Not an explosive athlete
Notice the weird gentleness in the voice of the interviewer – as if Bridges were not just a woman but a particularly fragile, traumatized woman who needs special sensitivity and care. I don’t think that’s how tv news interviewers normally talk to their subjects.
And Bridges claims his “performance has decreased massively.” He claims he’s lost more aerobic performance “than the gap is between male and female athletes.” I don’t believe him.
“fellow female athletes”? Hm, I just want the same treatment as my fellow lottery winners, so gimme my monies! (NB: I have not won the lottery.)
But you trans-won the lottery so that’s good enough!
Before Bridges came along, his “fellow” female athletes, the ones he competed with, had the opportunity to compete in women’s sports with other women, and this opportunity has been taken from them. I wonder if this poor disenfranchised athlete is getting enough attention yet.
@3 Or what Ophelia says in the next post… :D I seem to be a little slow on the draw lately.
Note the oversized glasses to make his face seem smaller than it is…
Ah yes. I had overlooked that.
So, for all the “be nice, be kind” people who told us to give these men the word woman because we would still have the word female for ourselves…looks like the men have taken female, too.
To the surprise of absolutely no one.
Objection: assumes facts not in evidence.
“fellow female athletes” is the proposition yet to be proven. No evidence has yet been presented to establish the claim. You can’t merely assume the truth of the statement without providing the evidence.
There’s a very good reason you have not presented any evidence to support your statement: None exists. There isn’t any.
For some reason evidence isn’t requires for this claim. It’s not treated as something that can be established via evidence. It’s an a priori truth, or something – kind of like a god.
It’s something that’s taken to be true if people say it is. Just that. Self-declaration is all that’s required.
Makes it very tricky to argue with, I must say.
The evidence isn’t there for him to be an “explosive” athlete either. Might I suggest firecracker therapy? :P
Shame on you, I meant towing a little cart behind his bicycle. I wasn’t channellong George Carlin, I swear. :P
The etymology of the word ‘woman’ is relevant here, although slightly to the left of OT. According to good old Wikipedia: “The spelling of ‘woman’ in English has progressed over the past millennium from wīfmann[R*] to wīmmann to wumman, and finally, the modern spelling woman.[R*] In Old English, wīfmann meant ‘woman’ (literally ‘woman-person’), whereas ‘wer’ meant ‘man’. Mann had a gender-neutral meaning of ‘human’, corresponding to Modern English ‘person’ or ‘someone’; however, subsequent to the Norman Conquest, ‘man’ began to be used more in reference to ‘male human’, and by the late 13th century it had begun to eclipse usage of the older term ‘wer.’[R*] The medial labial consonants f and m in wīfmann coalesced into the modern form ‘woman’, while the initial element ‘wīf’, which had also meant ‘woman’, underwent semantic narrowing to the sense of a married woman (‘wife’).
It is a popular misconception that the term ‘woman’ is etymologically connected to ‘womb’.[R*] ‘Womb’ derives from the Old English word ‘wamb’ meaning ‘belly, uterus’[R*] (cognate to the modern German colloquial term ‘Wamme’ from Old High German wamba for ‘belly, paunch, lap’).[R*][R*]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman
*[R] = [reference in original.]
Once again, this can only be understood as a factual claim about what’s going on inside other people’s heads. To call the women he is cheating “fellow female athletes” implies that there is indeed something called “female” that applies to both them and him at the same time. This “something” cannot be physical traits (certainly not according to gender ideology!), so “my fellow female athletes” can only be understood as “those who share my ways of thinking and feeling (best left unspecified)”
Of course the problem with crying wolf at every possible opportunity is that people eventually start second-guessing everything you say. You mean “violent threats” as in “tweeting pictures of suffragette ribbons”? “saying biological sex is real”? “using the
wrongcorrect pronouns”?“…I’ve lost more than the gap is between male and female athletes.”
A statement undermined a tad by the fact that he won.
One note of optimism. My wife was watching this news report in the other room and I overheard it. I wrote off a quick, thoughtless tweet about the fact that Bridges had been interviewed but none of the women he had beaten or who had lost places on teams to him.
Last time I looked it was approaching 4000 likes, which is to my knowledge by far the most likes I’ve ever had for a tweet. I got quite a few negative comments, of course, but the response was still overwhelmingly in agreement.
I suspect most of those likes came from the fact that Sophie-Grace Chappell tweeted a reply telling me off and then flounceblocked me. Chappell is the spinny-skirted Philosopher who once said that a spike in the murder rate of women wouldn’t be a problem if it improved trans inclusivity. It turns out that quite a lot of people don’t like him.
Anyway, it’s nice to see that there are a lot of people out there who think it’s wrong for women to be forced to compete against men and aren’t afraid to say so.