Laurel Hubbard to go to Tokyo

The transwomen in women's sports thing is incredibly tricky for TRAs and anyone who has spent their time calling women 'bigots' for believing that TWANW.

This is because the inclusion of the likes of Laurel Hubbard at the expense of a woman is pretty much indefensible. There really are not arguments to defend this, even if you were going to wang on about testosterone levels etc the photos and the results speak for themselves.

But

We know that the nature of this ideology means that it is all or nothing. There is absolutely no room for nuance. The likes of Owen Jones or Jameela Jamil cannot be seen saying that they believe that TWAW but that sports are a special case in which biology matters. So they say nothing at all. This has been a huge 'trans' story in the news this week, but actually there has been very little defence of it, even from the most usual of suspects.

The story of the 1928 women’s 800m race is interesting too. It seems that the story that it was too exhausting for women and that was why it was removed from the women’s Olympic schedule (and only reinstated in 1960) is rubbish.

<a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20180923092609/library.la84.org/SportsLibrary/NASSH_Proceedings/NP1985/NP1985zc.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">web.archive.org/web/20180923092609/library.la84.org/SportsLibrary/NASSH_Proceedings/NP1985/NP1985zc.pdf

Bloody uppity women winning things🙄

Sod it. Quote didn't come up. Was the one about that personal trainer having his Insta account threatened.

I'm not remotely a conspiracy theorist, but the way that powerful SM outfits silence people who make comments that are entirely within the law does make me wonder WTF is going on.

Go on Monty! He's a star 💪

I wonder if Monty is aware of the Kent women's cricketer Maxine Blythin?

Some legends are total legends.

That would be you Monty.

That’s Monty’s media career scuppered, then. I liked MP before this, now I like him even more

Monty Panesar (England cricketer) has voiced his support for women

Men have shown time and again in the Olympics how much they disregard women. Look at skeet shooting - if any sport can be mixed sex, shooting can surely? Well skeet shooting was, until a woman won for the first time in 1992. In 1996 it was promptly declared single sex, except they didn't have a women's competition, just a men's one. So the woman (Zhang Shan of China) didn't even get to defend her title in a women's only event.

Nine years too much for some.

Clearly.

NINE YEARS?

WHAAAAAAT?

That chap puts across everything I want to say but better.

I couldn’t care if Mr Smith was dressed up in a pantomime horse costume with a duster up his arse.

His nakedness has not offended me.

Threatening to take away his voice because of his beliefs offends me greatly.

9 years??

And I imagine those countries will ban the women again if they have to compete against men.

It's like we're riding a conveyor belt backwards and can't get off.

A whole 9 years.

It’s only 9 years since all women were allowed to take part in the Olympic Games

It is also what bemuses me - the IOC has access to the smartest sports scientists in the world. So, how can they come up with such a shambles?

Because science is the business of understanding and explaining reality, and reality (according the currently dominant construction of gender ideology) is transphobic.

I’ve mentioned this before, but the problem with an ideology that is in conflict with reality is that reality keeps poking through. So the ideological becomes more and more complex with more and more workarounds and special cases to deal with all the gaps between how it asserts the world is and how the world really is.

Why do we “follow the science” as far as coronavirus policy is concerned, but “follow the feelings” in sport?

Even if testosterone level were a good proxy for “creating fairness” (it isn’t), it doesn’t even do that.

Yes, there’s a lot of heavy lifting being done by relying on lowered testosterone to give a veneer of fairness.

Thanks for that image - that's a belter.

It is also what bemuses me - the IOC has access to the smartest sports scientists in the world. So, how can they come up with such a shambles?

I'm not a sports scientist but I can read that graph.

Not sure if this graph has been posted on this thread yet, but it’s a great illustration of what a fudge this all is.

Even if testosterone level were a good proxy for “creating fairness” (it isn’t), it doesn’t even do that.

That’s good news about Telfer, too. I had been concerned about whether even the monitoring of trans athletes testosterone levels was at some point going to fall to cries of “it’s transphobic!”, so at least it does seem as if monitoring is being done, and the results are being used to appropriately exclude athletes who don’t meet the (irrelevant, unfair) required levels.