It’s just wrong
Jolyon Maugham continues to be petulant and self-admiring instead of actually listening to women who point out [what ought to be] the obvious.
Hi Janice, It’s just wrong for you to suggest I am indifferent to women’s safety. There is no reasonable basis for that suggestion. It’s also wrong of you to smear me because I hold a view (shared by most sporting regulators) regarding the participation of trans women in sport.
That was in response to Times reporter Janice Turner:
It’s clearly unfair for those who’ve gone through male puberty to compete against women. But this is actually dangerous. What will it take, Jolyon, the legion of silent men & woke sports bodies, to persuade you women’s lives matters. A woman with a broken neck? A dead woman?
It’s hard not to conclude that some men are enjoying this. They’re amused that women are losing places in their own teams, that women get splattered in contact sports or 40-year-old mediocre ex-men beat young female weightlighters. If you DON’T think its funny, say something.
Of course it’s not wrong for Turner to say he’s indifferent to women’s safety, given the content of that BBC article that giggled about the potential for the male-bodied player to injure women. Maugham’s tweet sharing that horrible article said only “How the simple joy of sport can transcend fear and hate. Wonderful reporting.” He overlooked or deliberately ignored the several mentions of the danger to women. He told Turner, self-righteously, that “There is no reasonable basis for that suggestion,” but there is reasonable basis: his indifference to the dangers that the article itself mentioned. That’s the basis, and it’s reasonable.
Also notice his careful distortion of the issue:
It’s also wrong of you to smear me because I hold a view (shared by most sporting regulators) regarding the participation of trans women in sport.
But it’s not about “the participation of trans women in sport.” It’s about male-bodied people being allowed to play against or compete with women, thus depriving them of places and depriving them of any chance to win. The women Maugham is ignoring and misrepresenting are not trying to prevent trans women from participating in sport; it’s gruesomely dishonest of him to claim we are.
I keep on about it because it’s so unnerving, seeing how determinedly blind people can be while still insisting they’re on Team Right and Good.
But…if they follow our suggestions, we might be preventing them from winning every game! Why participate unless you are sure to win? At any cost, they must win.
You said it. The blindness is so bizarre. Apparently they actually cannot see the elephant right there in the room, even when it’s pointed out to them.
My understanding is that he is Atoning for Sin. He actually tweeted something measured and reasonable about self ID and was taken to task for it by TRAs. Somebody plopped this retweet of his in the middle of the “simple joy” thread:https://twitter.com/JolyonMaugham/status/1164688492963799042
He’s trying to earn his woke cookies back. Funny how these guys are more than happy to alienate and endanger half the population to appease the comparatively small number of TIMs and TRAs. Not really into math and bookkeeping, I guess? Or maybe because “it’s only women?”
Well, rad fems don’t usually carry baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire, and they don’t usually have large male bodies. Safer to piss off 3.5 billion people who are smaller and weaker than you are than a few hundred who are possibly larger than you are.