
Fallon Fox is still the bravest athlete in history
Why? Because of the hatred.
In 2013, when Fallon Fox came out publicly as trans in professional mixed martial arts, she was the target of a torrent of hatred I have literally never seen targeting an LGBTQ athlete. While certainly some writers took thoughtful approaches to understanding this emerging dynamic of trans athletes in women’s sports, still many more, like Joe Rogan, were vicious for the sake of being vicious.
Wait a second though. Isn’t Fallon Fox a man? Doesn’t “Fallon Fox came out as trans” mean that Fallon Fox is a man who decided to “identify as” a woman so that he could compete against women instead of men? Does that really make him brave? Let alone the bravest ever?
Cyd Zeigler thinks so, or pretends to think so in this article:
Yet Fox stood strong and continued to push for, and earn, her right to compete. Except for one fateful match, she also won every time she stepped into the professional ring.
Well no shit, he’s a man, who stepped into the professional ring to beat up women. When he stepped into the professional ring to beat up Tamikka Brents, he broke her orbital bone and gave her a concussion. I’m not seeing the bravery.
When I wrote my book, Fair Play: How LGBT Athletes Are Claiming Their Rightful Place In Sports, the final chapter was titled, “Fallon Fox Is The Bravest Athlete In History.”
That remains true for me now, four years later.
Nothing for the bravery of Tamikka Brents?
Don’t be silly, there’s no such thing as bravery in women.
I think Ashlee Evans-Smith is pretty brave too. Her and Fox both grew up wrestling on the boys’ team, but only one of them was a girl. Unlike Fox (ne Boyd Burton), Ashlee Evans-Smith is an incredible female athlete. She made mincemeat out of Fox in the ring. A better wrestler, a better fighter, and very brave to go in the ring with this lame dude.
This is starting to annoy me more and more. Coupling Trans Identified athletes with homosexual/bisexual athletes automatically jumps the controversy up onto the moral high ground — though I wonder how much space this book gives to lesbian and gay athletes currently in the process of at long last “claiming their rightful place in sports.” From now on, it’s LGB & T. The ampersand can play the part of an asterisk.*
*Don’t run them together.
In my book, any man who allows himself to physically attack a woman is lower than a snake’s belly. For these trans types to want to do so in the name of ‘sport’ or whatever is beyond belief. But it shows once again and for the umpteenth time how dangerous the combination of self-interest and self-delusion can be.
I do not know where this sport is heading, but from where it is right now, it’s downhill all the way.
‘The LGB & T’.
It sounds like some frontier start-up railroad company.
;-)
Maybe Boyd just gets off on the thought of beating up women?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KQpQmNhya14 Joe Rogan is NOT being “vicious for the sake of being vicious”, he happens to be an expert on this type of sport, and he tells it like it is. Rogan nails it in this podcast, if you have 20 min. to spare I recommend watching it. I don’t see any transphobia or any hateful commentary in this particular interview. (If I didn’t properly make a link, try google, youtube ‘Joe Rogan Reflects on Fallon Fox Controversy”.) The people defending this type of unfairness in sports are so obviously afraid of the truth. Let’s call a spade a spade here, it’s cheating.
Rogan was very much not expressing anything objectionable there. Hell, he even stuck to “she” and “her” while referring to the trans athlete. (And note that he calls out a case about a trans man youth who wanted to wrestle boys and wasn’t allowed to.)
“she was the target of a torrent of hatred I have literally never seen targeting an LGBTQ athlete.”
Oh really. I see at least two occurrences of dishonesty in that statement.
For one, there is the usual conflation of reasoned criticism with hatred. I’ve seen some of Rogan’s commentary on Fallon, and it was definitely the former. This tactic of course is used to skip past the fact that there are evidenced based reasons to split the sexes in sports in general, and fighting sports in particular; and further, that there are evidenced rebuttals against the claim that physical transitioning eradicates these advantages.
In doing so, all criticism is lumped in with all right wing “trans people are freaks” style yelling.
The second dishonesty is the inclusion of LGBQ with the T on an issue that solely revolves around properties unique to the T. This of course is to hitch trans issues to the sexuality wagon, for the sole benefit of the T, and worse, to the detriment of the G and especially L.
A consequence of those lies is that choosing to criticise trans participation in sports is seen as a signal that the person doing so is conservative; many lefties that are not scientifically minded will balk at this and go along with the flow while quashing their doubts. Is anyone else reninded of religion…?
As for bravery… when I was a kid, I was involved in a rural BMX league. It was split into age groups, and I was in the middle one. At a competitive meet I recall, after the serious races were done, there was a more relaxed series of races, where people could enter whichever age category and just have a go. Times for this round weren’t recorded, so it didn’t matter which you chose.
I put my BRAVERY on display: I chose the younger league. YOU WILL NOW APPLAUD MY BRAVERY.
Incidentally, I didn’t win… which of course proves that there was no advantage in being a bigger kid, right? I look forward to age categories being dismantled on this airtight basis.
what a world:
– donald trump is potus
– joe rogan is acknowledged as saying something sensible
– people beating the *!#@§ out of other people is referred to as sport
such an emoji there should be . . .
From the Post Millenial:
“I’ve fought a lot of women and have never felt the strength that I felt in a fight as I did that night,” [Tammika] Brents said, recounting her experience fighting Fox. “I can’t answer whether it’s because she was born a man or not because I’m not a doctor. I can only say, I’ve never felt so overpowered ever in my life and I am an abnormally strong female in my own right… I still disagree with Fox fighting. Any other job or career I say have a go at it, but when it comes to a combat sport I think it just isn’t fair.”
In another part of the interview Brents apparently said she had no idea Fox was trans until after the fight.
MMA matches can be won in one of a number of ways:
1) Knockout – When one fighter causes their opponent to lose consciousness due to striking.
Which is to say, the quickest way you can be declared a winner in MMA “sport” is by causing Brain Damage.
@Holms, yes exactly what I was thinking, it’s so much like religious belief it’s uncanny. Trans has very little to do with sexual preference, and a lot to do with wishful thinking. I think they have a right to believe whatever they want, just don’t ask me to buy into it. As far as sports go, the current paradigm of separating males from females, or whatever age, weight, skill classes are defined in the rules, should be upheld if there is to be any sort of legitimate fairness in competition. A simple medical exam to determine *actual* gender might be helpful, but I’m sure there would be significant backlash.
@ktron, like hunting, going out and killing animals is considered ‘sport’, I consider it just plain old killing.
[fictional] jeebus wept
the purpose of this “sport” is to Beat People To Death.
doesn’t this discussion require a seriously different perspective?
this aint triple jump – MMA is a real world incarnation of the “second amendment” fundamentalists
do you seriously think a society that condones sponsoring people to beat other people to death can be made to care about any of the possible biological differences of their gladiators?
People care when men become violent toward women, even men who are pretending to be women. That’s the perspective.
I think there are some mistaken ideas out there about what MMA is and does. Sure, it’s a combat sport, like boxing. Like boxing, you can win with a knockout. And to the untrained eye it’s more violent than boxing. But MMA actually causes fewer serious injuries to the fighters.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151106062447.htm
There are many reasons for this: in boxing the competitors stand face to face for an average of 17.7 minutes (5.9 rounds), which they spend just slugging each other. It could go up to twelve rounds. In MMA, the average fight length is 8 minutes, and there are only three five-minute rounds in a typical (non-championship) fight, and they spend a fair part of that grappling on the ground. So fewer blows are thrown and received.
In addition, the fight training for boxers can include 120 rounds of sparring before a fight, 3-4 days a week. MMA fighters spend as much time on grappling as they do on kickboxing, and take far fewer serious blows in training. Boxers frequently come out of the ring pissing blood and unable to think. MMA fighters come out of the cage with more visible injuries, usually from elbows and knees, but with about half the rate of clear concussions. Most of the damage to boxers, however, is in the form of CTE, which shows up later – think of Ali in his dotage. Like football, it’s not the one hit that takes them down, it’s the hundreds and thousands of hits that don’t.
In boxing, if a fighter gets dropped to the canvas, their competitor gets backed off and there’s a count to let them drag together enough consciousness to stand up again and take more punches. In MMA, if a fighter gets dropped, their competitor mounts them and the fight is over with a TKO as soon as it’s clear they can’t defend. They don’t get up concussed and get more concussed.
Also, about 18% of fights in MMA end with submission holds, which cause little or no damage to the body. A fighter with no ground game can’t win in MMA. This is something you could see in the fight between Evans-Smith and Fox. Fox, a stronger, brawnier fighter, relied on his knees and his punches, which sometimes staggered Evans-Smith. But Evans-Smith had more knowledge of grappling and a much better ground game, and this is why she won. As soon as they hit the canvas, Fox had nothing and ended up disadvantaged every time.
To be clear, I would be worried if my kids got into MMA. But I’d be far more worried if they got into football or boxing, where the damage is less visible and more inexorable.
Combat sports ought to be the test case for trans-women, since matches are organized around weight divisions. Ronda Rousey would not be matched to Joe Lewis. But it doesn’t work out that way.
To add to Papito’s post (and note, I’m not a fan of any combat, or even contact, sport):
There’s a lot of evidence showing that long-term injuries and premature death has gone up in both boxing and football with the advent of protective gear. Helmets and pads in football; padded gloves in boxing–both seem to have caused players to take more risks (because they feel safer) and, as noted in Papito’s post about the countdowns in boxing, to get hurt badly enough to have long-term consequences, but not badly that they can’t get back up and take more abuse.
For heaven’s sake, the point of MMA isn’t to beat your opponent to death. I completely understand being against combat sports like MMA and boxing (and probably football and other dangerous sports), but nobody wants to see anybody die.
A lot of people think combat is the purest form of competition. A lot of fighters fight for peanuts because they enjoy the challenge. A lot of people enjoy watching combat sports without being bloodthirsty savages hoping to see someone die.
Again, if it’s not for you, great. If you think dangerous sports should be banned, I can see that point of view. But saying the point of MMA is for one person to kill their opponent is incorrect,
As for Muhammad Ali being a broken-down, punch-drunk boxer, he actually had Parkinson’s syndrome. Ali’s doctor did not believe it was related to boxing. His symptoms were consistent with those of non-boxers that have Parkinson’s. CTE is a real thing of course, but Ali is probably not a good example of someone suffering from it.
Speaking of questionable examples, Fallon Fox should never have been in the women’s division, but her record is not as good as it looks. She beat 5 lower-tier fighters and lost to a mid-tier fighter. If not for Brent getting injured and saying Fox’s strength was off the charts, Fox would seem like a hundred other fighters who had a good start in the minor leagues but never went anywhere. She’s not the Veronica Ivy of MMA.
And Fox did in fact have a torrent of abuse directed at her. “Freak” and far worse was common to hear. I think Joe Rogan’s comment were fine, but there was a vicious tone to a lot of other people’s comments. I understand that people have a visceral reaction to what they saw as a man beating up women, so I can see where the rage was coming from, but there’s no denying it was there.
But Fox was not brave or courageous. She considers herself a woman and felt she should be able to compete with women. She should have been not been allowed to do that. She’s not a hero.
In the article Fox says a lot of women are willing to fight her.
I think that’s totally fine. If they know the score and want to give it a whirl, great.
That’s an advantage of a one-on-one sport. For biking or running, there has to be a consensus on who’s allowed in the race. For something like MMA, if a women wants to fight Fox it doesn’t really affect anyone else.
Yes, definitely, and if a child wants to fight Fallon Fox that’s great too. How about someone with muscular dystrophy? Also fine. A blind person? Yep, great, fabulous.
#20 Skeletor
“In the article Fox says a lot of women are willing to fight her. I think that’s totally fine. If they know the score and want to give it a whirl, great.”
That’s cool and all, but what of those who know the score (i.e. that Fallon is male) and don’t want to fight? We can be confident that their unwillingness to fight men will be distorted to “hateful bigot spits on all trans people” or similar. There is even a decent chance that some TRA fool will characterise the unwillingness to engage in violence against a trans person as ‘literal violence against trans people’ without even a trace of irony.
Oh and what of those who don’t know the score because it has been concealed from them? Simpler by far to just keep to sex segregation, and less harm all round.
Fox says. Fox also says he’s a woman. I think accepting statements from a transwoman about what other women are willing, or wanting, to do is similar in kind, if not in degree, to accepting that Donald is a stable genius because he identifies as one.
I’ve seen people suggest that Bernie Sanders should reject any endorsement from Rogan because of Rogan’s “history of transphobia”. This, though, is from people for whom misgendering or questioning the TWAW narrative constitutes transphobia.
There is nothing either male or female, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a disorder.
Ooh nice.
In case anyone doesn’t recognize it that’s a play on something Hamlet says: “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”
(Fun fact: this one time I was chatting with my brother who is a Montaigne scholar about what an influence Monty had on Hamlet (the play) and quoted that line.)
Thank you for that reference OB. I enjoy Shakespeare and I’m sure I’ve read or saw Hamlet at least once, but beyond the TBONTB level of famous lines I don’t remember any particular ones and references mostly pass me by unhindered.
I’m not a fan of the “OH MY GOD HE CRACKED HER SKULL” argument against Fallon Fox fighting women because female MMA fighters are well capable of cracking each other’s skulls. Bones break in combat sports. The only way to protect MMA fighters from broken bones is not letting them fight. I’m not for that. Women can do their own risk assessment and make their own choices. I’m not here to wrap them in cotton batting. Men possess more physical power than women in general but bones are only so strong. Female MMA fighters have more than sufficient strength to break all the same bones in a woman’s body male MMA fighters do.
My issue with Fallon Fox is one of fairness. There should be no league in which female fighters are required to compete against someone who benefited from male puberty, as if their musculoskeletal realities are comparable just because Fox takes estrogen. They’re not. There are no studies suggesting they are.