Parallels
What’s wrong with this headline? (Aside from the fact that it’s too long for a headline.)
It’s not a slam. It’s just a simple, humble, obvious fact. Men are not women. Women are not men. Adults are not children, children are not adults. Stones are not flowers. Squirrels are not hammers.
Anyway. The Mail goes on:
Between 1975 and 1985, Davies missed out on a string of medals while competing against East German drug cheats. She now believes there are parallels between the state-sponsored doping campaigns of the Cold War and transgender athletes taking hormone-suppression medication in a quest to win medals in women’s categories.
Again: that’s not a belief, it’s a fact. Here’s one very big clue: women lose in both cases. Some women take testosterone: the other women lose. Some men compete against women: women lose. It’s never men who lose in these manipulations, it’s always women.
I misread this as “Squirrels are not hamsters.”
Oh.
I do mix those up. That might explain all the chattering and screeching I heard in the course of my last building project.
But I can tell a hawk from a handsaw. I won’t make that mistake again.
Snerk.
If that were what she believes, it is a strange comparison: women taking drugs to increase testosterone, versus men taking drugs to reduce testosterone. The article is trying to play up the “taking drugs” and “adjusting testosterone” parallels.
But of course that isn’t what she believes, and that isn’t what is or was going on. It is about athletes using illicit means to improve muscle development, means that involve testosterone, either by taking testosterone drugs or by being male. Both of these cases can possibly be detected by measuring testosterone levels, but it isn’t really the testosterone levels themselves that are the problem. The fact that both of these cases MAY involve athletes taking drugs is quite irrelevant. But Davies is quite correct to point out that female athletes get disqualified for having too high a testosterone level, yet male athletes are given a pass with levels far in excess of those allowed for women, so long as it was reduced significantly from the normal male level.
But…but…but…what about stone flowers?