The sheer, breathtaking hypocrisy of the Guardian

[RoyalCorgi]

The Guardian's chief sportswriter, Jonathan Liew, is supporting a boycott of the Afghan cricket team: "We are warned not to punish the richly gifted men’s team for the sins of their government, as if the dignity and humanity of 20 million Afghan women were simply acceptable collateral damage against the wider backdrop of Rashid Khan’s availability for the next T20 World Cup."

Just in case you were wondering, yes, this is the same man who thinks having men play in women's sport is just great, and that women who don't like it are all evil right-wingers and, in his own words, "giving some of society’s most marginalised groups a chance to express their talent doesn’t harm anyone. Because trans women are women. And sport, I’m afraid, is only sport."

They really are trolling us now.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/jan/07/afghanistan-women-cricket-icc-taliban

Compartmentalised thinking.

When he thinks about trans issues, trans is marginalised and "cis" is powerful. So getting more trans and therefore fewer cis opportunities is a landable improvement on the current status quo.

When he thinks about sexism and misogyny, female is marginalised and male is powerful. So getting more female and therefore fewer male opportunities is a landable improvement on the current status quo.

When he's thinking about trans issues he is not thinking about sexism so he puts people into the trans and cis boxes. He sees that more trans people get opportunities - yay! He does not even notice that the "cis" people who lose out by this will be disproportionately female and the trans people who gain will be disproportionately male.

It's not even as meaningful as misogyny, it's just that unless he happens to be looking directly at women and girls, he simply forgets we exist, and therefore doesn't even get as far considering whether we have different challenges and opportunities to men and so that the practical application of trans (ie cross-sex) rights has different impacts on us than it does on men.

I think people like this are just virtue signallers and will say whatever they think will win them brownie points. Let's be honest, he doesn't give a fuck about trans or sportswomen or Afghan women.

Had a row with DH about this. Let them have their cricket, he said. The afghan cricketers aren’t political, he said, many don’t even live there any more.

But they are choosing to represent their fucking country, I said, to sport the flag and colours of a nation that is cruelly and viciously oppressing and abusing its women? Fuck that shit, babe. If they want my respect, they need to take a knee or some other equivalent gesture - making it very fucking clear that they condemn and are appalled by the what is happening - and seek political asylum [just as my own Iranian/afghan family did in the 70s when the Shah was deposed] I might - MIGHT - have some sympathy.

Until then. Yeah, but no.

That would be dishonest. If women claim they’re men when they aren’t actually trans, then they deserve everything coming to them. Women pretending to be men just to get out of uncomfortable situations is transphobic. And unfair to truetrans people, who, as we all know, are the most oppressed and most vulnerable people.

(Tongue firmly in cheek!)

Surely this is trolling.

Wow indeed. You’re really not meant to say the secret bit out loud. Liew got carried away — you can hear it — in the thrill of his woman-crushing vision.

He sort of knows you have to pretend to care, eg about women in Afghanistan. But he just can’t hide his excitement at the thought of utterly erasing women and girls from sport.

I know what happened in Cologne in 2015 or course, but what did the Guardian say about it that was the beginning of the end for you?

I can't speak for @Toseland but the effing Graun ignored it for days.
Tossers.
Women come last for the editorial team there.

I know what happened in Cologne in 2015 or course, but what did the Guardian say about it that was the beginning of the end for you?

The Guardian ignored it, and then published a dismissive piece where they pointed out how privileged the young women were to be out on NYE with smartphones with a sort of vague faux condemnation of the attacks. They also misrepresented the numbers in a different article, reducing it considerably, and when this was pointed out only corrected the article in the BTL comments.

Sorry meant to quote @TwigletsAndRadishes

I'd just like to point out that the Guardian hired Jonathon Liew just after he wrote that misogynist piece, possibly even because he wrote it.

😁

I did actually enjoy that attempt at an argument from a gender ideologue. Its always nice to be reminded just how profoundly they have no decent arguments at all.

What a ludicrous question. You might as well ask if stubbing your toe is as bad as having your throat cut.

Of course women are worse off living under a murderous regime where they are banned from education, from earning a living or receiving medical care. Luckily we don’t face that nightmare here. How does that make it ok for male cheats to win women’s medals?

In contrast to the execrable Liew, Oliver Brown of the Telegraph has been absolutely on the ball - as it were - when it comes to men participating in women's sports. His most recent article is about how the issue of men in women's sports helped to lose the election for the Democrats:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/2025/01/19/donald-trump-protecting-women-sport-party-political-issue/

https://archive.is/vENQY

My concern about this is that four years is a short time, and if the Democrats are back in power in 2028, US liberals will label all these measures as Trumpian attacks on minority rights and reverse them without any real debate.

I also think it's absolutely nuts that the female athlete talks about voting Trump "for women". Trump is in no way a pro women president. He might protect women's sports, but if he's dismantling women's reproductive rights at the same time, it's bad news overall.

if the Democrats are back in power in 2028, US liberals will label all these measures as Trumpian attacks on minority rights and reverse them without any real debate.

Maybe I'm being optimistic, but I wouldn't be so sure. If Trump does successfully keep men out of women's sports in the US, the Dems looking to reverse that would go down like a plate of cold sick with the American public.

I think the Dems know (even if they don’t acknowledge it) that voters don’t like men is women’s spaces and sports. I can’t see them enraging the electorate by reversing changes Trump may make on this, especially in four years time- the wheels are already starting to come off the ideology I think/hope.

Agreed. Oliver Brown has been outstanding - informed, centring women's sport and openly challenging the misogynistic culture that runs through so many of these governing bodies - from the IOC to the depressing but aptly named FA.

Some of the sports reporters on the Times have been seriously inadequate - shilling for Stonewall and giving mediocre male athletes deciding that they're now women a platform to whine about how awful it is that women think they shouldn't be in women's sport. Ironic given the normal high standard of journalism at the Times about all this.

Agree. To quote from the article:

"A New York Times poll released on Saturday found that 79 per cent of respondents, including 94 per cent of Republicans and 67 per cent of Democrats, agreed with the proposition that “trans women” – more helpfully clarified, for the purposes of this debate, as biological males – should not be allowed in women’s sports."

I know the Democrats have been immensely slow on the uptake, but surely it will eventually dawn on them that consistently adopting a policy position that is opposed by four in five voters, including two in three of their own supporters, is not a good idea. At some point, the penny has to drop.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. When this whole trans bollocks showed up on my radar about 6 years ago I thought "These people cannot really believe that! Can they?" and that all things gender would vanish like the morning dew overnight once more people heard of it. What I had not reckoned with is that it is a religious movement and as we know faith is entirely resistant to stuff like truth, reality, proof etc.

Seems relevant to post this here, as the latest episode of Gender:a wider lens featured Shaun Thierry, a former Democratic state representative. It is well worth a listen. She is so engaging and rational, and really shines a light on how this madness took hold in the Democratic Party. She said it wasn't so much that people moved more to the left, but into a progressive abyss.

I'm not a gender idealogue and wasn't saying I in any way agreed with Liew's views. I was just suggesting it's not necessarily illogical or hypocritical for him to support women in Afghanistan and still support transwomen in sport.

The issue of Afghanistan is 100% clear cut to just about everybody but Taliban supporters. The issue of transwomen in sport is 100% clear cut to you, but not to everyone.

If you know transpeople personally and believe they are oppressed in society, many of the issues are less clear cut than they seem if you believe transwomen are just men and should always be treated as such.

Dear Lord, many of us know trans identifying people personally, I don’t know why you get the idea that we don’t.

And we don’t believe TW are men, they factually are men. By definition, only men can be TW. And the issue of single sex sports and spaces, is not about TIM, it’s about men. It’s about the obvious harm caused to women by letting men in those spaces. The internal identity of those men is irrelevant. And yes, as someone who knows a TIM well, the issue is still clear cut.

There's probably not much point in me engaging here, but I will try.

I don't believe everyone who identifies as a transwoman should be in women only prisons and hospitals wards. But I can see why they might feel very vulnerable in male spaces, particularly prisons. That's not women's fault or responsibility, it's about the impact of toxic masculinity. But to me, it is part of why some transwomen are desperate to be treated as women.

The transwomen and transmen I know all seem pretty vulnerable to me. The quite legitimate campaign against self-ID has definitely emboldened transphobia and I've seen an increase in people thinking it's ok to joke at their expense. So I assumed that other people who knew trans identified people personally might feel more understanding of their viewpoint. Which is not the same as agreeing with it.

The thing is, there is a huge gap between recognising that some of the men who have adopted trans identities really do feel vulnerable in male spaces and may need additional protection, and agreeing the solution to this problem is to treat these men as if they were women.

It's the latter that is causing problems.

The brand of trans activism that has been dominant for the last few decades, probably because its simplistic "just another difference" message can be easily slipped into narratives we already accept around race, sexuality and (ironically) sex, has been very successful in creating a false narrative that the only way to support these men is to pretend they are women and let them utilise the existing protections of women, rather than doing something reasonable like looking at who they actually are, what they actually need and putting something new in place designed around that.

When I write it that baldly it's obviously stupid to claim that the only way to support trans identifying men is to agree that they really are in fact a bit more like women than they are men and therefore the right place for them is in with the women, and yet this is so rarely questioned that the arguments are always about how far over the line between man and woman it's ok for a trans woman to go, rather than asking "why on earth are we talking about these men as if they are any more like women than any other men in the first place, and why on earth are we suddenly seeing it as reasonable that people are saying the solution to these men's problems is for society to take back women's opportunities, rights and protections and give them to these men instead?