www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/for-young-transgender-runner-racing-wasn-t-the-hardest-thing/ar-AA1Ta4Fa?ocid=Peregrine
This article doesn’t surprise me from WaPo. It is emotionally manipulative story telling from the first word.
What is surprising is that this child’s school coach didn’t seem to have worked out that Garcia was starving and wearing ill fitting shoes. But the coach was fully ‘supportive’.
What is also very clear is this 17 year old male athlete has been fed all the fallacies and believes them and this article repeats them in a tired old cycle:
-The Phelps fallacy.
“But sports were never fair, Verónica thought as she rode a school bus to a track across town. The swimmer Michael Phelps had an unusually long wingspan, and Brittney Griner towered over the WNBA.”
(Reader’s note: Griner has been discussed many times as being a male athlete with a DSD that basketball have allowed through policy to play in the female category.)
-The I am only skinny, and ‘short’ (relatively) so I am not like the other male athletes fallacy.
“I’m a twig,” Verónica told her mother, Traci Brown. “Who could I hurt?”
-The ‘my team mates want me there’ fallacy
“She added three beaded friendship bracelets her teammates had made to commemorate her senior season”
Of course, it is great that this person made friends. However, it is irrelevant to the point that he should not be competing as a female athlete. Yet the article makes much of this team mate support.
-The fallacy that current testosterone level is the only advantage that matters and it cancels out all other advantages.
“Once upon a time, Verónica had had higher testosterone levels than other girls, but she wasn’t sure that was the case anymore”
and
”She hadn’t broken any rules. She was suppressing her testosterone”
This teen has an over reliance on the belief that testosterone suppression makes it acceptable for him to compete as female.
“Verónica watched the interview and felt the girl wasn’t being fair to her competitors. If she wasn’t suppressing her testosterone, as far as Verónica understood it, that meant she did have an advantage.”
-The fallacy that other allowable advantages should balance out male pubertal advantages.
“she knew plenty of girls who had advantages she did not. Some hired personal trainers. Others had the kind of expensive shoes that can help propel runners ahead of their competition. Her own shoes were donated and two sizes too small.”
-The fallacy that only Trump supporters and conservative religious people want to exclude male athletes from female sports competitions.
“Spokane is conservative. At least half of the cars parked outside her apartment complex had Trump stickers, and she knew several girls on the team were Christians. What if they didn’t want to run with her?”
and
““What was it doing on the track?” a tall girl in a hijab said”
-The ‘case by case’ fallacy
“Her situation was different, Verónica thought. She had taken medication, and so she hadn’t retained whatever hormonal advantages she might have had. But the president didn’t seem inclined to consider athletes on a case-by-base basis”
I also wonder if we, as readers, are supposed to feel that malnutrition, ill fitting shoes was supposed to add to the ‘case by case’ situation.
-The ‘not winning therefore no advantage’ fallacy.
“Verónica had beaten Lauren that first race of the season, but she lost her second event of the day — an 800-meter sprint — by 19 seconds. A few weeks later, she ran one of the slowest 400 meters she had ever raced. Meanwhile, the campaign against trans athletes was picking up speed”.
and
“Like 605 girls could easily whoop my ass,” she wrote. “(I’m ranked 606th nationally.) My time, while fast, isn’t some magical number that cisgender girls couldn’t reach.”
-The ‘I am a good sport, those protesting female competitors are poor sports’ fallacy
“Verónica clapped as the announcer read each medal winner. Girls from Bainbridge and Sehome and Cedar Crest took their spots on the podium. When the announcer called Lauren, the crowd roared, and Verónica clapped, but Lauren’s second-place spot remained empty”
There are a few references to the ‘sportsmanship’ ethic throughout this article. As if female athletes should be celebrating being beaten or having to compete with a male athlete and should therefore be shamed because they don’t celebrate this male athlete’s achievements.
-The biology is complicated therefore male athletes should be included in female categories fallacy.
”Verónica longed to ask Lauren what she thought a real girl was. Biology suggests it’s far more complicated than chromosomes”
-The dominating fallacy. (In this case ‘I didn’t dominate the race, but still overtook the female competitor to win’ fallacy)
“I didn’t dominate the race,” she wrote on Instagram. “I only started taking the lead the last 170 meters.”
Reading this article, it just feels like so many adults have let this teen down in so many ways. It is like this teen has been fed a constant stream of misinformation with adults who should be providing balanced and evidenced information being never mentioned. Only mentioned as haters while the enablers were fully supportive and seemed to support the fallacious thinking.
I suspect any neutral voice would have been dismissed by this teen as being the hateful Trump supporters, conservative religious people or transphobic people though. Or … the dreaded ‘middle aged’ haters. Because the journalist seemed to focus on those descriptions as if they were caricatures.
Bluntly, the constant reference to the poverty that this teenager is living in is also emotionally manipulative. His competing would still be unethical if he was from a wealthy family.
Then there is the use of other heavily emotionally laden language, such as ‘danger’, ‘threat’, ‘arrested’. All without pointing out that the science has been established and will not change. Instead it is just an overly emotional article that continues to feed a sense of injustice that these male athletes should be excluded from female events. Not banned from competing, because they could compete in the male events.
The constant portrayal of this male teenager as being weak, malnourished, very poor, frightened with very poor mental health, and testosterone suppressed is very deliberate when the writer then mentions Garcia’s competitors as ‘standing ramrod straight and strong’. It really is a study of hyperbolic drama to distract from evidence and fact.
The irony is that this article presents a testosterone suppressed late aged teen male athlete who is undernourished with poor fitting shoes who still came first in the female category.
Towards the end of the article, Garcia even says this:
”Verónica told herself she had also dedicated herself to excellence. She had trained hard, and she had done so without a bed or good shoes or even enough food”
I feel like the adults in official positions of authority in Garcia’s life failed him- such as his doctor, his coaches etc. The writer of this article picked up the issue but did not point out the obvious. This teenager was an isolated, depressed child who came from a challenging family situation, including the death of a parent figure and without enough food, who is up front about needing to find somewhere to ‘belong’. What a group of adults have done is affirm a gender identity and encourage him to compete as a female athlete.
This writer has emotionally leveraged this, and Garcia’s victimhood of his inclusion being protested, and his horrific personal situation including being raped while homeless, to convince people that that some male people deserve special treatment to allow them to compete as female athletes when they are male people on testosterone suppression.
I hope Garcia has plenty of professional and unbiased mental health support. Because he really must need it to sort through all that has happened.