Trans women are women, so...
A brief illustration of the absurdity of Twitter-bred "debates"
A routinely offered denial of basic human biology appeared anew on Twitter this morning.
The source this time is the Chris Mosier, blue checkmark and all. Q.E.D., regressive trolls! Previously, more prominent figures, such as American Civil Liberties Union attorney Chase Strangio—whose professional bio describes him as “the Deputy Director for Transgender Justice with the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project and a nationally recognized expert on transgender rights”—have tweeted out even more explicit denials of reality.
Ross Tucker of The Real Science of Sport Podcast took the time to politely quote-slam Mosier’s primitive attempt at an apt analogy.
Tucker did a podcast on December 17 dedicated in part to the Lia Thomas kerfuffle. (I despise that word, which is why I reserve it for especially irritating kerfuffles.)
I haven’t listened to the podcast yet, but Tucker’s tweet announcing it, along with previous comments he’s made on the subject, imply that he uses it to debunk the claim that men who medically transition to women, and take androgen blockers in sufficient doses to maximally lower their testosterone levels, lose their entire male advantage in the process. Tucker evidently believes, as should any rational analyst, that observers should not have needed Lia Thomas as a test case to establish this. The main reason is that the testosterone-induced, athletic-advantage-conferring changes to the male body that occur at puberty are irreversible and will remain so until someone invents a better time machine.
I feel like I am addressing an adult audience that deals only with young children when I write things like this, but here it goes: A 6’ 4” male is still going to be 6’ 4” after fully transitioning. If he has enormous hands, they will remain so. Testosterone is not a magical solvent, even if Wokism itself aims to reduce the various solidities of society to a puddle, and Wokish brains have been dissolved into a custard-like plasma by their immersion in a fanatical, apocalyptic religion.
How many women every grow to be that tall? I can point to a number of familiar sporting disciplines in which size is a distinct advantage.
The false claim that men who transition lose all of the effects of testosterone is the latest in a stream of bald-faced lies about transgender and intersex women and girls in sports. Initially, when the Caster Semenya kerftroversy was reaching full volume, the central claim was “testosterone isn’t that important.” Multiple soldiers in the army of disinformation-shitting assholes at the New York Times alone sought to discredit the very effects of testosterone itself.
Note that this claim has now been memory-holed, because while “lowering T levels solves the problem” is a dumb enough argument on its own, it also concedes that “T is irrelevant” was a crude ruse all along. Note also that Gina Kolata, the author of that “Does Testosterone Really Give Caster Semenya an Edge on the Track?” piece, also wrote an article in 2008 explaining exactly how testosterone gives men an advantage.
Not just the same publication. The same author. Does anyone really blame me for calling these people—idiots being paid handsomely to lie their tits off—unkind names? They deserve more than hurtful verbal salvos from relative nobodies.
Concurrent with these bullshit stances, of course, was “inclusion” advocates’ dismissal of the idea that trans athletes would deprive biological women and girls of wins or high finishes. This is only a tiny part of the picture—do girls running 24:00 for 5K want boys beating them out for the last varsity spot on a middling girls’ team? And do they dare speak up? —but whatever; it was another demented falsehood from the outset, as we* continue to see.
So given that the entire push to litter female sports with superior-performing male bodies in an effort to repair a broken female sports environment has been blatantly, comically dishonest from the start, it makes perfect sense that folks like Mosier and Strangio feel comfortable gaslighting the world with objectively, aggressively illogical tweets. Wokism is about “dismantling power structures,” don’t forget, and rules made by the patriarchy about genders and hormones and numbers represent part of an oppressive power structure and therefore don’t apply anymore.
In previously mentioning Strangio’s ridiculous yammering, I pointed out how none of the arguments propounded by the Wokish would last more than sixty seconds in a live, moderated setting. When someone makes the assertion “Trans women are women” on Twitter, they can block or ignore dissenting views while their similarly behaving peers recirculate the absurdity all over the platform. In other words, it encourages the social behavior of petulant preschoolers: I don’t hear you, motherfucker, but you WILL listen to ME scream.
Consider all of ways to complete a sentence starting with “Trans women are women, so…” an in-person conversation. Such as:
…they require adequate prenatal care.”
…they should be screened routinely for breast and gynecological cancer as adults.”
…they should be aware of how athletic performance is influenced by phases of the menstrual cycle.”
…they really might get pregnant the first time, especially in a Chevy Malibu.”
…they should consider different types of oral contraception before committing to any one of them.”
Obviously, the list goes on. And the usual response—when someone even dares express things like these, and they stand for more than a second before some brave blue-checkmark zaps them—is “Don’t be mean” or “Don’t be ridiculous,” as if they did not themselves introduce the absurdity.
None of these idiots will ever have a conversation with someone willing to discuss things with them on the very terms they invite. This is nothing but an attempt to ruin things by fiat. I don’t mean that every individual trans person is out to ruin something—that’s kind of what pro-trans Twitter loons want the world to think of anyone who says “Hey, you’re wrong about everything you say, and there are real and increasing costs to women and girls.” It’s the Wokish crusaders steering the whole lunatic vessel from on high—in the media, in the social-science departments (and now elsewhere) and administrative offices of colleges and universities, at white-guilt seminars, at workplace diversity trainings that do more harm than good. And they deserve every last bit of your heckling and hectoring.
Look: These people are fucking liars. They know this, just like traditional Evangelical Christian extremists, but they don’t care because they believe the ends justify the means. There is a widely held belief that Christians are forbidden to lie, but today’s fundies interpret this as “you can lie to your enemies.” That’s questionable at best, but when you’re already operating by fantasyland rules, who cares? And the same applies to Wokism. Evangelical Christians claim that the endpoint of their activism is salvation after an apocalypse they can keep forever kicking into the future; Wokish people say that theirs is equality, even though it’s plain that the forceful expulsion of cisgender old white people is far too fun and lucrative a pastime to put the brakes on so they can assess how far society has come.
No. This is just brute-force noise by people consciously operating at various levels of irrationality. They know they’re wrong and they don’t give a shit, and that’s why Twitter and profoundly libtarded “news” sites like BuzzFeed, Slate and Jezebel are the only fora for the advancement of such positions. Propagandists don’t discuss things—they just bark and belch and queef their interlocutors into harried submission.
Ultimately, despite the abysmal power of Twitter over too many contrived culture wars, people are going to stop folding in large numbers in the face of stupid arguments made by ugly, uncompromising, self-debasing zealots more intent on gaining followers and wrecking other people’s careers than on seeing broad-scale societal shifts.
When someone is lying to advance a position, they are not only revealing that their goal is unworthy; they are giving their adversaries rallying points. If you dislike this shit, keep hammering away at the liars and reminding them this is what they are. You’ll notice that even people who lie constantly and mostly get away with it hate being called liars, because they know it’s wrong. They know it’s worse than being mistaken in earnest. They know it’s damaging. Yet as long as they’re “winning,” however symbolically and even if the net effect is a more discordant America, then they can keep waving their middle fingers at the rest of us.
Meanwhile, the editors of Women’s Running —and at last notice, it was unclear that the magazine even had any editors left to start the year—have released their list of 2022’s Power Women of the Year in a members-only article. Seems premature, but life and women move at fast paces these days.
I like the header photo; I have no idea how they got all fifteen women together for the shoot. This group of women is not merely diverse, it’s so uniquely eclectic that it includes at least one de facto man. But in defense of a reeling publication, Francine Niyonsaba did indeed run in the 2021 Olympics as a woman and set a women’s world record in the 2,000 meters in September. So anyone who has a problem with this list should take up the beef with World Athletics.
By the way, the Women’s Running 2021 list of Power Women was 25 names long. At this rate, depending on whether this represents linear decomposition or is part of some kind of half-life process, all of the powerful women in running will be gone or nameless within as few as two years. Even if that happens, Women’s Running will probably disappear first.
But who cares? Nonexistent publications and job titles are still publications and job titles, as the logic goes.