In advance of the New England Championships in Maine, the Bangor Daily News publishes a letter from a female high-school runner defending the ruination of her own sport

"Leave teenagers who make absurd public statements alone" implores a teenager in an absurd public statement

The 88th New England High-School Cross-Country Championships are scheduled for tomorrow at Belfast Middle School in Belfast, Maine. An expected top-twenty finisher in the girls’ race is a sophomore boy at Maine Coast Waldorf School who these days answers to Soren Stark-Chessa.

This young buck is seeded around sixteenth in the New England girls’ field based on his best 5K cross-country time this fall of 18:09 and the estimated difficulty of the course on which he achieved this time. He qualified for the race by placing third in the Maine Class C Girls’ State Championship last Saturday. That was one week after he won the Class C South Region race.

Aufter Stark-Chessa beat the first girl in the South Region race by just shy of 83 seconds, a reporter named Steve Craig was summoned to produce a parallel-universe account of the event for the Lewiston Sun-Journal. Among the elements of this alt-real presentation is the subhed portraying the cheering of the winner of a youth cross-country race as a remarkable occurrence, as if kids who cross finish lines before anyone else does are typically greeted by fusillades of rotten fruit from the crowd as they sprint for the tape.

It’s possible the piece was actually ghostwritten by Stark-Chessa, his coach, or one or more of his parents. In any case, it lacks the usual trace evidence in most small-town-newspaper stories of the reporter having attended a distance-running competition before:

In the Class C race, Stark-Chessa went to the front quickly and ran with a serious, focused expression. She was often cheered on along the course by shouts like, “C’mon Soren.”

I’m not sure what the Craig expected to happen. Maybe a wide, vacant-eyed grin and people addressing him by something other than his most recently acquired name?

Actually, I’m kidding. While the author is in fact worthless as a writer, he was only doing what he was told to do with this painful-on-the-eyes flattery. Someone is obviously leaning on or bribing media outlets in woodsy, libertarian-conservative towns like Lewiston to generate stories that these outlets never would have published just a few years ago.

The main idea behind this ham-handed appraisal of a regional cross-country championship is to project a far wider acceptance of boys running as girls than in fact exists. If the idea were legitimate, such “sly” public-relations gambits wouldn’t be q required strategy. But the pushing of an illegitimate premise is always coupled to absurdities and gaslighting, because framing fake ideas as legitimate by definition requires the adoption of lowbrow tactics.

What else, after all, besides the use threats and misdirection can liars and swindlers do to keep their lies and swindles widely afloat?

This game continued with a letter to the editor published in yesterday’s Bangor Daily News by a 16-year-old who also runs cross-country for a Maine high-school girls’ team, but in this case is actually a girl. The title, probably not supplied by the author, is “A cross country race is not a top women’s issue.”

I wonder if Maine native and Fast-Women newsletter creator Alison Wade and her readers, or bitter special-needs munchkins like Erin Strout, both of whom have been unconditional advocates for the inclusion of males in female sports, would agree with this statement. Although they inwardly might—these are harridans whose failure to succeed on pseudo-feminist terms drives deep misogyny typically framed as, and folded into, garden-variety man-bashing—there’s no way these purported agitators for women’s athletic equality would lend open support to such an airy, sexist derogation.

This letter-writer—and whose idea was this anyway?—takes issue with Stark-Chessa being labeled “a boy who thinks he’s a girl,” even though this is exactly what he is or claims to be. The only other possibility is that he has in fact experienced no gender dysphoria at all, and is instead just an adventurous, nonconformist kid who has spotted an interesting loophole in the system and feels like having some fun with it.

The last paragraph contains a “hands off, adults, he’s too young a deviant to be heckled” imprecation:

Despite your opinions on the matter, Soren is a child — a child whose most significant “crime” is running a race. Instead of being able to participate in the same competition as any other high school runner, she is booed at, laughed at, cursed at and the face of an anti-trans campaign created by an adult.

In addition to this being a markedly different take on Soren’s acceptance by fans than the one Steve Craig wrote for the Sun Journal, it’s impossible to not notice the hypocrisy in the attempts by supporters of this disruptive nonsense to shield the lil’ gremlins at the center of it from criticism.

If the adults involved in this—parents, coaches, and school administrators—have decided or agreed that someone who is 14 is psychologically mature enough to “transition”—sometimes with surgery and drugs involved, both options being very adult-level decisions—then whether they acknowledge it or not, these rule-makers have tacitly agreed that it is okay for anyone watching to comment without restraint on the whole circus, as if the “trans” kid is an adult. After all, the perverts behind this “movement” are the ones who essentially decided to position these kids as de facto adults, so it’s perfectly reasonable to treat them as such—to try them as adults in the court of public athletic opinion.

This unrelenting demand to just shut up about all of this because of the alleged vulnerability of these ridiculous kids are so vulnerable is a necessary part of the strategy aimed at keeping this crap in place. You can see why: If just a few more spectators and pundits were willing to call this madness exactly what it is on the ground, far fewer of these boys would be willing to do it.

I wonder what would happen if the officials in charge of the New England Championships announced tomorrow morning that the girls’ race was being cancelled. Especially if this announcement were made after the girls were already warmed up, lined up and ready to go. It could go like this:

“It has been determined that there is no reason to devote time or effort to staging a girls’ version of these championships. You can all return to your buses and go home. Thank you for your polite cooperation.”

“What the hell? You can’t do this!”

“Oh, we can and we must. As one of you very scions pointed out, a cross-country race is not a top women’s issue. As a result, feel free to freshen up in a locker room and then watch the boys go off in forty-five minutes.”

A fitting coda to such an apt but obnoxious delivery would be wrangling off to the side of the field in the manner of Randal Graves of the Clerks film franchise departing choice scenes.

The Wokish love to invoke blatant double standards when it comes to who gets to say what and why. One of their favorite responses to complaints about “nonbinary” divisions is “It doesn’t affect you, so why do you care?” in addition to being incorrect in the first place, this works both ways. I could ask “Why is being ‘nonbinary’ so important that you want to force the entire world to pretend it’s real?”

I have no idea what is actually going on in young Mr. Loren’s head. But if he is indeed so mentally ill that he can’t tell he’s male, then someone needs to step in and try to correct him or at least him safe. When 11-year-old kids with Down syndrome pick up dog turds off the ground and take bites out of them because the class bully said “Hey, that’s a candy bar,” we discourage them from doing so. And when these same kids pull our their peckers in front of others on a school bus—and I saw this happen once when I was about six—we don’t chime in with “New rule! For Denny here and Denny only, the classroom is the set of a porn studio!”

I do know that Mr. Loren has or at one time had two parents, and that he has at least one coach, and that the school he attends most likely has administrators who are aware of and encouraging of his unoriginal burst of sanctioned-but-despised deceit. In fact, if you know anything about Rudolf Steiner or the original Waldorf school of thought, it won’t surprise you at all that Soren’s ascendancy is taking part at the institution where it is.

If anyone associated with this school or this kid finds this, please know that I hope that the school burns to the ground down this winter during the holiday break. The idea of the institution even existing is violent and makes me feel deeply unsafe. My feelings matter too, and you and the rest of the cackling assholes pulling this crap all over the country are counting on too many normies being too hamstrung by intimidation or other forms of paralysis to comment publicly in the manner they want to and most certainly should.

You’ve gotten this pass for too long and too widely, and I’m sure you’ll continue to broadly get it because of the combination of others’ unwillingness to comment and your own gibbering and gushing pathologies. But you won’t get it from everyone, most of all those of us who have simply concluded three-plus years into ersatz social justice that there is no upside to respecting a single idea these warped actors come up with and do downside to calling out the adults behind it.

Behind all the gaslighting and often-anonymous cancelation tactics, the Wokish are weak and weak-minded people who are always one well-phrased rejoinder or interjection from disappearing from the conversation forever. This goes for any batch of upright-ambling hominids on similarly oriented grifting missions. Once they realize that they can’t cancel you or shout you down as an online gang of posturing floor-humpers and knothole-bangers, you’ll find out that as individuals, these are among most broken and spineless economically stable people on Earth. That’s why they turned with such unmitigated ardor to social vandalism in the first place.

I’m planning to write a preview of tomorrow’s New England races themselves, but after this post, I need to let the guns cool off until early morning. I genuinely can’t believe not only how nutty society has become, but how remarkably effective the nutballs have been at silencing others or convincing others that their con-jobs and turd-slinging are grounded in earnest progressivism.