Graham Linehan on the Laurel Intrusion:

Representatives of the nation of Samoa have been speaking out against Hubbard’s participation in the women’s category since 2019, when Hubbard bested local hero Feagaiga Stowers at the Pacific Games. Stowers, a young woman who began lifting to cope with surviving sexual abuse, had won a gold medal in the 2018 Commonwealth Games. That year, Hubbard had been ineligible for participation after sustaining an elbow injury. However, upon returning to the sport in 2019, he placed first; Stowers took the silver medal, and Charisma Amoe-Tarrant of Australia took the bronze.

In a 2019 article for Samoa Observer, Mata’afa Keni Lesa wrote of how Stowers had previously entered the Samoa Victims Support Group, where she began weightlifting, pointing out that her story and success had been inspirational in her home country. According to Lesa: “It will be a tragedy of gigantic proportion for sport when this sort of carrying [on?] is allowed. We talk a lot about empowering women, this does not empower women. If anything, it is taking power away from them. It is robbing them of what rightfully belongs to them.”

We don’t talk so much about empowering women any more. In the context of prostitution and pole dancing maybe, but in general, nah. Men are the new women and we’d rather talk about them.

Samoa’s Prime Minister, Tuilaepa Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi, also objected to Hubbard’s participation. In 2019, he told Samoa Observer: “This fa’afafine or man should have never been allowed by the Pacific Games Council president to lift with the women. No matter how we look at it, he’s a man, and it’s shocking this was allowed in the first place.”

But if you just think of him as 1. a woman and 2. the most oppressed kind of woman of all, then all the shock goes away.

Women are not a hormone level, as Save Women’s Sports representative Beth Stelzer points out. Though we have known for untold centuries that men possess a physical advantage over women in sports, the admittance of males into female sports is basically an ongoing experiment being conducted at the expense of women and girls in order to boost the confidence of such men while simultaneously discouraging and insulting female athletes. Truly, men’s feelings are being valued over women’s reality. To compound the matter further, women’s weightlifting has only been an Olympic sport since 2000, for a total of five Olympic games. In contrast, the men’s weightlifting category debuted in 1896.

Five games is enough for anyone. Well ok not anyone, but for women. Women don’t matter that much, so five games is plenty.

In addition to biological advantages, Hubbard was born into wealth: his father, Dick Hubbard, is a politician and businessman who made a fortune as a cereal magnate. Hubbard was involved in a car accident that seriously injured an elderly couple, requiring hospitalization and spinal surgery. The couple, Gary and Sue Wells, spoke out in 2019 spoke out against what they believed was a lenient penalty given to Hubbard, and at the suppression of Hubbard’s name regarding their case: “The penalty and suppression were totally unjust. No notice was taken of our feelings and she (Hubbard) got everything she wanted.” Hubbard was discharged without a conviction, ordered to pay $13,000, and had his license restricted for one month. Hubbard’s name was suppressed from the media to allow him avoid stress while training for the Olympics, to which Gary Wells responded: “It was to protect her from hardship while she trained for the Olympics. What a load of crap. We couldn’t do anything for four months.”

Ok so he’s rich and male and white but just never mind that, he’s trans and that makes him The Most Vulnerable.

Several men have already begun competing against women, many of whom previously competed against men, and some of whom have apparently ‘aged out’ of the male category. Valentina Petrillo, for instance, aged 44, has already won 3 gold medals at the women’s Italian Paralympics Athletics Championships — despite Petrillo having made not even the minimum effort to falsify his official documents. He is still listed as a male on his identification.

But he calls himself Valentina. End of discussion.

For centuries men have been portrayed as the default humans, which has resulted in medicine being researched on predominantly male test subjects, among scores of other examples — so many, in fact, that Caroline Criado-Perez wrote an entire book, Invisible Women, on the subject. Because of this androcentric cultural lens, that which men desire is framed as a human right, whereas women’s rights can be sidelined to make room for men’s feelings.

Women are born to be sidelined. That’s just how it is.