Pants on fire
A dishonest headline:
The usual lie told in the usual way – by concealing “men who identify as women” under the blanket “transgender.” Men can’t compete against women at British Cycling elite events.
They’ve now changed the headline, no doubt in response to a torrent of furious replies to that tweet. It now says:
Transgender women no longer able to compete at elite female events run by British Cycling
Men no longer able to force themselves into women’s races. Finally.
From the story:
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said earlier this week he did not believe transgender women should compete in female sporting events – a view he conceded might be “controversial”.
In response, LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall said: “Trans people deserve the same opportunities as everyone else to enjoy the benefits of sport, and blanket exclusions on trans people participating are fundamentally unfair.”
Same old lie. It’s not a “blanket exclusion on trans people participating,” it’s exclusion of men from women’s competitions.
The Stonewall lie is the last sentence in the piece. Of course it is.
But aren’t ‘transwomen’ in fact transgender men? Crossdressing men? Transsexual men? Don’t they have this all backwards? A man who is transgender is a ‘transwoman,’ n’est ce pas? I understand the confusion, but it sure adds to the lack of clarity when it comes to these issues… Now I’m wondering if I’m the one who has it backwards. :P
Confusion, lies and obfuscation are a feature not a bug. Imagine all the stories that would suddenly become non-stories if everyone used the clearly understood phrase “trans-identified male.” Most, if not all the “controversy” goes away if the actual issue is described accurately, completely, and fairly. It pisses me off that saying that on this issue, the media has deliberately taken an ideological position that distorts its reporting, it makes me sound like some right-wing nutter.*
*I might very well be a nutter, but not a right wing one.
Re “the clearly understood phrase ‘trans-identified male'”: I don’t think it’s as clearly understood as it seems, even among the commentariat here. I recall using the phrase in a comment and someone thought I was talking about women who claim to be men. That has also happened in real-life conversations. Lots of trans allies assume that “female”, “woman”, “female-bodied”, and so on all apply perfectly well to men-who-claim-to-be-women. Phrases that seem to be generally understood (and often found offensive), in my experience, are things like “men who claim to be women” or “men who identify as women”. I like the former, because the whole “identify as” concept increasingly seems like snake oil.
Re the OP, what was the original headline? There’s something weird about the tweet, maybe it was removed or something, and none of it is rendering for me.
For me either. Sorry – I think the original headline said “Transgender athletes unable to compete at British Cycling events.” That’s the gist at any rate – the general trans as opposed to trans women i.e. men, and the general cycling events as opposed to women’s events. Hide the men bit, and hide the women bit.
The fact that they changed it, presumably because of the outraged replies, now makes it clear that they’re doing this deliberately and they know it pisses women off, so maybe they should just fucking STOP DOING IT. It’s bad journalism, apart from everything else – it omits two crucial aspects of what they pretend to be reporting on. It’s like reporting that a woman hit a man without mentioning that he was trying to rape her at the time.