Executive summary: If someone makes an argument online, quietly deletes it after someone rips it apart, and then makes a nearly identical but even weaker argument in a sister venue, then you’d be a fool to trust that person to reliably transmit information. But some people value blind reassurance more than they do intelligent, honest guidance, so they seek out such deviants as advisers. And those types, now operating in a moral cocoon as well as in various alternative sociological realities, often become furious at the suggestion that their guru of choice is no expert but instead a fountain of misinformation packaged in saccharine, deflective drivel.
All of this is the result of a running environment that has become filthy with crybabies, narcissistic bootlickers, hypocrites, and blubbering liars.
In early March, I reviewed an article ostensibly about threshold running on trails by David Roche, an environmental lawyer by training who along with his medical-doctor wife has established a coaching practice here in Boulder. In addition to covering the meandering piece he wrote for Trail Runner—a moribund publication edited by Zoe Rom, also listed as one of Roche’s coaching clients—I referred to a Twitter thread Roche started with the tweet below.
After learning of and possibly even reading my post, Roche posted a series of aggrieved soliloquies on his social-media accounts claiming he’d been attacked by a hater, all for the sin of just being himself. He didn’t identify the hater or his post, as that would have been inconvenient to every aspect of his general narrative. But he knew my post about him was being widely read, so total silence wasn’t an option; he was obligated to unfurl a burst of performative art for the benefit of his followers, to show he wouldn’t be moved by the random chatter of some disillusioned nobody.
This display was cringe-inducing coming from a grown man, but allowed Roche to avoid every point I raised. It also induced the desired effect of his fans spitting out their pacifiers for long enough to blast anyone who shared my post.
It’s entertaining to watch a guy who attended Columbia, has a law degree, and is married to a physician, but is choosing to coach trail runners for a living, complain of being bullied, as if he’d be living in a refrigerator box if his coaching business collapsed or his writing for the Outside, Inc. suite of electronic junk-brochures dried up thanks to someone—gasp!—mocking his work.
But in addition to whining about being unfairly marauded, Roche also deleted the Twitter thread—basically the equivalent renting a billboard advertising your own rhetorical incompetence and hoping no one you know drives past it. Roche is regularly paid to write advice-oriented pieces read by a substantial number of runners. If he has this little confidence in his own persuasive powers, why does he even bother framing himself as a coach, and why does anyone listen to him?
Roche wasn’t quite done being a slimeball in this area, though. After silently tampering with the virtual evidence room of an unflattering post about him, he posted notice on Instagram of a podcast last Wednesday celebrating the “courage” of transwoman swimmer Lia Thomas.
This week on the Some Work, All Play podcast, @meg_runs_happy and I celebrate the courage of swimmer Lia Thomas in a discussion driven by medicine, law, performance science, and ethics about the importance of trans athlete inclusion in sports. There is so much misinformation out there about her trajectory and the broader implications of her amazing national championship. We try to lovingly and openly discuss the facts, acknowledging the nuance in a way that hopefully accommodates all perspectives (that are grounded in empathy and kindness).
This is no more than an undisguised appeal to poorly tuned heartstrings, with words like “science” and “facts” included strictly for show, in the same manner Bible literalists speak of “creation science” to describe their entertaining attempts to topple modern geology using Old Testament fables. When you’re preaching only to the converted, striving to make airtight claims is merely extra work. The post also makes clear that overly factual input will be treated as insufficiently compassionate and excluded from the program.
Amazingly, while the rest of the world perceived the results of Lia Thomas being counted as a female swimmer in the recently concluded 2022 NCAA season as evidence of a flawed NCAA transgender policy, Roche pretended that Thomas’s superb and superbly disruptive season was somehow vindicating to the “inclusion” side. It’s as if Roche, having just watched someone hurt himself by diving into a swimming pool from a second-floor balcony, said “It would sting less if you jumped from the roof of the building! WOOOOOOT!”
It would be fun, and I mean seriously fun, to hear Roche debate Ross Tucker on the subject, or on anything.
So, after real life taught Roche an obvious lesson, he chose to smile, nod, ignore it, and push the same nonsense because “YAAAAAAAY!” is sufficient marketing for 95 percent of the blinkered demographic the Roches are trying to attract. They didn’t set up shop in a town overloaded with self-absorbed quasi-liberal trust-funders and other well-off fitness freaks by accident.
I’m not hitting back against Roche and others banging the “trans women are women” upside-down garbage can simply for being scientifically incorrect. More concerning is that their supposed quest for kindness and empathy is patently a sham. The sports world is now awash in exactly the kind of consequences to girls and women that “transphobes” foresaw and continue to point out, thus far to no U.S. rule-changing avail I’m aware of.
My most recent “images only” post—and maybe I should create a separate category for those—called attention to the gloating behavior of transwomen Fallon Fox, whose patent distaste for the women he beats up could not be more obvious. (An ideal fate for Fox, I think, would be for him to be overpowered by about a dozen normal-sized women, beaten unconscious, and thrown into the nearest dumpster. That would be some next-level Grrl Power for once.)
Then there’s Veronica Ivy—now on at least his third name, seventeenth hair color, and ten zillionth empty threat—who suggests that people who disagree with him should be burned to death. (And, same.)
Anyone aware of these displays who casts himself or herself as an advocate for a more equitable world for women might as well be wagging a pecker around and braying, “Check out my vajayjay!” or conversely. Ah, that’s right—we’ve already crossed that threshold, too.
Whatever. Ladies, these mentally ill dudes hate you. Why accommodate them and their impulses, to no one’s benefit and your own and other women’s debasement?
As I pointed out already, running’s journalist-impersonators collectively ignored a series of recent essays by women explaining exactly why every argument is favor of including transfemales in female sports, however well-meant, is wrong; how this is becoming increasingly evident; and why sporting bodies need to act.
Other than Letsrun.com, running’s pundit class has universally failed to even acknowledge—let alone try to rebut or merely decry—Sonia O’Sullivan’s March 24 editorial calling for the restoration of fairness in female sport. Its members have also ignored another sweeping treatment of the subject in the March 30 British edition of the New Statesman by Tanya Allred, “There’s got to be a better way to include transgender women in sport.” They will probably also ignore this piece by cyclist and Olympic gold medalist Nicole Cooke.
Instead, they keep the focus on sources of butthurt from nobodies and the need to hector them for being jerks.
“Release the hounds!”
First, Alison Wade is in no position to determine who is and isn’t an asshole. She was among the loons who wanted a race director boycotted for not allowing political postings of any kind on his Facebook page, a policy Wade and many others touted as unconditional evidence of Gary Cantrell’s racism. The entire corporate journalism world showed its pimply, dirty ass with that one, and the episode is probably the main reason I’m glad to be a pariah in the eyes of opt-in retards like these.
But more to the point: No kidding the guy is being an asshole here—I’m pretty sure he was aiming for just that tone. But the fact that Alison Wade is ignoring Sonia O’Sullivan and the antics of miserable sons of bitches like Fallon Fox and Veronica Ivy shows where her “fairness” priorities really lie. Alison Wade is as much of a fraud as the Roches, with her main motivation being resentment rather than ego-enrichment.
The problems arising from this kind of demented advocacy are not limited to a few bad actors like Fox and Ivy (double entendre intended, and actually, it’s far more than a few). The insistence on trans people of being called by their chosen pronouns or else is asinine for at least two reasons. One is obvious: If you are transgender, then by definition you have taken measures to obscure or deny your birth sex. Complaining of being “misgendered” is like me walking up to a stranger, asking her “Is my age in years odd, or is it even?” and kicking her in the balls for furnishing a wrong answer.
But more important, something like 75 or 80 percent of teenagers who declare themselves to be trans later change their minds. (Importantly, this is not to dismiss gender dysphoria as a real thing; it is a serious, debilitating mental-health condition, making it especially precarious to treat it as simply an “identity” to be “celebrated.”). That means that the majority of proudly defiant Twitter intros authored by young transgender people c. 2017-2022 will eventually surrender almost every word their authors now consider vital. Trans people pitching fits over being “misgendered” seems silly when it turns out that a solid three out of four of them go on to admit having misgendered themselves. A lot of these kids are just the Goths of their generation.
Also, even Wokish researchers can be brutally dishonest. (Between COVID-19 and the cresting swell of gender weirdness, I assign no value at all anymore to someone’s medical degree or other doctorate degree if I know that person has steeped their brains in Wokish acid baths.) For example, a group of researchers eager to have kids reporting gender dysphoria get on puberty-blocking drugs lied about the results of their research when the results didn’t align with their desired conclusions.
Considering the stakes to children here, such developments are nothing short of dire.
I previously gave Roche credit for being more lazy and ignorant than dishonest. When dealing with Wokish people, this is pointless, because it invariably means merely delaying admitting and pointing out that another someone has been systematically and purposefully deceptive in the name of personal gain, or for sake of being a rake.
Roche, Latoya Snell, Erin Strout, and every one of their pissed-off fans and followers have the standing option of commenting directly to my posts. Anonymous trolls routinely post long-winded, hostile, even racist things there, and I let those comments stand and even engage most of them. But this will never happen, and the pussies in my crosshairs will queef up every feeble, self-immolating excuse in the book for hiding and hoping like hell I get bored or disappear.
I’m not hammering away at Roche to wreck his “coaching” business; even if I wanted to do that, it wouldn’t be possible, because there will never be a shortage of emotionally vulnerable trail runners willing to pay someone—for a while, anyway—to tell them “It’s all okay.” And I would bet money that he does this in at least some cases not to accompany whatever workout specifics he gives, but in lieu of them. But that’s between the Roches and the people who hire them.
But I am flat-out fucking sick of people making shitty arguments to successful effect. I know that if I asked Dr. Megan Roche whether Fallon Fox has a higher risk of prostate cancer than of endometrial cancer, with her medical license hinging on a correct and honest answer, then she would have to contradict the entire “trans women are women” narrative. And I could ask her a dozen or more similarly troublesome questions, and in a real-life setting, people can’t just yell “transphobe!” and make you (or themselves) vanish. These are pertinent questions, and the Wokish can’t dismiss them by pretending they arise from meanness or dark humor (though both contribute).
The gutless, intellectually dishonest method of “argument” embraced and encouraged by Wokish opportunists like the Roche clown duo never would have gained traction in the running community a few years ago; anyone pulling such moves, especially someone with David Roche’s hapless raisin-nuts persona, would have been laughed into oblivion. Yet “ignore, yet indirectly deflect” has become a standard response to fair criticism from Wokish people who take illogical and destructive stances that are popular within left-wing lunatic circles, but unpopular among the non-afflicted American majority.
Almost every guru and blinkered acolyte in these camps is also an anti-speech, anti-science coward. As obnoxious a trait as this is, it’s also to be expected from constitutively spineless people and watery thinkers whose parents spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on an education terminating in “men and women are indistinguishable, and anyone who says otherwise is a regressive asshole.” Tweet-blurts like “That’s transphobic!” are used as argument-enders in the same childish way Bible-bangers shout “See you in Hell!” at the guy in line at Sbarro’s in the Pornhub T-shirt.
Such visionary social reformers are so irritated at being unable to spew their wrongness unchallenged that they employ bully tactics both blunt-force and shrewd to exclude reality-based people and their reality-based arguments from public conversations. And the more these cowards continue to support obviously damaging social policies, such as allowing psychologically troubled males to participate in sports as females (with or without medical modifications to their bodies), the more upsetting their childish attempts to steer reality in ugly directions becomes.
Wokish people delete, modify, and protect tweets and other online postings because at some level they know screaming and yelling at people to quit sharing facts is the only weapon they have to prop up their ranting. They’re afraid that if they stop doing it, the general public will more quickly catch wise to their personal and philosophical fraudulence.
I’ve become used to media representatives and general attention-whores being gelatinous in this way. Lindsay Crouse, Chris Chavez, and Strout are also eager history-revisers and popular-narrative-chasers—low-wattage thinkers, but high-energy egoists who in their minds are basically running for student council their whole lives no matter their respective backgrounds. They lie and contradict themselves, and then they try to hide their lies while targeting others for removal or desperately ignoring those whose voices they’re unable to silence.
Though some combination of profanity, cynicism, heresy, and a practiced rejection of popular narratives, I routinely tempt almost everyone who reads these posts to unsubscribe. Well, if you ever catch me quietly deleting an entire article because someone challenged what was in it, I’d hope every one of you would almost hurt yourselves lunging for the “Unsubscribe” button.
And you know, if I see something on the Internet and you put it there, I get to comment on it even if I think it sucks. Some people seem genuinely perplexed by this development, although I think it’s mostly annoyance that some people just won’t shut the hell up and let people be ruinous, self-interested blowhards.
But even Strout agrees, even if she only applies this standard to herself and others who share her views. This is a recent retweet.
Oh, I should clarify. I meant “others who share her 2022 views.”
The tarring of people who in any way oppose the participation of transmales in female sports as transphobes might work fairly well on me, because I do in fact write as though I detest almost everyone and everything (and that’s close enough to the truth for Substack work). But what about, say, Lize Brittin? She writes about many of the same topics I do, and at times it’s almost a controlled experiment: I offer compelling facts while writing like a jaded asshole who doesn’t care what anyone thinks, and Lize offers compelling facts while going out of her way to pad her blows, because she really is a kind person and has been through various modes of real suffering.
Finally, I don’t want to hear about how little I actually care about female sports, especially from 25-year-olds with blue hair, bangs, and Coke-bottle glasses whose most recent run longer than ten meters was more than three weeks ago. This is approximately the ninth straight year I have been trying to help keep at least one high-school girl’s running moving in a productive direction thanks to abysmal on-the-ground coaches, mostly men and whose antics have ranged from fomenting petty conflicts within teams to general ignorance of the sport to crossing lines you absolutely shouldn’t with a minor and getting away with it thanks to connections to a literal billionaire family. God Bless this fun-loving democracy.
An army of crazed morons screams constantly on Twitter and Instagram about nonexistent problems or the wrong problems, and yet I in my supposed isolation and disenfranchisement see examples of real, endemic problems in the sport all the time. (Yes, as vagina-clenching as it may be, people trust me as a coach also, even with their kids). Imagine what might happen if everyone with a grudge and energy to burn channeled at least some of that vigor into tackling issues that matter rather than sucking each other off online and otherwise lying for gain.
