Fairness
Janice Turner on The Laurel Hubbard Question:
Samoa enjoys few sporting glories but it excels at weightlifting. Feagaiga Stowers, just 20, a child sexual abuse survivor who started lifting while living in a domestic violence shelter, won gold at the 2018 Commonwealth Games. She looked a cert for the 2019 Pacific Games too, but instead the podium was topped by 41-year-old trans woman Laurel Hubbard. Bumped to second place, Stowers and team mate Iuniarra Sipaia, who took bronze, hung their heads in dismay.
While inferior athlete Laurel Hubbard loomed over them in cheating triumph.
Back in Samoa, the response was more baffled than furious. The prime minister asked how it could be fair that this New Zealand fa’afafine was competing against women. The question will echo across the world on Monday when Hubbard competes in the Olympic women’s 87kg-plus weightlifting. Stowers and team mates aren’t even there. Covid risk is the official reason. But given that all other qualifying Samoans are in Tokyo, there’s speculation the female lifters are protesting at the injustice of their event.
Reviewing Helen Joyce’s recent book Trans, my colleague David Aaronovitch remarked that her tone was too angry. But when I think about Stowers battling such odds, or Roviel Detenamo, only 18, a lifter from even poorer Nauru, denied her first Olympics because Hubbard took her qualifying slot, I’m filled with white-hot rage.
Same here, and it happens all over again every time I see Hubbard smugly proceeding along this path of stealing medals from women, and women of color at that.
Men like the International Olympic Committee’s medical and science director Dr Richard Budgett have no skin in this game. “Everyone agrees that trans women are women,” he said this week, “a lot of aspects of physiology and anatomy and the mental side contribute to elite performance.”
Everyone agrees that men are women? I think you’ll find that it’s not quite everyone.
Now the IOC rules state that any male who wants to punch female boxers or run the women’s 100 metres must simply get their testosterone below 10 nanomoles per litre for a year. The normal testosterone range for women, including elite athletes? It’s 0.12-1.78 nmol/L. So even when applying this one paltry measure of fairness — the level of rocket-fuel male hormone — they didn’t try for parity. Five to ten times the female norm was just fine. And what if a woman athlete used drugs to raise her testosterone to 10nmol/L? She’d be disqualified for doping.
How is that fair exactly? It isn’t, but they’re doing it anyway, because hey it’s only women who lose out.
All the hope we have left regarding Laurel Hubbard is that the blatant unfairness of his competing against women – made to stand out more by his incredible level of privilege over those women he forced off the roster – makes clear, across the world, how oppressive the trans lobby’s power has become. He will be booed around the world, and for a lot of people with no skin in the game this will be the first time they notice something has gone terribly wrong with the alphabet community.
They should have all the events divided into testosterone levels, to hell with sex and weight divisions.
Not that I can bear to watch the Olympics anyway, there are over 400 events now, each one more boring than the next. Every bit as boring as Nascar. :P
Dr. Richard Budgett lied when he claimed “Everyone agrees that trans women are women”. There is no other plausible explanation.
Worth noting that the IOC said this week that their existing guidelines are not fit for purpose, and will allow sports federations to develop their own. So World Rugby’s ban will hold.
Ah, yes, the angry woman. A sure sign that something is amiss. Same if it was a black male. White men write angry books all the time, and people don’t notice. Why? Because white men are angry for reasons. The press rushes to validate their anger, to explicate the legitimate reasons that white men are angry. They never notice that these reasons are always because other people are getting a shot at the same goodies they already have.
White men angry = legitimate expression of grievances
Woman angry = ballbusting bitch
Black man angry = dangerous potential criminal
The press is no better at analysis and nuance than the average American. Perhaps the reporters realize that, but know they have to simplify. Perhaps not. All I know is it comes at the expense of legitimate grievances: women and PoC.
Well I left that bit out of my part of the discussion because it wasn’t crucial and because David A isn’t part of Team Misogyny in general and his review of Stock’s book is favorable.
A bit of a tangent, because this wasn’t in the part of the article you quoted, but as it is Turner’s framing device, I think it’s a bit more than a nitpick.
Turner writes:
I don’t know enough to take a side, but Jesse Singal has written about how Samoan culture’s treatment of “fa’fafines” is probably not a good progressive role model. First, because some boys are more or less forced in to the role because there aren’t any girls in the family and somebody’s got to help mom with the “feminine” duties. Second, because they aren’t all warmly accepted and celebrated, as one survivor reports:
I don’t think that quotation from Aaronovich is quite fair. Here’s the paragraph from his review:
The “if” is important. He strikes me as saying that, if you want to find a flaw, this is probably what you’ll note. And in saying that, he’s doing what a fair-minded reviewer ought to to – he’s teasing out the possible weaknesses of a book, to see if they’re serious. The final sentence of the paragraph indicates to me that the “too” isn’t justified: that the objection he’s articulated doesn’t, in this case, have particularly sharp claws.
That’s how I read it. That’s another reason I didn’t include it in the post: a tangent & even more of a tangent if I went the “he’s not saying” route.