You're saying this like it's a fact, but it's not. There is no reliable scientific data to support this, only a handful of studies with methodological limitations. So far as I know, one major study has been
announced in 2021 but not yet yielded any results.
This would be correct if this were a debate confined to some turtleneck intellectuals in late-night talking heads shows. But it's not. The whole thing has a lot of context and a lot of baggage that simply can't be ignored.
Let's start with who Riley Gaines is and why she ended up talking about trans people in sports. Gaines is a former college swimmer who in an NCAA competition in March 2022 was
tied for fifth place with a transgender woman named Lia Thomas. The NCAA only had one fifth place trophy in stock and they gave it to Thomas, telling Gaines her trophy would be sent to her via mail and that during the celebration she should stand in sixth place. Gaines was butthurt about this, whining that Thomas had already gotten a trophy the previous competition (where she indeed took first spot) and suspected without any proof that this was done to her because Thomas was transgender.
That's it. That's what happened here. That's why she's talking about a potentially unfair advantage transgender women may have over cisgender women in sports. She said that later, she watched a friend of hers being beaten by Thomas in a competition in which, now get this,
Thomas took sixteenth place over her friend, and she suspected that Thomas wasn't even really trying and her friend lost out unfairly.
Now tell me, if transgender women had such an unfair advantage over cisgender women, how is it that in three competitions, Lia Thomas won once, but took fifth and sixteenth spot respectively? Shouldn't she absolutely rip the other athletes a new one every time she enters a pool?
Here's the full story as told by her side, if you don't believe me.
Now, if this were the end of it, there wouldn't be a story, would there. So Gaines associated herself with Republicans running in the 2022 midterms, appearing in
campaign ads and on
Fox News.
So don't tell me this is about sports or about science. This is about politics. This is about Republicans exploiting a non-issue in an electoral campaign to rile prejudice and hatred among the more bigoted of their voters.
There was an enormous anti-trans campaign by the Republicans in 2022, who believed that by focusing on this issue, they could get a landslide victory in the midterms. They didn't, but for whatever reason, this still won't stop them.
So yeah, people are quite upset about this, because this isn't a rational debate, and was never supposed to be. People aren't stupid - they know we've been down this road before. It's as if in Germany in 1933, somebody walked up the stage and said "We should discuss the detrimental societal effects of allowing Jews to own businesses, let's exchange arguments and not shout at each other all the time. My friend Joseph Goebbels agrees with me, btw."
Yes, some people appear on TV shows, others write books on the topic. There was intellectual Anti-Semitism in the 1930s, too. In fact, the term "Anti-Semitism" was coined to give the anti-Jewish sentiment the appearance of rationality and academic foundation. Let's not kid ourselves. This whole transgender "issue" is the same thing, it's people with ulterior motives driving people dissatisfied with their lives to direct their hate and frustration at a small group of people who are perceived as different and can't defend themselves.
There is no debate to be had here. If you think there is, you've already been caught by the Pied Piper.
kansasreflector.com
