Such a frenzy
Hey, The Nation, ask a stupid question why doncha.
“a frenzy” – yes those hysterical women, how dare they get in “a frenzy” just because a large ruthless self-serving man forces himself on them and cheats them at their own sport.
The author of this garbage is one Frankie de la Cretaz. Google turns up the information that “they” is a freelance writer and a “they” After a lot of scrolling I still can’t find whether they is a he-they or a she-they. From the ruthless smugness and smug ruthlessness I’m guessing they’s a he.
The question is why The Nation sees fit to publish this kind of offensive openly misogynist insulting dreck.
The title is insulting – “How Women’s Swimming Got So Transphobic” – it’s not transphobic for women to want women’s sports to go on being for women. It’s sexist to call women names for wanting to keep their own sports.
The subtitle is insulting – “Almost no other sport is as hostile to trans athletes—and that’s because its culture created the perfect conditions for transphobia to take root.” I repeat – it’s not transphobic for women to want women’s sports to go on being for women. Also it’s not “hostile to trans athletes” to keep men out of women’s sports. The issue is not that he’s trans, it’s that he’s male. Male trans people could solve this problem in a heartbeat by not bullying women.
So. The article.
When Lia Thomas first entered the women’s NCAA swimming scene in 2021, her presence was immediately felt. National media outlets became obsessed with her. She got the kind of attention rarely given to swimming athletes outside of the Olympics.
Thomas was good, but she wasn’t the next Simone Biles of her field. So what explained such a frenzy? Simple: Thomas was a transgender woman having success in the women’s division.
No shit, Sherlock. He got a lot of attention because he was cheating women in their own sport. That’s a bad thing to do, and he shouldn’t be allowed to do it. It’s not fair to the women.
There was a lot of news media attention, Cretaz notes.
“That level of coverage of women’s swimming, specifically, has not come close to being matched in the year after the end of [Thomas’s] swimming career,” says Ari Drennen, the LGBTQ program director at Media Matters. “They like to say that this is coming from a place of caring about women’s sports, but it’s hard not to notice that they don’t really cover women’s sports unless trans women are competing in them.”
I think you’ll find that’s a pattern all over the news media. They don’t really cover victims of mass shootings until the mass shootings. They don’t really cover Ukraine until Russia invades it. They don’t really cover global warming until it’s far too late to do anything about it. The news media don’t cover things that aren’t news.
The intensity of the critical media coverage helped fuel an equally intense backlash against Thomas. Sixteen of her University of Pennsylvania teammates signed a letter midway through the season saying that she had an unfair advantage.
Because he does.
That letter was organized by former Olympic swimmer Nancy Hogshead-Makar, who, along with fellow Olympic swimmer Donna de Varona, is a founding member of the Women’s Sport Policy Working Group, which has been leading the movement to ban trans women and girls from competing in the women’s division in sports across the board. (The Human Rights Campaign has called the WSPWG “a hate group.”)
(The Human Rights Campaign is wrong.)
And World Aquatics, the international federation that governs the sport of swimming, released a new transgender participation policy in July 2022 that essentially bans trans women from competing by creating incredibly restrictive requirements for their inclusion.
No, it doesn’t ban them from competing, it bans them from competing against women. This is such shitty dishonest “reporting” – how is it that The Nation waved it through?
And why shouldn’t men face “incredibly restrictive requirements for their inclusion” in women’s sports? Why shouldn’t they just be told “No”? Why don’t women matter here?
(As I have written previously, there is no real evidence that trans athletes have an inherent advantage over their cisgender counterparts.)
I repeat: the issue is not trans athletes, it’s male athletes in women’s sports. Does The Nation not have any editors? Why did it publish this dishonest pile of dung uncorrected?
The World Aquatics policy was the culmination of a long-simmering anti-trans sentiment in the sport of women’s swimming, particularly in Western countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. While most sporting bodies have taken a hard turn to the right in recent years when it comes to allowing transgender athletes—and transgender women, in particular—to compete, women’s swimming is, in some ways, uniquely anti-trans.
It’s not “anti-trans,” it’s not a “sentiment,” it’s not “a hard turn to the right” or any turn to the right at all.
Jumping ahead –
How did someone like Hogshead-Makar, who fought so hard for girls to be protected in the world of sports, end up on the perpetrating end of such a targeted campaign of harassment and exclusion? If you ask her, she believes she is still “protecting” girls—by defining girlhood as exclusively belonging to cisgender girls and seeing transgender girls as a threat. In doing so, she has fallen for one of the most insidious transphobic talking points—that transgender girls are “biological men” and therefore a threat both on the sporting field and in the locker room.
Yes how dare she “define” girlhood as meaning girls instead of girls and some boys who pretend to be girls? So archaic, so strange, so hard to believe.
There’s more. Lots, lots more. I don’t know if I can face reading any more of it. I would still love to know how The Nation manages to think this merits publication.
Yet much of the reporting has missed the real story: the fact of Thomas’s cheating, and the fact that it is being permitted. It’s like blandly reporting the sudden entry, with the blessings of those in charge, of a motorcyclist into the Tour de France and being puzzled by the angry reaction of the other cyclists, without a word about the advantages conferred upon the rider who has an internal combustion engine between his legs. But this would never happen in men’s sport, would it. The men wouldn’t put up with it. It would be unmanly to roll over and accept such blatant cheating. Yet in women’s sport it is considered rude and “unwomanly” to point out cheating and injustice. They are supposed roll over and accept it, like good little girls. “Suck it up, buttercup. SHUT UP! OR ELSE.” Women are penalized, disqualified, and banned by their own sporting authorities for speaking out. There’s the real story. It’s not in the pool or in the locker room (though what women are forced to accept in each of those places is crime enough), but in the <board room. Cheating, corruption, injustice. Closed doors. It’s an irresistible combination. Then why are so many reporters resisting it? Any good reporter should see that and jump on it. Why are they studiously looking the other way? What’s happening behind their closed doors? Well, that’s another story….”Who watches the watchmen?” indeed.
The most impressive nonsequitur in the article was the bit about racism, and how women’s swimming is so awful because it’s there to protest the dainty flower of white womanhood. They/them hasn’t noticed that Thomas’s enormous shoulders have a distinct lack of melanin.
YNnB there’s a meme about that motorcyclist in the Tour de France thing, I just saw it a few minutes ago while scrolling through the furious replies to The Nation on Twitter.
I love (not really) the way they say real evidence. That poisons the well against any of the reams of evidence of advantage and danger to women. It isn’t real evidence unless the trans lobby accepts it, and they aren’t going to accept it unless it shows what they want.
And then the Nation would publish an article about how the Tour de France suddenly became so motophobic?
This article is such a crazy, twisted pretense that it almost seems like performance art.
I was talking with some friends about the whole “words are violence” idea from the TRAs. Is turnabout fair play?
It would go like this:
Frankie’s article is violence against women. It doesn’t just support violence against women; the fact Cretino de la Falaz ever wrote this article is violence against women. The Nation publishing it is violence against women. Etc.
Hahahahaha Cretino de la Falaz – thank you.
So there are specific male and female leagues because men’s bodies collectively are stronger, faster, etc. (Individually there are females who are superior athletes to many male individuals. But as groups, the best male athletes have advantages over even the best female athletes.)
But, according to “science” these advantages disappear when a man takes a little estrogen. They vanish. Gone.
Always and everywhere. Every individual transwoman is a fair competitor against any individual female. It’s “science.”
And any examples of a mediocre formerly male-identifying athlete entering women’s sports and smashing records, and winning spots on Olympic teams are just isolated anecdotes.
And any stories about untoward behaviour in showers, or aggression on the field or the bicycle track are most likely lies. Even if there’s evidence.
I guess I should say that I’m being sarcastic.
I wonder why the US left publications (The Nation, Current Affairs, Jacobin, The Baffler) are publishing more and more and more of these articles advocating extremist transgender ideology. It goes well beyond the “give trans people equal rights” stuff that they used to publish.
Maybe these publications decided that they’ll automatically oppose whatever they Republicans are doing without thinking about it first.
Matt Walsh (disclaimer: I *don’t* support Matt Walsh), has criticised Thomas’ behaviour.
https://twitter.com/MattWalshShow/status/1651681610528354315
So the left-wing US publications all start treating Thomas like he’s the new Colin Kaepernick. “Ha! We’re owning the GOP by supporting a cheat!”
Writer is a she-they:
http://www.britnidlc.com/
https://www.vice.com/en/contributor/britni-de-la-cretaz
I am amazed by the apparent fact that ‘The Nation’s’ editorial staff believe that appeasing their pro-trans readers is worth the alienation and loss of potentially all their female readership. Which leads me to ask: ‘What non Earth have they been smoking?’
It used to be a worthwhile journal. Not any more. It’s a pile of horse shit so huge one could grow mushrooms in it by the ton.
Cretaz has turned up before. She never fails to irritate. From Butterflies and Wheels, Aug 24th, 2016:
And last month, also spouting nonsense in The Nation about ‘trans’ males in women’s sport.
Lordy, just last month. What an impressive memory I have.
Ophelia @ #12
Cretaz has made herself into an identikit handmaid – a forgettable mediocrity.
Must be something in the water.
Love the scare quotes around “biological men.”
“While most sporting bodies have taken a hard turn to the right in recent years when it comes to allowing transgender athletes—and transgender women, in particular—to compete, women’s swimming is, in some ways, uniquely anti-trans.”
I love the accidental acknowledgement that trans-ness is its own pole, with the advocates of trans ideology unable to comprehend the notion that someone could be a leftist AND opposed to them, not in spite of their leftism, but because of it.
No theory of mind.
Too much testosterone?
What a weird thing to complain about. Yeah dude, so strange that time moves in only one direction and so news outlets only report on news after the news happens. *bong hit*
Essentially? A strange choice of wording if he truly believes the policy literally bars trans women from all sports. Therefore I read it as a deliberate choice because without it, the sentence would have been a lie. But lying via weasel wording is still deliberate dishonesty.
I note the replies to the tweet were universally negative, as far as I scrolled.
There are advocates who don’t want the men to have to take estrogen, or lower their testosterone, or cut off parts of their body to compete. That’s what self-ID is all about. They deny that there is any difference in the bodies of men and women. That only makes sense if they are including transwomen in the group “women” for their comparison – which of course, they are. And transmen in the group “men”. So you can point t these “women” with a penis, and say see? A woman’s body, but it’s just like a man’s. No difference. Shut up, TERF.