[Trigger warning: This post uses the words "male" and "female" and third-person pronouns the way they have always been used in English and are still used by the vast majority of native speakers.]
Feagaiga Stowers is a young woman weightlifter from Samoa who recently competed at the Pacific Games. She had survived an abusive childhood and trained hard, to the point where she was expected to win the gold medal, as she had done at some earlier events. But she lost that prize to another competitor, Laurel Hubbard of New Zealand.
Hubbard, whose original name was Gavin Hubbard, self-identifies as female. The Pacific Games disregarded the fact that, until recently "transitioning", Hubbard was unambiguously male. Indeed, previously he had competed as a man in male weightlifting events. At the Pacific Games, Hubbard was recognized as a woman.
The question is whether this was fair to biological women such as Stowers who were competing there. Transitioning, even surgically, does not remove all of the advantage in physical strength built up over decades of life as a male.
An analogous situation arose earlier this year in Connecticut, where two transgender students took first and second place at the State Championships in Girls' Track, outrunning biologically-female students who would otherwise have won. One of those girls, Selina Soule,
has been outspoken about the unfairness of competing under these conditions, and has
filed a Title IX complaint. For this, she has been vilified in the media and allegedly subject to retaliation by school authorities, though a few journalists have taken
a more even-handed view.
The standard response on the left to such cases has been to ignore them or, when individuals refuse to be ignored, to try to silence them with name-calling. A good example is the reaction faced by Martina Navratilova, an early pioneer of lesbian visibility in sports, when she dared call attention to the issue late last year. Despite making more effort than most people would to sympathize with the views of the people vilifying her, she was effectively
denounced as a heretic and several LGBT organizations severed their ties with her.
The issue extends beyond the world of sports. The insistence on recognizing biologically-male transgender people as women in all situations often includes giving access to women's restrooms and locker rooms. An unambiguous man entering those places would instantly register as a potential threat. Women and girls who are not up to speed on the latest mandatory ideological contortions naturally
react to any biological male the same way in that context. In some countries
children who believe they may be transgender are being
given "puberty blockers" to disrupt their natural biological development (
see multiple links here). Young people who are probably simply normal homosexuals are being encouraged to
consider themselves transgender and undergo physical mutilation in what amounts to a new form of conversion therapy.
In Canada, a transgender activist has exploited that country's oppressive "hate speech" laws to
harass and silence people who failed to ignore biological reality and accept him as a woman; an equally absurd
"publication ban" law helped him
conceal his history as an abuser until recently. In Britain last year, a
convicted rapist who claimed to be transgender was sentenced to a women's prison,
with predictable results. Feminists who object to such practices, called "TERFs" ("Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists") are routinely vilified and subject to
horrifying calls for murderous violence.
This is madness. It is unsustainable because it requires constant and energetic reality-denial; it is being propped up by name-calling and shouting down anyone who dares call attention to the absurdities it creates. The extension of full equality, including equal marriage rights, to gay men and lesbians had no real costs to anyone else; transgender ideology inherently requires manifold incursions into women's long-established separate zones in every area of life, from athletics to public bathrooms.
This issue will not go away. The more transgender ideology becomes generally accepted, the more cases like those linked above will arise. And this is a problem for the left, as long as it continues to treat people like Soule and Navratilova as it has. As you can see from the links I posted above regarding her case, Soule has fallen in with some pretty unsavory right-wing characters. But who can blame her, when the left will not give her a hearing? If we refuse to listen to the victims in these situations, they will turn to those who
will listen. Denunciation
will drive people away, but will not silence them. And ignoring the issue and refusing to talk about it isn't good enough.
We have a choice. We can keep trying to hand-wave away cases like those I've raised here so as to re-affirm commitment to the existing ideological response to this issue, ignoring and silencing victims and giving the rightists a lever which will enable them to pry away growing numbers of women voters in the future. Or we can figure out a response to the claims of transgenderism which will be fair to everybody. I don't claim to know what such a response would look like. I just know that what we're doing now is
not going to get us there. Quite the opposite.
[Some of the links used in this post found via
Aunt Polly.]
