Deborah Frances-White and trans-women in sport

[RitaFairclough]

I think DFW is marvellous and I love the Guilty Feminist. But I just read her comment on Twitter about the sport debate and I am wondering how any feminist can really support that position.

I am too scaredy cat to comment on twitter because I use it for work stuff, but I would like to present the following scenarios...

You are a 12-year-old girl and you are really fast at running. You win medals and you dream of being at the Olympics one day. You can even beat the boys - for now. When you are 13, or 14, a trans-girl arrives in your races. She is much taller than you and she runs faster. She wins the medals, and the sponsorship. You know however hard you train you will never beat her. You give up running.

Or

You are a 12-year-old boy and you’re good at running. But by the time you’re 14, your times are slipping and you’re not winning any more. Your coach suggests you say you’re a girl and try your luck in those races. You’re not keen but your parents are pushy and your coach is too, and once you’ve done it once and won a medal easily you start to see the benefits...

I just can’t see any way in which girls or women don’t lose here.

Mrs jamin. I know she's only a comedian but it's a bit despair inducing - it gives me a sinking feeling that a feminist has written that. I think I saw it at the time. There is no trace, not even a flicker, of the analysis and ideas which gained us our rights. We are historically abnormal - being female and also having legal/formal equality. That's not a normal state of affairs for humans and it is fragile. If the women's rights movement takes its eyes off women's rights (which it has) there is no guarantee that it won't just be a blip.
But on a brighter note things have changed a lot in the last 6 months.

I've just tried the podcast again. It's about abortion in Northern Ireland and apparently this doesn't just affect women, also non binary and trans women.

How can abortion affect trans women unless they were the father? No uterus, no pregnancy, no abortion required.

A showering of cis as part of the intro, made me mutter fuck off, fuck off, fuck offff!

Yeah I had to stop listening too @buttyblahblah, DFW should rename it The Guilty Handmaiden.

Some people have said that the trans activists seem angrier than the lobbies who do not want revisions to The Gender Recognition Act. That isn’t always the case actually (sometimes far from it!) but where it is, it’s important to remember that those fighting for change often seem angrier than those fighting for the status quo. The suffragettes seemed angrier than the men running the House of Commons^

For. Fucks. Sake. Idiot.

Of course by "angrier" she means threatening, bullying and misogynistically abusive, I presume.