The latest attack by Women's Running on the patriarchy reaches new frontiers of moral bankruptcy
The unguided publication's worsening anti-female, anti-speech, anti-reality stance highlights the supreme emotional immaturity and fragility of the Wokish mind
Executive summary: Even after Letsrun.com removed its April Fool’s Day joke lampooning not trans people but the incoherent—and yes, inherently funny—idea that transgender people are biologically indistinguishable from non-trans people, Women’s Running commissioned an editorial not only blasting the Letsrun for this lapse in judgment but also blaming its proprietors for so much of the pain women runners—especially blacks and those with eating disorders—have experienced over the years because of the site’s message board. This outrage, despite the Wokish themselves routinely using the Letsrun forum to spread false, angry, and deeply poisonous ideas when they’re not busy on Twitter doing the same thing, and otherwise engaging in the very behaviors they claim are destructive and unacceptable.
The levels of undisguised self-victimhood, viciousness, rhetorical incoherence, and intellectual laziness on display in this editorial are truly monumental. From an objective standpoint, it could not have been more self-defeating had Letsrun co-founders Robert and Weldon Johnson themselves overseen its every detail. But being convincing by asserting verifiable facts is never the point of these relentless verbal salvos from ersatz feminists; being convincing by asserting catastrophic levels of externally imposed butthurt is, because no amount of inflation can curb the demand for that deliciously bitter brew anymore.
At a reductive level, the piece is another transparent usury of the transfemales-in-female-sports controversy that underscores two major features of Wokism: Every “this hurts all women” argument is in fact driven by loudly advertised personal resentments; and appeasing these relentlessly hypocritical shrews is pointless because they’ll try to cancel you anyway.
The author of the editorial, Morgan Florsheim, starts by complaining of being the first loser three times in a row at the same high-school cross-country race, and how devastated she was to see the winner’s coach make a Facebook post containing “something along the lines of” the words, “So great to see a strong athlete win against one who clearly has an eating disorder.”
Since Women’s Running has no credibility—and, at the moment, no news editor (but ten applicants for the job)—I’m tempted to assume in the absence of a link or a screen capture that this horrible offense is mostly or completely fabricated. But I’ll accept it as mostly true. Who cares? People are jerks on social media all the time, and in exactly this way. The author apparently believes that this affords her special insight into how transfemales feel when someone points out the obvious reason the adjective “trans” is even needed. She doesn’t. I’ve seen plenty of comments over the years about photos of me running that raked at my own body-image neuroses, but I can admit I have no idea what it’s like to be transgender and deal with other people’s reactions and comments. This isn’t empathy, it’s emotional vampirism.
The idea that Florsheim’s story can naturally segue into her beef with Letsrun is hence a contrivance, producing a non sequitur, But such woe wuz me introductions are obligatory in these hit pieces, because they propose—with no alternatives even considered—that if someone out there feels bad, it’s got to be someone else’s fault, and that responsible person or entity must be silenced for good. This is because a female runner who, say, loses a race three years in a row apparently just has to check Facebook to scan for gloating, hurtful comments from the opposing camp—there’s currently no legal option for hypersensitive Internet users to just not interact with Facebook at all. And by extension, everyone bitching about the Letsrun message board evidently has no choice but check it out first thing in the morning to look for excuses to externalize their panoply of unresolved issues, and then zip over to Twitter, where their only option is to try to out-goon the most ardent bigots in Letsrun message-board history.
(By the way, if Florsheim and other women runners insist on assigning blame for their eating disorders to a single person, they should blame their father. Being the dad of a hard-driving eating-disordered daughter, he’s statistically more likely than other parents to be an alcoholic, domineering, or both. And since every argument surrounding pain culture these days is about group power dynamics, I’ll join in and make sweeping assumptions about everyone based on surface data alone.)
From the standpoint of Wokish, the real problem with Letsrun’s April Fool’s Day joke wasn’t that it mocked trans people. The real problem was two-layered, and it’s a problem for Wokish activists and media figures, not for trans individuals.
One is that it points out a basic fact—trans females are not biological females. If they were, the “trans” wouldn’t be there. The only way sex and gender can align in a transgender person is if sex and outward gender are for whatever reason misaligned at or close to birth, and the affected person later switches their gender to match their anatomical sex. This is rare but not unheard of.
If there were no physical differences between males and females, this entire controversy wouldn’t exist, because trans people would blend in seamlessly with everyone else—athletically, on physical examination, and in every other way. Most of the athletic world is trying to figure out how to resolve the sudden explosion of transgender people wanting to play sports in a way that maximizes fairness. Because this is, at least from a scientific perspective, an easy call that the NCAA and others have thus far botched by allowing transfemales to count as females in sports, advocates for trans people are furiously trying to slander and cancel truth-tellers into submission and nonexistence so that the level of fairness female athletes previously enjoyed is never restored.
The second reason the Wokish are upset at mockery of the “trans women are women” claim is that its illegitimacy—which becomes more evident every day thanks to the kinds of events the Wokish systematically ignore—makes them look bad, especially those in the media. They are liars, and the only way they can keep their ramshackle crusade afloat is by not allowing anyone with a significant platform to reveal that crusade’s fundamental frailty. But the fact of having chosen a wrong position and needing to defend it with lowbrow tactic bothers some of them, too, even if this is rooted more in ego deflation than in having not done the right thing.
I really wonder what “trans women are women” think of stories like the ones associated with these headlines. I’m not including them to portray transgender people as broadly dishonorable or creepy—in one case, remember, we’re talking about already incarcerated folks. I just want to know if and how they see jarring but statistically inevitable outcomes like these as pro-woman. (Of course they don’t, but they would never openly admit it because they are members of a de facto religious cult.)
You’ll find plenty of cisgender people in heterosexual marriages riding the trans-women-are-women train, like David and Megan Roche. I’ve already suggested that Megan Roche would have never become a practicing physician if she had answered questions on her licensing exams that align with her husband’s current stance. But another thing you notice about these couples is that they always select partners with nonrandom genitalia. If trans X were X, we’d see at least a few men married to trans women and having kids—or at least engaging in potentially child-producing activities—and a few women married to trans men and doing the same.
For all their “It’s all good, it’s all right” public pablum, the male in this duo chose the mate she did because she has natural breasts and a birth canal, and the fame made her selection because he….well, I assume he’s been named David since he was born. You get the point.
Also, I’m not the first to notice that these pro-trans-inclusion pieces by women runners never seem to come from happy women runners, or from women who even show evidence of regularly running at all. They all seem to spring from sources evincing extreme levels of personal unfulfillment attributable to various societal miscalibrations that have stacked the life deck against them. That’s probably not a coincidence.
Florsheim’s baseless complaints about Letsrun and its message-board posters include “they call NCAA champion (Lia Thomas) a biological male” (that’s a true assessment), the “misgendering” of “intersex cisgender woman” Caster Semenya (intersex people are biologically male). She automatically convicts all involved of racism on the basis that Semenya and other high-profile DSD athletes are black. Is anyone aware of any active “white” DSD athletes at the world-class level?
Like the other intellectually dishonest crybabies taking a trans-inclusion stance, Florsheim refuses to acknowledge that criticism of this stance is hardly limited to oft-maligned punching-bags like the all-male website Letsrun. Wouldn’t that be convenient! Instead, this coward ignored this and this and this and all sorts of useful websites operated by women athletes. You know, just the kind of vulva-havers a magazine called Women’s Running purports to represent.
Florsheim, showing absolutely no self-awareness, decided to establish how bad the Letsrun joke was by linking to butthurt-rich tweets from luminary pundits such as @ogstinkberry.
Florsheim goes on to link to past articles examining the specific evils of the Letsrun forum, including one by Martin Fritz Huber, whose job for Outside Online is to write chin-stroking hit pieces masquerading as dispassionate reviews, mostly for this lazy mushbrain.
Not surprisingly, Florsheim takes aim at a 2018 profile of Katelyn Tuohy by Matthew Futterman in The New York Times. It must be an accident that whenever some runner with a vagina takes aim at the NYT, it’s never a richly deserving target like Lindsay Crouse or Taylor Lorenz or any other “reporters” or “editors” whose careers consist solely of lying and status-seeking, having low innate intelligence and no morals, and causing problems for others. It always manages to be Matthew Futterman for some inscrutable reason.
Imagine what would happen if Jon Gault or one of the Johnsons wrote an article for Letsrun titled, “Why Women’s Running Needs to Cease Publication.” I’m not kidding; try to imagine them seriously agitating for the cancellation of WR or any entity that publishes running content, no matter how apt the suggestion. If this is difficult, it’s probably because you recognize that Letsrun would never do such a thing no matter how much unjustified crap they take from the harpies. This is one of the unfortunate hazards of not being Wokish; you can observe criticism without needing it and its creators to stop existing.
And that is what they want. If you had the emotional maturity of a five-year-old and were a slave to your own worst impulses and fears, wouldn’t you just want all that noisy mean stuff gone?
I’ve recently begun assembling literally graphic examples of hypocrisy and other face-plants from contributors to fitness magazines, retired pros who helplessly run their mouths about every issue, execs and representatives of shoe and apparel manufacturers, influencers, and everyone else with an opinion on how the running and greater world ought to operate. As funny as this “work” can be, it’s also a reminder of just how nasty and insincere so many people with meaningful platforms are. I can’t imagine not sloshing through life in an eye-watering cloud of shame while behaving as these dingbats have and will continue to do until sanity prevails. Since comparatively few people, understandably, care about distance running or what anyone writes or says about it, sanity is not likely to prevail.
Every time I see another of these inept and feckless compositions, I imagine someone sitting in front of a computer with half a turd in her non-typing hand and brown smudges all over her face, and suddenly getting the idea to complain on Twitter about the smell of male flatulence in the coffee shop where she’s plying her activist trade.
Laura Kipnis has a constant target of worsening feminist cancel culture for years, and one reason leftist women hate her is that she accurately compares them to children. People don’t like hearing that others can see when their typical motivation for ruthlessly going after people reduces to an undeniable childish processing of personal or professional envy.
Who else sticks their fingers in their ears and refuses to even hear input that bothers them—even and especially if it’s true? Wokesters and little kids. If they would open their minds to the ideas of scholars like Kipnis, if nothing else, they’d understand why so many younger people aren’t getting laid anymore.
The people pushing this crap are malignant actors who understand that society will broadly reject Wokish positions if allowed to become sufficiently attuned to their fulminating dishonesty. They’re sensing that an expanding majority of Americans, not just right-wingers or even political conservatives, are aware of both the frailty of their propositions and the gaslighting tactics they employ to keep their falsehoods in circulation, but the perpetrators are far too invested in their own campaign of nonstop lies to back off at this stage.
I don’t care whether trans or “intersex” athletes eventually grab every title and world record available. The sport gets what its media framers and rule-makers offer, even if it deserves better. To hell with it. Apart from the athletes I work with, I don’t care about girls’ or women’s running—it’s pointless. The women with the loudest megaphones evidently want to see transfemales outrunning, out-lifting, or flat-out pounding on girls and women; so be it. And right now, multiple active DSD athletes, who are male by any applicable biological standard, occupy high positions on all-time women’s track performance lists. More will follow, and I don’t make the rules.
Also, given the age and hue of my skin, I’m told I can’t possibly give a rip anyway. I can’t help but notice that the biological sex of critics of Wokism somehow matters a great deal, even if it’s supposedly irrelevant in other contexts.
So, consider me disinterested. This project has, perhaps inevitably, led me to beat up on everyday trans persons and others with non-traditional constitutions and physiology when the real target is and needs to be the media and unmitigated idiots like Veronica Ivy who identify as trans and clearly want everyone who disagrees with them to just die already.
In complaining that Letsrun “punched down” at trans people with its joke, the essay manages to illustrate perfectly why the phrase “punching down” needs to be retired. For one thing, Florsheim’s linking to random Twitter static shows that she understands the power of calling on the often-nameless masses to help sully someone’s reputation and catalyze the process of getting them memory-holed. For another, even a website as deeply settled in running culture can’t be considered safe when the rest of the media is aligned against it. The media carries unprecedented and undue influence, as its own perceived role is now social and political activism rather than the furnishing of unsullied (to the extent possible) information.
One of my recent images attempted to explain how Phil Knight is buying media influence in his golden years to help ensure that no one says uncomfortable things about Nike athletes or Nike as a company, or mentions that Nike all but owns an already deeply corrupt and incompetent USA Track and Field.
Knight’s “Hayward Magic” project is clearly nothing more than a propaganda stream, and it is apparently shuttling money toward Women’s Running and Trail Runner (both owned by Outside, Inc., and both eminently disposable), Runner’s World, The New York Times, and the Citius Mag agglomeration of fanboy websites and audio files. Not Letsrun, though. Letsrun has shown tendencies in the past to be harshly critical of Nike-associated figures, and that has to be offset in the public eye somehow.
The laughable people calling themselves running journalists today have already proven themselves a pliant bunch by spineless, seat-sniffing constitution. But now the elements are in place for corporate running coverage to survive in spite of itself, with nothing but a stream of incurious drones tasked with making sure the next Lance Armstrong or Shelby Houlihan is treated a victim instead of a cheater, or even as a victim of the inherently doped-soaked sport no one is supposed to characterize as such.
I doubt that all of these Outside, Inc. publications will survive as they are for more than a couple of years. It already deep-sixed Podium Runner, and my sense is that the various members-only packages it’s selling are not helping much. But that doesn’t matter, at least not to the people at the top of the company. What Outside, Inc. is likely to do within a few years is dispense of most of its full-time and part-time editorial staff. That way, those few assholes can continue to monetize the huge pile of awful clickbait it will have amassed by then while not having to pay anyone, and can then issue the inevitable IPO. Then, those assholes will probably move on to some other profiteering enterprise.
For now, Women’s Running appears to have a managing editor, one whose entire background, fittingly, is in food and wine. (I got a sad but real LOL at seeing “fact-checking” one of her skills.) Does Jessica Campbell-Salley even look at the material that’s uploaded to the company Internet presence, before or after this technical step? And if she’s even partly in charge of hiring the next news editor, will she explain out in the open that WR is not a real running publication, for women or anyone else, or will that be a tacit understanding between Campbell-Salley and anyone the outfit recruits?
I can’t do anything to stem the tide of nonsense, which is deeply antagonistic toward my mission of enjoying everyday life. But I think the actors responsible can be made to understand that a significant gap exists between the way most people see them and their sad output and their own perceptions of these things. I think that if enough people respond to lies and attempted gaslighting with the same kind of casual inhumanity and disregard for personal pain, individual experience, and tangible consequences that the Wokish practice, maybe a few of them will think twice about adding more screeching to the canon.
If not, I still get to insult the deserving and then laugh as they launch into online defenses against….well, something or someone, but they can’t say exactly what whether it’s Sonia O’Sullivan or Save Women’s Sports or thus place, because then people who actually function as fact-checkers when reading things will learn interesting facts about “the attacked.” The clowns all read this crap, and they just keep waiting for me to get angry enough to actually catch on fire, like everything else in this city.
Today, dozens of hollow-headed gawkers have flown long distances to be in Boston for no good reason. They are not there to cover the marathon; they are there to cover themselves “covering” the marathon—to promote their meta-media operations or their own social-media feeds. The ones who manage get COVID-19 during the trip will not be eager to admit it. After flying home, many of them will go online and, within days to weeks, start ranting about how every runner has a responsibility to combat climate change, with one strategy not using fossil fuels you don’t have to. They’ll post racist, sexist, and classist things in the name of fairness and justice, and they’ll call for more equity even though they’re only getting work or exposure because equity is being directing at undeserving grifters and frauds.
They’ll make me again grateful that I don’t have to be here for one day longer than my eight-year-old dog is, because the world I was told I lived in is either gone or was never here at all. People don’t value what they say they do, and I don’t care about anyone who’s not a family member of a friend at this point. My view of “society” is completely bleak, and I’ve up on caring to adapt to it. I think portions of it should adapt to reality instead.
Anyone who doesn’t like getting their feelings hurt by what others say and write is free to stop lying, cheating, and being an asshole. This stuff isn’t coming from a void.