Emil Franzi and I grew up 15 years and 15 miles apart in the San Fernando Valley, he in lily-white Glendale and I in kill-whitey Pacoima. He grew up conservative and, later, libertarian. I grew up liberal and, now, still liberal. But what I found the oddest was that I grew up totally immersed in (and obsessed with) sports, while he was a car guy and a greaser.
I never lost my love of sports, while Franzi became this wild opera/classical music guy. We tried to talk about it, but didn’t get far. He thought football was fat people knocking each other down while I thought opera was fat people singing at each other in loud voices.
When he passed away, I did a tiny bit of soul searching. When I’m on that conveyor belt to the afterlife, will my devotion to sports be a plus or a minus? You can just see St. Peter and Lucifer sitting side-by-side (but not too close) at the end of the beltway, deciding whether to use that giant flipper to send me one way or the other, like I’m a package at the Amazon distribution center.
Back when I was a kid, there was no doubt. Sports were a force for good. Participants could learn sportsmanship and teamwork, how to be humble in victory and gracious in defeat. Sports brought together people of different races, religions, nationalities and politics.
Of course, as I got older, I learned of the dark side of sports—the high-school and college coaches who illegally recruit, the steroid monsters who use chemicals to gain an illegal edge, the parents who think it’s perfectly OK for their 10-year-olds to be on year-round travel club teams. Nevertheless, I still believe that sport has a net positive effect on the world and that’s why I continue to coach and participate in other ways. While the tales of cheating refs, law-breaking athletes, and bribed coaches have taken their toll over the decades, I still stand up for sport and believe that most people participate in it for the right reasons.
Which brings me to the egregious case of Rachel McKinnon. The transgender McKinnon recently broke world records in cycling, prompting a firestorm of controversy followed by an inevitable backlash by people who just love to shout “transphobia” these days.
Let’s be clear here: Transgender people deserve every protection under the law in the workplace, in housing, in education, in marriage, and in life. They deserve our respect, our patience and our understanding. But, in my opinion (formed by decades in believing in the fairness of sport), they do not automatically deserve to compete against ciswomen. They just don’t.
McKinnon was a male for the first 30 years of life before deciding to transition in 2012. McKinnon’s supporters want us to believe that those first 30 years of testosterone-fueled muscle building don’t count for anything. (Even today, McKinnon is six-feet-tall and weighs 200 pounds.) Cycling champion Victoria Hood, one of the few people in the sport willing to speak out, said, “It’s not complicated. The science is there and it says that it is unfair. The male body, which has gone through male puberty, still retains an advantage that doesn’t go away. They have the right to do sport but not the right to go into any category they want.”
McKinnon bristles at such criticism, claiming that Hood has “as irrational fear of trans women,” then adding, “by preventing trans women from competing or requiring them to take medication, you’re denying their basic human rights.”
Um, no.
McKinnon’s stance is infuriating. She is actually a professor of philosophy at the College of Charleston and yet she shows absolutely no desire to look beyond her own selfish interests.
Not only have I been a sports person my entire life, I have been fighting for women’s equality in sports my entire life. I was raised in a household with a strong mom and six athletic sisters (no brothers). One time, after having coached several consecutive girls’ basketball teams to winning seasons, I got called into the athletic director’s office. He told me, “I’ve got good news for you. The boys coach is quitting, so you can move up to the boys job.” This was a professional educator with a master’s degree in education.
A kid on my basketball team last year said, “It’s kinda strange, Tom, that you’re more of a feminist than any of us are.” (This came after I barred the playing of any music by woman-beater Chris Brown in the team bus.)
McKinnon’s situation is not isolated. Last year, I wrote about two kids in Connecticut who were finishing one-two in all of the sprints in the girls state championships. The two are not undergoing any transition, but have merely stated that they “identify” as female. I’m sorry, but if I was the parent of one of the kids who finished third or fourth and got cheated out of a state championship (and potentially a college scholarship), I’d be heated. Hell, I’m heated as it is.
Jennifer Wagner-Assali, who finished third behind McKinnon last year, perhaps said it best: “I do feel that hard-fought freedoms for women’s sport are being eroded. If we continue to let this happen, there will be men’s sports and co-ed sports, but no women’s sports.”
This article appears in Nov 14-20, 2019.
Oh my, I agree with Tom. Time to re-assess my viewpoint.
It’s terribly sad that a tiny percentage of people have this particular mental illness that makes them uncomfortable with how they are made. It’s also sad that society gender roles are so strict that it adds to their discomfort. But re-ordering our entire society and language and pretending that they are really a different sex is not the way to help them and the inconsistencies of this approach are starting to show.
We should be compassionate, kind, flexible, but also respectful of the truth when dealing with the condition of gender dysphasia. If someone thought they were a dog, you would be compassionate, kind, get them all the help they needed, but you wouldn’t pretend they actually were one and feed them dogfood and lead them around on a leash.
For once I agree with this paper it is not fair, except they are NOT women, they are men. You show me their birth certificate that says otherwise, I might agree. Women need to just step away and not compete when these suito women show up.
Mr. Danehy, allow me to preface, I have four sisters. Needless to say, the three older than me, intelligent, resourceful, with oodles of social smarts became my primer in feminism. Hell, some decades back, in the face of ridicule I dated the intelligent, charming, and lovely (is it PC to use this adjective?) president of the campus NOW, a woman if ever there was one!
But I digress. I agree 100% with your assessment. Biology and the testosterone advantages a developing male body experiences should not be minimized. Transgender folks definitely carry evolution’s gender-bias upper hand where muscular development and efficiency are concerned. To deny it is to deny the fundamentals of human physiology. That said, following in the tradition that acknowledges gender “differences” wherein we have created male/female binary divisions in athletics, nothing says we cannot as a culture open new categories that validate, acknowledge, and make room for cisgender and transgender participants respectively. Allow transgenders their category; co-extensively allow cisgenders theirs. Anything else would be disingenuous.
Be well.
It could be simple, instead of men’s and women’s athletic competitions, make them Y and X competitions based on a person’s sex chromosome.
I identify as a martian, and I cannot begin to tell you the discrimination and trampling of my civil rights that has happened. Why, not even the LBGQT community will not even create a special letter, or welcome us into the group, for those who feel the same as me, even though the number of us who identify as martian is roughly equal to half of the trans community, that is 0.05% rather that 0.1% of the population. There are no martian rights, protections, pride parades, nor even recognition of our founding member, Orson Welles. This will not stand! I was made this way…..I think.
Transgender is not a protected class so they have the same rights as any other individual. Being transgender does not change your DNA.
If a transgender woman competes and wins an event; it is still a woman that wins the event.
I feel Tom’s pain. But the evidence doesn’t add up to the same conclusion he has.
As a liberal he might want to study the facts and science rather than taking one example and extrapolating from there.
Tom is a journalist with access to research that is beyond the average persons. He should take advantage of that.
Lying Tom Wrote: “Let’s be clear here: Transgender people deserve every protection under the law in the workplace, in housing, in education, in marriage, and in life. They deserve our respect, our patience and our understanding. But..”
Everything before the “but” in meaningless.
This is basically the same argument that white racists in the south used:
African Americans deserve every protection under the law in the workplace, in housing, in education, in marriage, and in life. They deserve our respect, our patience and our understanding. But, they shouldnt attend the same schools as Caucasians or eat in the same restaurants.
You want to show us how woke you are by saying they deserve protection under the law for everything but then in the same breath advocate denying their rights.
It is beautiful watching liberals like Lying Tom eat their own tail on this issue. The LGBTQ community destroyed Martina Navratilova, who was a trailblazing advocate for gay rights.
Rachel McKinnon is either a male or female. Pick one, biology or self-identification.
If it is self-identification then she and every other person who identifies as a woman should be allowed to play female sports, otherwise you have classified them as second class females. As for the kids in Connecticut, they are no different from Rachel McKinnon, they just havent had any surgery or hormone therapy, or does surgery and hormone therapy make one a woman?
If it is biology then she is a he and should treated as such.
Cant have it both ways.
Lying Tom wrote: “This came after I barred the playing of any music by woman-beater Chris Brown in the team bus.”
You’re a hero. Are you off of the Marvin Gaye train as well? He was an infamous wife and girlfriend beater.
Motown? Gone. Motown enabled a culture of domestic abuse among its performers.
I am guessing that you dont watch any professional or college football and basketball since almost every team has perpetrators of sexual assault and domestic violence on their rosters.
Just another hypocritical virtue signaler.
We just watched a black NFL player pull the helmet off a white quarterback and beat him over the head with it. Yet nobody has said “hate crime.” We have a variety of laws based upon the perpetrators race. How did that happen? Misguided guilt to assuage the past. Dr Rodney King said it best, Can we all just get along?