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A Tongan weightlifter – and rival to transgender athlete Laurel Hubbard – who missed out on an Olympic qualifying berth has been awarded a wildcard entry to the Tokyo Games.
Nini Manumua, 21, has been handed a tripartite place by the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF). She finished in 14th in the women’s +87kg division, one place short of an automatic qualification berth. New Zealand lifter Hubbard finished seventh.
Well, he finished seventh competing against women. Manumua is an actual woman.
She [Hubbard] competed in men’s events before coming out as transgender in 2013.
That is, Hubbard competed in men’s events (being a man and all) before he decided to pretend to be a woman in order to cheat his way to medals.
Her inclusion has generated significant criticism with some groups claiming Hubbard has an unfair advantage, but others see the 43-year-old as a figurehead for greater inclusion at the Olympics.
Oh we’re not just claiming he has an unfair advantage, we’re saying with emphasis that he’s cheating. It should be obvious to everyone over the age of 6 that he’s cheating.
His advantage is patently obvious in the pictures. Some people put on blinders.
Rival? In a sane world, they wouldn’t be – Hubbard and Manumua belong in separate leagues.
iknklast, yes but there is large variability within the sexes therefore something something and that’s why the female division is no longer female-specific.
Athletes certainly verge into pathological obsession a lot of the time. How much do we really know about Hubbard’s motivation? Is sport so important to him that he would fake trans status for the sake of a medal? Or is this second-chance athletic career just a side benefit?
@JTD #3
That’s a really good question. I don’t agree with the phrasing “fake trans status” because it’s unclear what that means. Does this person genuinely exhibit gender dysphoria, and would this person transition even if athletic competition were impossible? I don’t know if people could answer that honestly, because sport is a huge part of some people’s lives.
Laurel Hubbard, Rachel McKinnon, Hailey Davidson, three examples of less-than-top-rank (I would not say mediocre) male athletes who won championships after declaring they were female. None is a “female brain in a male body” or any such nonsense, because no one is. Would any of them have transitioned if they had an amputated leg or something? Does it matter?
Somewhat related, I saw this brilliant article via Twitter. A butch lesbian with gender dysphoria (who has chosen not to transition) talks very bluntly about gender identity, the gingerbread model, and porn.
Lauren Black: “Gloves off. I’m going to talk about how dysphoria, plus the gingerbread model, plus pornography, leads to the creation of who I call ‘porn addled robot people’.”
Sackbut@5:
That’s Lauren Black, co-founder of LGBA Ireland. I liked the article a lot. Lauren also wrote this:
https://lesbianandgaynews.com/2021/03/lauren-black-i-am-a-butch-lesbian-i-live-with-gender-dysphoria-i-do-not-believe-my-deep-discomfort-with-my-female-body-means-that-i-should-take-steps-to-change-it/
She’s also been on glinner’s The Mess We’re In at least twice:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qouJfnyz9gU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jX5T_OYXUE
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, Sackbut. Really, I can’t thank you enough for that link. To read a woman describe dysphoria so accurately, without falling for the ‘trans’ narrative about it, or the ‘born in the wrong body’ lie, is healing (even though I’m not a lesbian).
Ditto Sack @5, good find. Definitely a good read.
I consider the question “is transwoman X only claiming to be sincerely transgender for the obvious benefit?” very similar to “is mega preacher X only claiming to be sincerely Christian for the obvious benefit?” Unless the appearance of fraud is just too obvious, my default is to assume they’re sincere.
Given the nature of both beliefs, the conditioning, the social and cultural messages, and how terribly easy it is to discover both Truth- and- One’s- True -Self in vague, mystical, easily adaptable glittering generalities, it’s no stretch to imagine that they believe — at least — part of it all of the time, and all of it some of the time. Even outright cons have been known to start buying in to their own story. It’s so easy. We think in stories, we are the stories we tell ourselves.
Especially when it’s very convenient.
That’s all fair enough, it’s just that I think the appearance of fraud is indeed just too obvious in this case. I’ve never believed he really thinks he’s a woman.
OK, so we can’t know his motives. We can only guess.
So what? It doesn’t matter how much or even whether he believes himself to be a woman; he objectively isn’t one, and shouldn’t be allowed to compete against women.
I know I’m not saying anything that anyone here doesn’t already know, but Hubbard’s motivation is irrelevent. Whether or not he’s “genuine”, “sincere”, “actually dysphoric” etc. has no bearing on the fact that he does not belong in any women’s sport. It wouldn’t matter if he was the truest of “true” trans. He’s still not a woman and never will be. If he can’t make the cut in the men’s division, that’s just too bad. It’s not a problem for which women should be forced to offer a solution. He shouldn’t be given a woman’s spot as some sort of consolation prize. He should face the fact that he, like billions of other people, is not good enough. It’s criminal that international sporting organizations have deliberately, needlessly hurt women.
As Ophelia has pointed out many times, even though his participation is allowed by the current ules, Hubbard should not have put himself into the competition. In reality, rules or not, “genuine” or not, he’s a shameless cheater. His “victories” will always be tainted, as surely as any doper’s are. And they will have come at the theft of a woman’s rightful place on his county’s team, and on the podium. Once sanity is restored and the rules are rewritten to reflect reality rather than to stroke narcissism, his titles and medals will be footnotes to madness and lunacy.
“I do not accept that it is possible to live “as a man”, without believing in old fashioned gender stereotypes.”
This is one of the things that bothers. How can anyone consider “Caitlyn” progressive in any way?
Awesome essay. And, as we all know, many/most/all of us can be uncomfortable in our own skin. It is only now (when there is MONEY and POWER involved) is radical surgery and drugs prescribed.
What strikes me about Lauren Black’s experience of dysphoria is how clear she is that it’s something wrong in her mind, and how much of it comes from outside of her – society and culture generally, and the way she is viewed and treated by others specifically. Which makes me think that as a woman, if you haven’t got some degree of gender dysphoria, you’ve probably got Stockholm Syndrome.
And another problem is how these men are setting new “women’s” records – which no woman will be able to beat without illegal doping (and maybe not then).
There are certain blinders that women wear, built for us at an early age by society, that allow us to believe that the ‘traditional’ roles for women are the ‘correct’ roles for women. Some women really do submit; some women rebel in ways that won’t change anything but make them feel better; and some of us are in outright rebellion against the men who would hold us hostage.
One of the problems of any movement is not being able to get everyone on board. For the women’s movement, though, it seems like the number is a much larger percentage than any of the other movements. Not all people of color support BLM or the NAACP, but a substantial number do. Not all LGB support the goals of the movement, but a substantial number of them do. With women, we probably only have slightly under/over half that support women have full rights, and of that ~half, there are so many factions aligning with various male causes and shouting down the GC feminists that our voices often get drowned out. On top of the many strawmen that are still perpetuated about what a rad fem is (old, ugly, screechy, bitter, humorless, ballbuster, etc). The other movements also have that faction problem, but it seems they are able to succeed around it most of the time.