Time for Special Sport Competitions for the ‘Transgendered’?
A kerfuffle broke out after a man identifying as a woman won a women’s cycling championship.
This is NOT satire, but it should be…
The encroachment of gender dysphoria into professional sport competitions met with some resistance after the recent 2018 UCI Masters Track Cycling World Championships in Los Angeles.
The winner of the 35-39 age bracket was a Canadian competitor who calls himself Rachel McKinnon. He is a so-called “transgender” athlete, but the fact is, and will remain, there are only two genders and no matter how one might prefer to self-identify, gender does not transition.
McKinnon broadcast his victory across social media, proclaiming, “First transgender woman world champion … ever.” Despite the populist orthodoxy, which dictates that questioning “transgenderism” is not acceptable, McKinnon’s win led to objections by actual women athletes. One of those was championship runner-up Jennifer Wagner, who declared, “I was the 3rd place rider. It’s definitely NOT fair.”
Wagner was responding to British columnist Katie Hopkins’s comment, “For clarity — this was the WOMENS world championships. I repeat. Women’s. Congratulations to the brave faces of silver & bronze. The world is gripped by a febrile madness.”
Predictably, McKinnon responded to objections by labeling objectors “transphobic bigots.”
According to McKinnon, this is all about civil rights: “Focusing on performance advantage is largely irrelevant because this is a rights issue. We shouldn’t be worried about trans people taking over the Olympics. We should be worried about their fairness and human rights instead. This is bigger than sports, and it’s about human rights. … When it comes to extending rights to a minority population, why would we ask the majority? I bet a lot of white people were pissed off when we desegregated sports racially and allowed black people. But they had to deal with it.”
This devolution of the Left’s identity politics — in this case, equating the rights of gender confused people with the genuine civil rights efforts of those who have sought equality regardless of race, ethnicity or sex — is an affront to the latter.
As columnist Kimberly Ross notes, “The current preoccupation with coddling the confused allows Rachel McKinnon, a biological male, to declare victory over women as he presents himself as a female. Though popular opinion will try to convince us otherwise, there is nothing more anti-female, regressive, and manufactured than that.”
The solution may be for a special category of games for those with special gender-identity issues.
(McKinnon in the middle, with the silver and bronze runner-ups at his side.)
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