August 20, 2023 • 51 mins
James and Mia talk about how transphobes have targeted sport as a way to advance their agenda and how they’ve managed to persuade cycling’s governing body to effectively ban trans women from elite competition.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Wonderful good podcast introduction boys the West part of the podcast.
Maybe that could just be hor retro, Hi Mayre, how
are you we're doing a podcast?
Speaker 2 (00:17):
I've been feed a the chess world has decided that
my chess powers are too strong, and I'm now I'm
now being discriminated against. It's a good time, very excited. Yeah,
having a great time with my biological advantage at chess.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Yeah, that's right. Well, you know, you've got to reach
those those chess pieces somehow, and it's old to do
with your hip angle.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Trying to my wrists are too powerful. This allows me
to write down my moves faster than my opponent, thus
giving me an advantage on the clock. I can also
reach the clock faster. Incredible stuff happening in the world
world of chess.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Not just chess, sadly, but the fact the Turfs have
got their clause, I guess, into many sports, which is
what we are talking about today. Specifically, I thought we
could talk about how the Turfs were in cycling, Yeah,
because that is the thing they have been trying to
do for some time. It's a thing I've written about before,
(01:23):
and hopefully a thing I'll be able to write about again,
and unless the cycling press just kind of gives itself
over to the turf, which doesn't seem to have done,
to be fair, generally, generally dicycling press, I think it's
fair to say, has lacked an intersexual analysis of anything.
But they've been better on this than I had expected,
(01:44):
especially the outlets which are not run by white sis
heat dudes in Boulder, which, to be fair, is a minority. Yeah, strange,
that odd? How odd? But yeah, shouting in particular to
Outside for including a gear guide to the gear the
cop used at the twenty sixteen RNC, which could perhaps
(02:05):
be included as the most tone deaf article ever written. Yeah, yeah,
incredibly comment and then to leave it up in twenty
twenty to not like cover your tracks.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
You know, this is one of those. This is one
of those like when the workers take Boulder like no
biker will go hungry moments.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Ah Yeah, Boulder, Colorado is a special place for bad things.
I won't say bad things to happen because they had
not a format shooting, but like social Yeah, intersexual analysis
has not made it to Bolder savvy. Great, great shame.
But when I'm talking about Boulder today, we're starting out
with a little discussion of cyclo cross. So, cyclo cross.
(02:48):
Are you familiar with cyclo cross? Mire? No, okay, so
it's a fundamentally silly sport in which I've competed, of course.
It's it's when competitors race skinny tired drop bar bikes
on off road course. Yeah, I would please google preps. Okay,
(03:09):
I'm going to send you one one cyclic cross video.
It is iconic for people who are who are at home.
The videos called is joey Okay, we can we can
have mere reacting live.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
The first picture that I saw when when I googled
this is two people not riding on the two people
carrying their bikes.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Yes, so this is a thing. Right, you get really
good at cycling, you train your entire life and then
and then in cyclic costs are parts where you have
to get off. Unless you're very talented. You can hop
the barriers. I've tried that with mixed success or you
can also you can ride the stairs, but you do
have to be a bit of a boss. So there
(03:54):
are barriers and challenges which you have to get off.
It's called field riding in Dutch, which is about right
writing have you watched the video will include a link
in the note to everyone else of it. Did you
(04:14):
watch it with the sound on?
Speaker 2 (04:16):
Yeah? Okay, I'm trying to figure out how to describe
this effectively. What has happened is this guy Okay, so
these guy's like going at full speed and then while
the bike is still moving, he's attempting to get off
the bike before he gets to this barrier, and he
like he just goes. He does not get offentime. The
bike's going too fast and he like he is he's
(04:39):
like sprawling, but in mid aires he's flying off his
bike over this barricade thing.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
EDGs. It is incredible. Yeah, all the time people are
shouting his name. And that's what you're supposed to do.
You're supposed to dismount and just carry the speed. You
kind of you can thwing your leg through a thing,
your leg to outside and then carry a speed and
jump and then hop back on it. It's a very
strange sport, right, And a big part of cyclo cross
(05:07):
is heckling. So the crowd will heckle you, right, they will.
They'll do all kinds of things like often like crowd
hand ups are a big thing in cycle across. So
like I've been handed dollar bills.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Yeah, what is happening in the sport?
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Oh yeah, it's very funny. And the moment, you're not
compective if you're just grabbing ship off the spectators. So like,
like I remember racing in Las Vegas at night. There
was a race in Las Vegas at night, and I
ain't gonna win right like then, so I'm just grabbing
dollar bills and shoving them down my like like people
(05:48):
will hand you like drinks. I've had beer hand ups,
donut spake, and one notable occasion a cookie that was
not just a normal cookie, which you should fucking disclose
to someone before you get to Yeah, that was a
bad day. I also had a pretty rough traumatic brain
injury that day. Oh no, yeah, I'd already sustained brain injury.
(06:10):
And the cookie. I thought my blood sugar was low,
so I was like, yeah, I'm going to get that
cookie and it's going to be great. It was not.
It wasn't the blood sugar. It it was affected my cognition.
So cyclo cross is fun and silly, and heckling is
part of it, but like heckling occurs within a certain
certain bounds right, Like you're not supposed to be mean,
(06:31):
it's just supposed to be funny, like everyone's supposed to laugh.
So I think in twenty twenty one everyone was rather
it's funny signed as a part of it too, right.
But in twenty twenty one we saw some shit that
was distinctly not funny when a group called Save Women's
Sport posted up at the race and held what were,
as you can probably guess by the name, transphobic science
(06:53):
throughout the race. So a lot of people were upset
by this, and by their own admission, nobody wanted them there.
One woman told the protesters your shiit feminism isn't welcome here,
which I think would be a great T shirt. If
she's listening, please will license your T shirt from you.
(07:14):
And they were pretty rarely rejected by most of the community,
which is great, But the bigotry they bought really wasn't
a surprise to anyone who'd been paying attention to online
discourse for a while, especially with respect to cycling. The
harassment of trans cyclists has been escalating for years. For
at least five or six years now, the governing body
(07:35):
USA Cycling has known about this and chosen to have done
nothing to stop it. Right, So this particular focus on
cycling came about in twenty eighteen when anti transcardras began
to focus on the sport because of the success of
a woman named Veronica Ivy. She wasn't called Veronica Ivy
at the time, and she was using she had a
different name then, but that's her name now, so I'm
(07:56):
going to use that name out of respect for her
choice for that to be her name. She she won
a world championship in the women's thirty five to forty
four spring category. Now, like, I have no disrespect at
all for masters athletes. It's great. I'm glad people are
out there exercising. This is not the same as an
Olympic gold medal, right, like the big I would I
(08:20):
mean people may disagree. The biggest determinant of your ability
to win a master's track cycling gold medal is the
amount of free time you have to exercise and the
amount of money you have to buy fast gear and
get to the event. Right, wait, what what is like?
The difference between masters is it's competitions for older people.
So it's so in cycling you have juniors and there
(08:43):
are various you know, obviously the eight year olds don't
compete with eighteen year olds, but up to eighteen is
juniors espoirs is eighteen to twenty three. We use a
French name because you know, you want to be all
what is what is what? Jesus Christ? Yeah, this French
name under twenty three, right, you can call it if
you want it to be an angler phile. And then
(09:06):
from there you go into the elite competition. Elite competition
is it's actually eighteen and like an eighteen year old
could compete in an elite competition, so could a fifty
year old, right, But it's the highest level of competition.
And then you get protected age categories again once you
get to thirty five, so thirty five to forty four,
(09:26):
forty five to fifty four going ten year blocks, right,
and that's for people who are only of that age.
Now it's the older you get, the less competitive it gets,
just because more people will fewer people will be racing. Right,
But thirty five plus masters sometimes they call it baby masters,
is not. You don't have a significant decrease in your
(09:48):
endurance performance at thirty five, so like some of these
people are still very good, and that's why they call
it baby masters, I guess. But like track cycling is
not a big sport to begin with, right, that's going
around in circles on an indoor velodrome. Master's track cycling,
it's a smaller sport. And then I know some excellent
masters track cyclists who just don't care to go to worlds. Right.
They've been professional cyclists, are very high level amateur cyclists,
(10:11):
and once you reach your mid forties, some people don't
care to travel and spend that money and do that competition. Right.
San Diego has a really great track scene. Some people
who I know very well have recently won multiple world
championships on the track, like, we have a very thriving scene,
but not all of those people even care to go
to La to race worlds like, let alone travel across
(10:33):
the world. Right, So it doesn't necessarily truly mean the
people who win Masters are the best athletes in the
world for their age group. And certainly I wouldn't say.
There are lots of things that make this competition unfair.
One of them is how much track bikes cost, how
much track time costs, and how much travel costs to
get to the event. But of course it didn't matter
to these people, right, What mattered is that a transfoman
(10:54):
had won, and she became the center of the culture war.
And this was really at least the first one that
I was aware of, a sort of instance of someone
a trans person winning a very a notable event in cycling.
And maybe trans people have been competing in elite races
(11:17):
in cycling for forty years, like Wally Cameron was the
first trans woman to race in a World Cup, and
Money's been racing for a while, and no one said shit,
no one cared, right, But around twenty eighteen, the culture
war around trans people was becoming heightened, and so people
got mad about her wing the race. And since then
(11:39):
there's been this steady increase in transphobic sentiment towards by Crass.
It's really the sort of leading voice in this has
been former probke Grace at Inger Thompson. She's been joined
by a few amateur women in various fields voicing their
feelings about the participation of trans women. And Thompson has
made a lot of statements, some of which I'll, you know,
(12:01):
choose not to share with you. You can google them
if you want, but most of them will be like
she misgenderous people all the time, right, that that's what
you can find her on Twitter, misgendering people. And I
think that that is kind of the giveaway that this
isn't necessarily about sport, right. And I think that it's
really important that people, regardless of where you stand on sport,
(12:25):
understand that this is a wedge and it's a wage
that's designed to push trans people out and away from
femininity in a way, from inclusion.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
Yeah. I think one of the reasons why it's important
is that it's a way of focusing the discourse like
on trans people, on like really really weird interpretations of
physical characteristics. Yeah, and this is something that you can
(12:55):
use to sort of like, you know, this, this is
the wedge that you can use to sort of like
tear this sort of issue open. It's been really really
effective at this, and it's also been like, you know,
it's something that's sort of like vaguely plausible, plausibly deniable,
and it also plays on a really kind of effective
branding strategy that these people had, which is that, like,
(13:17):
you know, if people remember what feminism was like in
like the twenty tens, it was almost entirely about you know,
not just in the twenty tens, like you even sort
of previous to this, right, Like the notion that like
women are weaker than men was something that was like
like broadly considered to be sexist, Like that was not
(13:37):
a feminist thing that was like like women are weaker
than men. And then you know, you get you're when
you're getting into people complaining about like like trans women,
like being on Jeopardy or like this shit that's happening
in chests that we're going to talk about later, it's
like okay, Like if you go back in time to
before sort of trans arrangement syndrome set in, like and
you told someone that in the future, this person is
(14:00):
going to be arguing that like like like trans women
have a biological advantage in Jeopardy because men are smarter
than women. They'd be like, what the fuck are you
talking about? Like this person is like a neo Nazi.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Yeah, it's oh that women are only defined by their
ability to bear children, right, and and then that is
your sole characteristic and value as a woman, Like yeah,
and like like this.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Is and this is something that you know if you
go back to like Simon before God I hate French
it's really a true it's a truly terrible language.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
That's the official stance of this podcast, Anti French Action.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Yeah yeah, but like you know, I mean, you know,
like you actually read the Second Sex, and like in
the Second Sex is talking about you know, literally like
her famous line it's like women, like no one is
born a woman like women is made right because it's
it's it's it's it's it's a social process, not a
biological one. And then you know, and and but because
there was like a kind of cultural victory for feminist
(15:00):
where it suddenly became really really difficult to be a
mainstream person and like call yourself, like call yourself an
anti feminist, Like all of these people who believe all
of the same shit that like phylish Lafley did, like
have to relabel themselves feminists. And you know, and sports
is the sports the thing they picked to do that
because sports is the like it's the area they can
(15:21):
pick where they can, like with some plausible deniability, start
doing all of this like oh, women are inherently weaker
than men and have to be protected from men like
shit again.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
Yeah yeah, and it's yes, it's very much like un
recontstractive stuff that we would have seen if not feminist
twenty years ago. Now sadly it's being advanced by people
laying claimed to feminism. I guess yeah. So in the
most recent Phyclocross Nationals, trans athlete Austin Cillips finished third
(15:54):
at the event, local John Browann gun club members had
attended to step in and protect transathletes what's governing body
wouldn't And it was actually a really I mean, what
you saw was a lot of discourse online about Austin
quote unquote blocking uh and SIS woman athlete, and then
you saw like a lot of people sort of saying
(16:15):
that and like SIS women had been I guess, like
you know that Austin's inherent biological advantage I'm using heavy
scare quotes here had allowed her to come third. She
got beaten by two SIS girls, right, Like this is.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Always the thing like that. There was one of these
in skateboarding where like this turf skateboarder was like yelling
about how she'd been beaten by a trans woman and
you look at the results. She lost to an eight
year old. She was outplaced by an eight year old,
like shot the fuck up bullshit, like.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
And a lot of the discuss about like Austin quote
unquote blocking someone like I don't know, but to me,
it very clearly seemed to come from people who hadn't
watched many other bicycle competitions, right, Like that's what we do.
You push on each other, you lean on each other.
Like if you didn't do that, people would follow over
a whole lot more. It's a race, you're trying to
get to the finish line first. But she didn't do
(17:10):
anything that anyone else wouldn't have done. And at the
time Turfs kind of tried to make this a big
deal but were unsuccessful. And it was not really until
Austin won a race in New Mexico, a big race
tour of the Healer, that it became again, Like it
wasn't twenty eighteen a very big deal? Right? So one
(17:33):
of the key leaders, as I said, is Inga Thompson.
Inga's a very accomplished cyclist, There's no doubt about that, right.
She's a Bicycle Hall of Fame inductee, five time national champion,
three time Olympic team member, a Tour de France firm,
and a podium finisher, a three time silver medallist at
the U Show World Championships, but I think she's arguably
more famous now for her anti trans bigotry, and she's
(17:57):
appeared she tried to encourage cyclist to take a knee
in protest at the ucis transgender inclusion Yeah, which like.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Fox News finally finds something that they're for.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
Yeah, they've finally. She was actually removed from her role
on the board of a France based American protein for
her statements there. I thought that their statement is kind
of interesting. They said, if shared in the absence of politics,
her knowledge and experience would benefit many in advanced cycling
for everyone. However, she has decided to dedicate her time
(18:34):
to excluding people that otherwise currently eligible to compete and
UCI events. She is also tempted to use our team
as a platform for political activity, which like is a
very neutral stance, but it's also it's also like it's fine, right, like, like,
our cycling team isn't here to hate trans people. If
you're going to use it for hating trans people, please
(18:55):
go somewhere else like it. It doesn't you don't have
to like take a hugely radical stance to be like that,
this isn't a hate platform for hate speech. Like like
go away, and that they added to be clear, Miss
miss Thompson is entitled to her opinion's an advocacy, but
her methods and personal attacks are inconsistent with ciniska's mission
to advanced opportunities for women. These methods, well documented on
(19:19):
Miss Thompson's social media presence, include dehumanization of transgender people,
spreading misinformation, demagoguery, and personal attacks on anyone who opposes
her views spellow alert that includes me. She doesn't like
me it all, I don't don't be mean to trans people,
don't missgender my friends. So I did think it was
very funny that like this team isn't like the like
(19:40):
I don't knowe that like the woke team for woke people.
They're just trying to get along with helping women cycle
and they can't do that if they're one of their
board members is so consumed by hate that no no
one wants to have anything to do with it. So
in the wake of this protest, the twenty twenty one
Save Women's Sport protest fliletted they're unofficial with USA Cycling,
(20:03):
published an open letter calling for the resignation of the
organization's CEO and the safe sport coordinator Kelsey Rickson, who's
responsible for preventing hate speech and bullying. They gather one
hundred and five signatures from racists and other cyclists in
support of their demands, and a day after they sent
the letter, De Martini announced he was stepping down. So
(20:25):
he has a bit of a failure of just like
there's a statement he made an interview where he said
it would be different if our athletes were going to
be affected. When he was talking about bands for trans
athletes in interscholastic sports, he said, we don't believe they
will be which look in technical and in technical sense
(20:45):
because cyclists could be for clubs, not schools. They might
not have done. But if you think that a ban
on trans kids playing at school isn't going to affect
participation in trans athletes in all sports everywhere, either completely
myopic or bearing your bigotry. He claimed he was quoted
out of context, but it was part of a pretty
(21:06):
big block quote. I don't see how that could be
taken out of context. They did say at that time
that they're against any legislation limits trans inclusion. It's worth
pointing out that cycling has a body as to all
Olympic sports. It should prevent hate speech, bigotry, and bullying, right,
And that's called Safe Sport set up in twenty seventeen,
(21:26):
and that was following what happened at USA Gymnastics, right,
which was widespread sexual abuse of athletes. People I'm sure
will remember that Safe Sport, I feel fairly confident in
saying has completely failed in preventing abuse, preventing harassment, preventing bullying.
What it has done is is perhaps given a legal
(21:47):
shield to governing bodies, so has prevented them getting sued.
But it's done nothing to prevent this kind of bullying,
which is why athletes and the community have had to
taken upon themselves to do that. Right, Like, if there's
one thing you should expect a governing money to do
to make sure everyone feels safe at races. But people
(22:07):
were legitimately worried about racing in areas where they knew
there were a lot of not just turfs, but like
groups like the Proud Boys right, who have kind of
hung their hat on transphobia. I know people who didn't
go to races in areas where they were worried about that.
I know people who, like you know it went out
of went to an effort every day to drive a
(22:27):
different way back to their hotel at races because they're
worried about like people genuinely felt unsafe doing something that
no one should feel unsafe doing, which is playing. So
as I said, you know who won't make you feel unsafe?
Speaker 2 (22:49):
I I'm going to say the products and services, and
then I'm gonna.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
They will wrap you up in a cocoon like blanket
of gold and coin and meal kits. How can do
you not feel so safe when you're surrounded by Reagan coins?
Speaker 2 (23:07):
No one fact checked.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
This is a fact check free zone. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
The following and preceding thirty seconds have not been fact checked. Right,
Please enjoy these adverts, and we are back and we're
(23:31):
still talking about turfs. So says Women's Sports, which is
this organization that put on the protests, presents itself as
an organic reaction to the participation of trans women, who
it repeatedly misgenders in women's categories. Claimed that several races
in the cycle across national championships privately contacted the organization
to express concerns, but only one, Evie Edwards, competed under
(23:53):
the SWF Team banner. SWS at the time was not
a nonprofit, so it was relatively hard to find out
what exactly their financial ties to various other transphobic and
right wing groups were. It's registered in Minnesota as a business,
but it appears to be assault. At the time, again,
it was a sole prop run by someone called best Steltzer.
(24:15):
The both Ev Edwards and SWS used the race to
aggressively fundraise for their campaign. Steltzer, for instance, at the time,
was making three hundred and eighty five bucks per month
on Patreon by quote creating awareness of males invading female spaces.
Page has been taken down since then. She turfed too
close to the Sun. She also received donations on her
(24:39):
venmo page, which is very funny because I don't think
she realized her venmo page was public. Checked it out
in the judge. Yeah, that there is no there There
was no distinction made between advocacy spending and personal spending
on that account, I will say, And she was taking
advocacy donations and you know, making emoji purchases it on
(25:01):
a venmo at the time. I think maybe since has
made it private, but this.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Is something that like if you ever want to just
like I don't know if someone just like appears in
the news and they suck, like, go try to find
them on venmo because people just don't realize that stuff.
And oh yeah, you know, people like people recently caught
like I think we talked about Clarence Thom.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
I think it was.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Clarence Thomas people amazing paying his staffers on venmo, Like
you can find a bunch of very funny stuff because
people people are bad at doing crime.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Now, yeah, I cannot tell you how many people, uh
literally had things on their venmo like travel to DC
and like like on January sixth, right like ven boing
each other for like revolution tacos after they divated the
Capitol smart stuff and no, no, please keep doing that
(26:00):
if you're planning transphobia or coups. So much of this
awareness that save women's sports awareness, Like I think if
you're ever donating to someone who's promoting quote unquote awareness
of anything, there should be a large red flag. It's
an extremely nebulous concept that very ready does anything to
help anyone. But much of this awareness seems to be
tied to pre standard right wing anti trans talking points
(26:23):
and not the many dozens, maybe hundreds of instances were
trans and sists women happily compete alongside each other, have
a nice time, do exercise, go home, and don't engage
in any bigotry. In the past, just WS has worked
with far right organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the
Family Research Council to prepare a guide to quote help
parents understand the transgender issue. Again, if you're framing the
(26:45):
existence of other people as an issue, you're not that
far from flaming it as a question, are you. Yeah,
I'm impressed to the self awareness avoided the transgender question,
but only by you know, using the thesaurus to reframe
it as an issue. I guess the guide refers to
the transgender trend quote unquote and repeatedly calls trans women men.
(27:10):
They of course also you know Steltzer In particular, it
appears anti abortion rallies, anti marriage equality rallies, things like that. Right,
this is part of a wider space of painting bigotry.
It's not just about support. Cyclists have taken it upon
themselves to protect trans riders. So access of solidarity, of
range for blocking SWS protesters and national championships announces refusing
(27:33):
to allegedly refusing to mention races on the team.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
That's pretty funny.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
Yeah, it is pretty funny. Also, this mo money Cameron
has this organization called Ride, which is let trans kids ride,
and money Mate sees wristband which like a trans flag,
the Transpride flag, and like one of my friends won
the biggest race in the US. It's cis guy with
his Transpride ristband on, which, you know, a little thing.
(28:02):
But also like it's it's nice to see people show up, Like, yeah,
it's nice to see and like it's rare that you'll
go to a race when people won't be you won't
see a few people wearing that like in pro men,
pro women, you know, both, like it's there are overwhelmingly
people don't give a fuck. They're just happy if you're
enjoying riding bikes. It's not like it's a big sport.
(28:24):
You know. The real threat cycling is all of us
getting killed by people in Tesla's playing pong like it's
not it's not trans women. But unfortunately this solidarity hasn't
extended to the governing body, so two years after this
initial protest right, the UCI effectively banned all trans women
from participating in elite level cycling. This happened just a
(28:48):
few weeks before the World Championships. Like, I have friends
who had to cancel their flights. Yeah, it was the
most bungled, fucked up pseudo science kind of half fast,
Like it was just a mess. The whole thing was
a fucking mess. They had an extraordinary meeting in August,
(29:09):
just a few weeks for the World Championships, and like
people previously had to have a to have a submit
blood numbers to show a testosterone level to compete, right,
which is a thing lots of governing bodies have been
doing for a while now. They had certified people like
weeks before this, they'd be like, yeah, you're good to
go for another year, and then that psyche, No you're not.
(29:29):
You can't compete ever again. And like this is people's jobs, right,
this is their livelihood, it's how they pay rents. It's
also like being an elite cyclist is hard. It is
most of your life, right, Like you're you've got to
sleep or you got to eat, right, You've got to
train all the fucking time. You can't go out. You're
going to be resting when you're not training to take
all that away from someone with a click of the
(29:50):
fingers and bringing no consultation for them. It's incredibly cruel
and the U see, I'll just read their statement because
I think there's a couple of things in it we
should pick apart. Obviously, you can't take woying for it
being inherently transphobic. From now on, female transgender athletes who
have transitioned after quote male puberty will be prohibited from
(30:11):
participating women's events on the UCI International Calendar in all
categories in the various disciplines. Notably, they also said it's
also impossible to rule out the possibility that biomechanical factors
such as the shape and arrangement of the bones in
their limbs, may constitute a lasting advantage for female transgender athletes.
And yeah, it's yeah, there's a lot going on there, right,
(30:35):
Like they use female where where most people would use women.
The barrier they set is to rule out any possibility
of an advantage, right, which is a very high barrier.
That's like a kind of guilty and to prove it
innocent situation, right, Like I'd also like the arrangement of
the bones in my limbs changed significantly when I was
racing bikes because I broke them all the fucking time.
(30:58):
Such such a strange category to choose. Also, the requirement
that you transition before puberty. That's not the same as
taking puberty blockers, right, They're requiring that they're taking homemones
before puberty, like like eleven or twelve, yeah, which.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
Which is just also now illegal in an enormous number
of states, like.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
Yeah, and even most from what I understand, most gender
affirming care takes the approach of taking puberty blockers rather
than yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
Well this is this is sort of like I mean,
this is sort of the disaster that's been happening in
the last like four or five years on this, which
is that like like taking puberty blockers was the compromise position. Yes,
Like that was the position that was taken because people
thought it was too dangerous to like let kids do HRT,
(31:44):
which it's not like it's completely fine. In fact, it's
actually like you know, you're you're going to go through
puberty anyways, right, You're like like if if you are
in a human body, you were doing uncontrolled puberty, and
that is less safe than doing a controlled really which
is what you know, doing like doing it urty when
you're a child, is yeah, but yeah, the young vice
(32:06):
position was like, oh well we're not we're gonna do
those will do puberty blockers, and then like everyone went
insane about puberty blockers. And now like even the compromise
position has been sort of like you know, I mean
like we're away that, and it's like okay, like you know,
but then and then like and then you know, like
now and then having done this right, and it's like, oh, well,
now you can set up all of these rules that
(32:27):
are like require you to have done a thing you've
now made illegal. It's like this is.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Great, Yeah, exactly right. You now have a rule that
basically bans almost anyone from participation, like you have to
begin transitioning at eleven. It's also very nebulous, like male puberty,
like like what does that mean? What what point are
you defining you have been through male puberty? Like are
we going to after able to submit that fucking test
(32:52):
of stone numbers from when they were eight?
Speaker 3 (32:54):
Like yeah, like what like it's it's just man, it's
what it is, right, it's you can't ever transition satisfactorily enough.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Yeah, or like, for example, I don't know, so, like,
let's say you you are onlike let's say you don't
start hormones until you're like twenty four, but but you
rearrange the bones in your body, it just allows you
you now have feminine bone arrange.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
Bit does this now allows you to cycle gender affirming
orthopedic surgery? Yeah? And like also this, and I want
to get into this a little bit because it completely
obfuscates or ignores I guess what we know to be
(33:42):
true that there is not a binary puberty process, because
there is not. Humans don't exist in a binary sex,
nor do they exist in binary genders. Right, So, I
think probably the best example of this would be Marie
Jose Martinez Patigno. If people aren't familiar with her, obviously
Google is right there for you. But she was dismissed
(34:03):
from a Spanish Olympic team in nineteen eighty six for
failing the gender test. She's publicly shamed for being like
a secret male. She loses her fiancee, she loses her funding,
she loses almost everything. She fought and won a successful
court battle, illustrating the fallacy of this binary gender approach.
But she's not a trans woman, to be clear, she's
an intersexu woman who has androgen insensitivity syndrome, but she
(34:28):
was able to They were using chromosome typing, right, Like
like you'll often this is a thing that you'll still
see turf trotting out right, something that was outdated in
nineteen eighty six, that like xx or x y, that
is that's not a binary that fits the entirety of
the human species.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Yeah, there's like a lot of people for a lot
of other different.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
Kinds of yeah, mosaicism. Like it's again like I get it,
you didn't you're not a biologist. That's fine, It's okay
to shut the fuck up if you don't understand something.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
Yeah, that's one of those things that's sucks because it's
like like I wish these people had decided to like
try to build airplanes based off of like pre Deutnean
or something work, because it's like like there's no consequence
for them for not understanding biology. But it's like I
don't know, like like if if you, if you, if
you're trying to argue that like general relativity doesn't exist,
like your you're like your satellite is gonna fall on you.
(35:20):
But this this is the one thing where you can
just like you can say ship that it's not even
like like people people make a joke it's like high
school biology. It's like it's not it's just like elementary
school biology. And it's not right, like like YouTube biology,
isn't it That's what it is?
Speaker 1 (35:35):
Yeah, yeah, yes, exactly, yeah, but unfortunately the consequences of
people who are not them, Yeah, and that's hugely unfortunate. Right,
Like even we see like Cassa Semenia when a court
case this month or last month, like allowing her to
compete again, like we found time and again that this
notion of a binary sex is as nonsense to call
(35:58):
as emotion of a binary gender, and yet we continue
to try and force people into these different competitions. I
just want to read a statement that Austin made and
like it's very hard not to see this as them,
specifically seeing Austin winning a big stage race in New
Mexico and going like, right, we can't fucking have that,
Like as soon as trans women win stuff, Right, it's
(36:20):
fine if they come and then don't win, but as
soon as they win stuff, And again, if she had
this inherent massive biological advantage, she would have won everything
which hasn't happened. She said, I'm devastated by the UCI
decision to renege on the policy and framework it previously
set out for inclusion. My journey in professional racing has
allowed me to see the world, build lifelong friendships, and
(36:41):
most importantly, give my absolute or something I find deeply fulfilling.
No one should be denied the opportunity to chase that
same joy that I and others have found through racing,
which I think is great, and I think it's important
to lift up her voice in this and other transathlete voices.
In theory, there is what's called open category, which is
(37:01):
the men's category. The problem is that there are no
open races and that this category, like, if you line
up as a trans woman in the fucking open category,
you're being very clearly othered, right, yeah, you're being like
you're Some of them also will have women's licenses, like
(37:22):
it's not clear what men's category they can race in.
But more importantly, I think, as Chris Mosia pointed out,
people will be familiar as Chris as the first trans
athlete tend Olympic trials in the US. The open category
contradicts both international Olympic Committee guidelines on Fairness and Inclusion
and extensive research at states trans women do not have
an inherent advantage in sport. Chris is a good follow
(37:44):
on Twitter, it's the Chris Mosia, but it contradicts even
like the IOC. Again, not like on the bastions of wokeness,
people who sent the Olympics for the Nazis have a
better policy see them this. And yet cycling has chosen
to go above and beyond, And in large part I
(38:06):
can't not see that as because of the attention paid
to this by people who do not give a fuck
about cycling. Yeah, because they found a wedge, and because
our community has generally been inclusive, Like even after this
at the World Championships there were people with trans flags
the course, you know, like World Championship or which trans
women could not compete, advocating for inclusion right it was
(38:30):
in Glasgow. And as a rule, the sport I think
has been accepting. Like I've never cycled, not known there
being trans people in cycling, and I've cycled a lot,
but this has allowed trans people to thrive. And when
trans people started describing these fucking bigots decided to make
this a wedge issue and that's why it's happening here,
(39:02):
but it's also fucking happening in chess. So do you
want to do you want to talk about chess?
Speaker 4 (39:06):
Man?
Speaker 5 (39:07):
This is this is insane, Okay. The weird part about
the chess one is like I I don't know, I had.
This is not something that anyone in chess was like
talking about.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
Like chess has like a lot of incredibly weird and
bizarre political stuff going on, but like they're I had,
I don't know, Maybe I just missed it, or maybe
it was just like a part of the chess discourse
I wasn't following, But like I I don't know, really
truly weirdly just seemingly out of nowhere. I don't know
(39:39):
what is going on with this seemingly out of nowhere
fee Day, which is like the International Chess Federation released
this statement, released this like policy that says that like
it has a lot of weird stuff. It effectively sets
up fee Day as like what I can only describe
as a gender counsel, where like, if you want to
(40:01):
like change your gender, you have to like submit it
to fee Day, and then fe DA gets to decide
what gender you are so great, great things happening here.
And then also for some reason, Okay, so chess has
had this thing for a while where chess has like
(40:21):
there are like women's sections for stuff, and there's a
lot of some weird stuff going on here. So like
there's the regular title like grand Master, there's also like
a women's grandmaster thing which has different qualification, is slightly different,
and this was this was set up basically because like
the guys who play chess are insane, Like I've talked
(40:41):
about this some of the Bobby Fisher episodes right, like
they're like most of the most famous chess players in
history are like utterly deranged Neo Nazis or like like
people who are even weirder than Neo Nazis, like like
like unreconstructed like nineteen seventeen Zon artists, like people like that,
(41:02):
like just people with with like truly truly deeply weird
political ideologies that are like unbelievably right wing, and you know,
and like part of part of what like happens here
is that like just chess in general is like unfathomably sexist,
Like it's it's really really bad, and you know, like
(41:26):
their solution to this effectively was like to create this
like kind of parallel like women's infrastructure, which kind of
works and kind of hasn't in a lot of ways.
And you know, like part of what's going on is
just like, okay, so a lot of girls, like young
(41:47):
girls play chess, but there's this bottleneck that happens around
when you're like thirteen or fourteen, while this is twelve
to thirteen, So there's fourteen where like the number of
girls playing chess just like collapses, right, And the reason
that happens is because boys are fucking dog.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
Shit Like this is this is this is like literally.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
What's happening, right, is like you have a bunch of sexist,
like really sexist boys. And then the product of this
is that because there's so many fewer like women who
played chess and there are men you play chess, like,
there's just like, for example, like there's way less like
women who are like really high rated chess players. And
that's because there's just like like the barrier of institutional
sexism to like become a woman who's really good at
(42:28):
chess is so high. And then yeah, okay, so so
this this is the sort of background, So like there
are these separate like women's like tournaments and stuff like that,
and so fee DA, which is the Chess Federation, released
this thing where Okay, so they say a few things.
(42:53):
One is that, okay, the the the big one is
that if you, like, if you are a trans woman,
you cannot play in official fee Day events or women
until fee Day does something. And it's not entirely clear
what that is.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
So is it like a testosterone level you have to submit?
Speaker 2 (43:16):
Wait, literally, I'm just gonna read this sentence because it's
it's utterly unclear what is going on here. In the
event that the gender was changed from male to female,
the player has no right to participate in official fee
Day events or women until free Day's decision is made.
Such decision should be based on further analysis and should
(43:37):
and shall be taken by the fee Day Council at
the earliest possible time, but no longer than within a
two year period. So it's you can be out for
two years. Well yeah, wait, wait, why what the fuck?
Speaker 4 (43:51):
Like?
Speaker 2 (43:51):
What what?
Speaker 1 (43:52):
What?
Speaker 2 (43:53):
What?
Speaker 1 (43:53):
Like?
Speaker 2 (43:54):
What what are they possibly like analyzing here?
Speaker 4 (43:58):
Right?
Speaker 1 (43:58):
Like I I it is it?
Speaker 2 (44:01):
Like like what what what? What? What it? What is
supposed to be the thing that differentiates like the genders
that like lets you that makes you not be able
to compete in the women's category. Like is it like
like is it like if you played you aggressively or
some ship like what what?
Speaker 1 (44:15):
Yeah, well it's baffling. Yeah, that is a bizarre decision
like and yeah, like you said, it's just completely it's
not even that they're not it's not an Olympic sport, right,
it's not like they have to conform to any IOC guidelines.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Yeah is the chess cartel right, Like they can do
whatever they want, you know, I mean, like I know,
expecting Fede to do stuff that isn't insane is like,
look like this is the organization that after uh that
after Bobbie Fisher went on the radio in the Philippines
(44:53):
and said that he hopes that the government like rounds
up all Jewish people and kills them like they let
him back into feed A after that, So like, you know,
a great organization run by amazing people here. Yeah, but
this is I don't know, it's it's incredibly deeply weird.
Like the thing I keep thinking about is, I don't know,
(45:17):
this is kind of a weird, kind of silly story
in someways, but like so, like the first trans person
that I was like aware of it was a trans
StarCraft two player named Scarlett, and she's great. She's awesome,
Scarlet rules she actually she she she's She's one of
(45:38):
three non Korean players ever to win a tournament in Korea, which,
like I don't know how to express how difficult it
is to win a StarCraft tournament in Korea. Like it
would be like if a football team from like Siberia
showed up to the US was somehow allowed to play
in the NFL and then like won the super Bowl.
Like that, That's about the level of difficulty it is
to win a StarCraft tournament in Korea. Yeah yeah, Jamaica
(46:01):
bove say team moment, Yeah yeah, but like like yeah,
so like you know, it's it's one of those sort
of like really wild things. But like one of the
things I remember about that was like she was always,
as best I could tell, like always allowed. Like StarCraft
also had a women's division because you know, very very
similar like probably even more intense sort of sex ye
going yeah, yeah, being pretty toxic, you know, and like
(46:23):
like yeah, like it was actually you know over the
arc of like the like the like over a decade
she's been playing, like you know, like I've seen the
scene get less transphobic, but like, as much as I
could tell, there was never like a thing in the
women's tournaments. They're always just like yeah, sure, hey, look
a girl wants to play StarCraft like this rips and
yeah yeah, yeah, well more of us like yeah, yeah,
(46:43):
like you know, and she's also like and she's like
again really really good at the game. But like, you know,
but like it like this is the thing that like
historically hasn't I don't know, like like Jenny Wiley like
in in games like this that are like not, well, okay,
StarCraft is enormously more athletic than chess, but like yeah,
like you know, like this has been a thing where
(47:04):
people like there's if you're in one of these like
incredibly sexist environments, there's like a real, like really obvious
like both trans women and women like we're all in
this together thing because you get to look at like
the fucking ravening hordes of like absolutely deranged psychos in
(47:26):
like the Twitch chat and be like, oh god, they
hate both of us. Yeah yeah, which is also like
I think the other thing about this is like it's
unclear like who at feet day like decided this, Like
this doc just like appeared, and so there's like a
non zero chance this decision is being made by men,
(47:47):
Like pretty high that this is just like a decision
made by a bunch of men, because fuck them, and
they've just decided that, like you know, after just like
literally are giving a shit about women's dress for like
the entirety of its existence. They've finally decided to do something,
and they do something is make me not be able
(48:09):
to play women's tournaments.
Speaker 1 (48:11):
Like right, yeah, you didn't take action when Bobby Fisher
went full Nazi, but you decided to.
Speaker 2 (48:16):
Yeah, it's like, okay, this is great, great, great things
are happening. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
Yeah, talking of Nazis, there was a it was I
think actually a a again a nonbine or okay, an
intersex woman who competed for the Nazis in nineteen thirty
six at the Olympics. Yeah, with I'm not entirely sure
of her, like like external external sex presentation, I guess,
(48:46):
but later definitely served as a man in the German
Armed Forces. But that could have been a forced social transition.
But yeah, there's a long history of us trying to
work out gender ship through sport, and I guess I
just want to finish by like, if you don't give
a shit about sport, you have to understand this is
still important because like, sport's always about like who's on
(49:10):
our team and who's not right. That's why we didn't
let black people play baseball in the fucking country. It's
why they took like Olympic medals away from indigenous people
for violating stupid amateurism rules because they were designed to
only let people have a certain class pay. It's why
Colin Kathmack doesn't have a job, right, Yeah, that's why
(49:32):
people didn't want to go to the Nazi Olympics and
went to one in Barcelona, and it was bigger. Like
sports not just about being the best to exercise. It's
it's a social tool to include or exclude people. And
if you care about including people, then I think you
have to care about sport right now, because that is
a wedge that transfers are using to exclude people. So yeah,
(49:58):
that's that's what I have for you. I don't know,
if you have money, you can give it to Molly.
Molly Cameron you can. You can find her online. She
will help more trans kids ride or yeah, yeah, go
go ride it back. It's fun.
Speaker 2 (50:11):
And uh if if if if if you are one
of the seven people in the world who still thinks
that Colin Kaepernick doesn't have a job because he's not
good enough of football, come fight, Come find me in
the Bears parking lot. I will force you to watch
an entire season of the Chicago Bears, Like, like, watch
every quarterback we've ever fucking had in my lifetime, and
then I will beat you. You will you will you
will you will you you will be you will be
(50:31):
in a catatonic state after that.
Speaker 1 (50:34):
Yeah, I just found proven right. Money's website is ridegroup
dot People want to check that out. Oh oh yeah,
find find Colin Kaepernick on the internet watch videos.
Speaker 4 (50:51):
It Could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
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iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
monthly at coolzonemedia dot com. Slash sources. Thanks for listening,
Wonderful good podcast introduction boys the West part of the podcast.
Maybe that could just be hor retro, Hi Mayre, how
are you we're doing a podcast?
Speaker 2 (00:17):
I've been feed a the chess world has decided that
my chess powers are too strong, and I'm now I'm
now being discriminated against. It's a good time, very excited. Yeah,
having a great time with my biological advantage at chess.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Yeah, that's right. Well, you know, you've got to reach
those those chess pieces somehow, and it's old to do
with your hip angle.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Trying to my wrists are too powerful. This allows me
to write down my moves faster than my opponent, thus
giving me an advantage on the clock. I can also
reach the clock faster. Incredible stuff happening in the world
world of chess.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Not just chess, sadly, but the fact the Turfs have
got their clause, I guess, into many sports, which is
what we are talking about today. Specifically, I thought we
could talk about how the Turfs were in cycling, Yeah,
because that is the thing they have been trying to
do for some time. It's a thing I've written about before,
(01:23):
and hopefully a thing I'll be able to write about again,
and unless the cycling press just kind of gives itself
over to the turf, which doesn't seem to have done,
to be fair, generally, generally dicycling press, I think it's
fair to say, has lacked an intersexual analysis of anything.
But they've been better on this than I had expected,
(01:44):
especially the outlets which are not run by white sis
heat dudes in Boulder, which, to be fair, is a minority. Yeah, strange,
that odd? How odd? But yeah, shouting in particular to
Outside for including a gear guide to the gear the
cop used at the twenty sixteen RNC, which could perhaps
(02:05):
be included as the most tone deaf article ever written. Yeah, yeah,
incredibly comment and then to leave it up in twenty
twenty to not like cover your tracks.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
You know, this is one of those. This is one
of those like when the workers take Boulder like no
biker will go hungry moments.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Ah Yeah, Boulder, Colorado is a special place for bad things.
I won't say bad things to happen because they had
not a format shooting, but like social Yeah, intersexual analysis
has not made it to Bolder savvy. Great, great shame.
But when I'm talking about Boulder today, we're starting out
with a little discussion of cyclo cross. So, cyclo cross.
(02:48):
Are you familiar with cyclo cross? Mire? No, okay, so
it's a fundamentally silly sport in which I've competed, of course.
It's it's when competitors race skinny tired drop bar bikes
on off road course. Yeah, I would please google preps. Okay,
(03:09):
I'm going to send you one one cyclic cross video.
It is iconic for people who are who are at home.
The videos called is joey Okay, we can we can
have mere reacting live.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
The first picture that I saw when when I googled
this is two people not riding on the two people
carrying their bikes.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Yes, so this is a thing. Right, you get really
good at cycling, you train your entire life and then
and then in cyclic costs are parts where you have
to get off. Unless you're very talented. You can hop
the barriers. I've tried that with mixed success or you
can also you can ride the stairs, but you do
have to be a bit of a boss. So there
(03:54):
are barriers and challenges which you have to get off.
It's called field riding in Dutch, which is about right
writing have you watched the video will include a link
in the note to everyone else of it. Did you
(04:14):
watch it with the sound on?
Speaker 2 (04:16):
Yeah? Okay, I'm trying to figure out how to describe
this effectively. What has happened is this guy Okay, so
these guy's like going at full speed and then while
the bike is still moving, he's attempting to get off
the bike before he gets to this barrier, and he
like he just goes. He does not get offentime. The
bike's going too fast and he like he is he's
(04:39):
like sprawling, but in mid aires he's flying off his
bike over this barricade thing.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
EDGs. It is incredible. Yeah, all the time people are
shouting his name. And that's what you're supposed to do.
You're supposed to dismount and just carry the speed. You
kind of you can thwing your leg through a thing,
your leg to outside and then carry a speed and
jump and then hop back on it. It's a very
strange sport, right, And a big part of cyclo cross
(05:07):
is heckling. So the crowd will heckle you, right, they will.
They'll do all kinds of things like often like crowd
hand ups are a big thing in cycle across. So
like I've been handed dollar bills.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Yeah, what is happening in the sport?
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Oh yeah, it's very funny. And the moment, you're not
compective if you're just grabbing ship off the spectators. So like,
like I remember racing in Las Vegas at night. There
was a race in Las Vegas at night, and I
ain't gonna win right like then, so I'm just grabbing
dollar bills and shoving them down my like like people
(05:48):
will hand you like drinks. I've had beer hand ups,
donut spake, and one notable occasion a cookie that was
not just a normal cookie, which you should fucking disclose
to someone before you get to Yeah, that was a
bad day. I also had a pretty rough traumatic brain
injury that day. Oh no, yeah, I'd already sustained brain injury.
(06:10):
And the cookie. I thought my blood sugar was low,
so I was like, yeah, I'm going to get that
cookie and it's going to be great. It was not.
It wasn't the blood sugar. It it was affected my cognition.
So cyclo cross is fun and silly, and heckling is
part of it, but like heckling occurs within a certain
certain bounds right, Like you're not supposed to be mean,
(06:31):
it's just supposed to be funny, like everyone's supposed to laugh.
So I think in twenty twenty one everyone was rather
it's funny signed as a part of it too, right.
But in twenty twenty one we saw some shit that
was distinctly not funny when a group called Save Women's
Sport posted up at the race and held what were,
as you can probably guess by the name, transphobic science
(06:53):
throughout the race. So a lot of people were upset
by this, and by their own admission, nobody wanted them there.
One woman told the protesters your shiit feminism isn't welcome here,
which I think would be a great T shirt. If
she's listening, please will license your T shirt from you.
(07:14):
And they were pretty rarely rejected by most of the community,
which is great, But the bigotry they bought really wasn't
a surprise to anyone who'd been paying attention to online
discourse for a while, especially with respect to cycling. The
harassment of trans cyclists has been escalating for years. For
at least five or six years now, the governing body
(07:35):
USA Cycling has known about this and chosen to have done
nothing to stop it. Right, So this particular focus on
cycling came about in twenty eighteen when anti transcardras began
to focus on the sport because of the success of
a woman named Veronica Ivy. She wasn't called Veronica Ivy
at the time, and she was using she had a
different name then, but that's her name now, so I'm
(07:56):
going to use that name out of respect for her
choice for that to be her name. She she won
a world championship in the women's thirty five to forty
four spring category. Now, like, I have no disrespect at
all for masters athletes. It's great. I'm glad people are
out there exercising. This is not the same as an
Olympic gold medal, right, like the big I would I
(08:20):
mean people may disagree. The biggest determinant of your ability
to win a master's track cycling gold medal is the
amount of free time you have to exercise and the
amount of money you have to buy fast gear and
get to the event. Right, wait, what what is like?
The difference between masters is it's competitions for older people.
So it's so in cycling you have juniors and there
(08:43):
are various you know, obviously the eight year olds don't
compete with eighteen year olds, but up to eighteen is
juniors espoirs is eighteen to twenty three. We use a
French name because you know, you want to be all
what is what is what? Jesus Christ? Yeah, this French
name under twenty three, right, you can call it if
you want it to be an angler phile. And then
(09:06):
from there you go into the elite competition. Elite competition
is it's actually eighteen and like an eighteen year old
could compete in an elite competition, so could a fifty
year old, right, But it's the highest level of competition.
And then you get protected age categories again once you
get to thirty five, so thirty five to forty four,
(09:26):
forty five to fifty four going ten year blocks, right,
and that's for people who are only of that age.
Now it's the older you get, the less competitive it gets,
just because more people will fewer people will be racing. Right,
But thirty five plus masters sometimes they call it baby masters,
is not. You don't have a significant decrease in your
(09:48):
endurance performance at thirty five, so like some of these
people are still very good, and that's why they call
it baby masters, I guess. But like track cycling is
not a big sport to begin with, right, that's going
around in circles on an indoor velodrome. Master's track cycling,
it's a smaller sport. And then I know some excellent
masters track cyclists who just don't care to go to worlds. Right.
They've been professional cyclists, are very high level amateur cyclists,
(10:11):
and once you reach your mid forties, some people don't
care to travel and spend that money and do that competition. Right.
San Diego has a really great track scene. Some people
who I know very well have recently won multiple world
championships on the track, like, we have a very thriving scene,
but not all of those people even care to go
to La to race worlds like, let alone travel across
(10:33):
the world. Right, So it doesn't necessarily truly mean the
people who win Masters are the best athletes in the
world for their age group. And certainly I wouldn't say.
There are lots of things that make this competition unfair.
One of them is how much track bikes cost, how
much track time costs, and how much travel costs to
get to the event. But of course it didn't matter
to these people, right, What mattered is that a transfoman
(10:54):
had won, and she became the center of the culture war.
And this was really at least the first one that
I was aware of, a sort of instance of someone
a trans person winning a very a notable event in cycling.
And maybe trans people have been competing in elite races
(11:17):
in cycling for forty years, like Wally Cameron was the
first trans woman to race in a World Cup, and
Money's been racing for a while, and no one said shit,
no one cared, right, But around twenty eighteen, the culture
war around trans people was becoming heightened, and so people
got mad about her wing the race. And since then
(11:39):
there's been this steady increase in transphobic sentiment towards by Crass.
It's really the sort of leading voice in this has
been former probke Grace at Inger Thompson. She's been joined
by a few amateur women in various fields voicing their
feelings about the participation of trans women. And Thompson has
made a lot of statements, some of which I'll, you know,
(12:01):
choose not to share with you. You can google them
if you want, but most of them will be like
she misgenderous people all the time, right, that that's what
you can find her on Twitter, misgendering people. And I
think that that is kind of the giveaway that this
isn't necessarily about sport, right. And I think that it's
really important that people, regardless of where you stand on sport,
(12:25):
understand that this is a wedge and it's a wage
that's designed to push trans people out and away from
femininity in a way, from inclusion.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
Yeah. I think one of the reasons why it's important
is that it's a way of focusing the discourse like
on trans people, on like really really weird interpretations of
physical characteristics. Yeah, and this is something that you can
(12:55):
use to sort of like, you know, this, this is
the wedge that you can use to sort of like
tear this sort of issue open. It's been really really
effective at this, and it's also been like, you know,
it's something that's sort of like vaguely plausible, plausibly deniable,
and it also plays on a really kind of effective
branding strategy that these people had, which is that, like,
(13:17):
you know, if people remember what feminism was like in
like the twenty tens, it was almost entirely about you know,
not just in the twenty tens, like you even sort
of previous to this, right, Like the notion that like
women are weaker than men was something that was like
like broadly considered to be sexist, Like that was not
(13:37):
a feminist thing that was like like women are weaker
than men. And then you know, you get you're when
you're getting into people complaining about like like trans women,
like being on Jeopardy or like this shit that's happening
in chests that we're going to talk about later, it's
like okay, Like if you go back in time to
before sort of trans arrangement syndrome set in, like and
you told someone that in the future, this person is
(14:00):
going to be arguing that like like like trans women
have a biological advantage in Jeopardy because men are smarter
than women. They'd be like, what the fuck are you
talking about? Like this person is like a neo Nazi.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Yeah, it's oh that women are only defined by their
ability to bear children, right, and and then that is
your sole characteristic and value as a woman, Like yeah,
and like like this.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Is and this is something that you know if you
go back to like Simon before God I hate French
it's really a true it's a truly terrible language.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
That's the official stance of this podcast, Anti French Action.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Yeah yeah, but like you know, I mean, you know,
like you actually read the Second Sex, and like in
the Second Sex is talking about you know, literally like
her famous line it's like women, like no one is
born a woman like women is made right because it's
it's it's it's it's it's a social process, not a
biological one. And then you know, and and but because
there was like a kind of cultural victory for feminist
(15:00):
where it suddenly became really really difficult to be a
mainstream person and like call yourself, like call yourself an
anti feminist, Like all of these people who believe all
of the same shit that like phylish Lafley did, like
have to relabel themselves feminists. And you know, and sports
is the sports the thing they picked to do that
because sports is the like it's the area they can
(15:21):
pick where they can, like with some plausible deniability, start
doing all of this like oh, women are inherently weaker
than men and have to be protected from men like
shit again.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
Yeah yeah, and it's yes, it's very much like un
recontstractive stuff that we would have seen if not feminist
twenty years ago. Now sadly it's being advanced by people
laying claimed to feminism. I guess yeah. So in the
most recent Phyclocross Nationals, trans athlete Austin Cillips finished third
(15:54):
at the event, local John Browann gun club members had
attended to step in and protect transathletes what's governing body
wouldn't And it was actually a really I mean, what
you saw was a lot of discourse online about Austin
quote unquote blocking uh and SIS woman athlete, and then
you saw like a lot of people sort of saying
(16:15):
that and like SIS women had been I guess, like
you know that Austin's inherent biological advantage I'm using heavy
scare quotes here had allowed her to come third. She
got beaten by two SIS girls, right, Like this is.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Always the thing like that. There was one of these
in skateboarding where like this turf skateboarder was like yelling
about how she'd been beaten by a trans woman and
you look at the results. She lost to an eight
year old. She was outplaced by an eight year old,
like shot the fuck up bullshit, like.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
And a lot of the discuss about like Austin quote
unquote blocking someone like I don't know, but to me,
it very clearly seemed to come from people who hadn't
watched many other bicycle competitions, right, Like that's what we do.
You push on each other, you lean on each other.
Like if you didn't do that, people would follow over
a whole lot more. It's a race, you're trying to
get to the finish line first. But she didn't do
(17:10):
anything that anyone else wouldn't have done. And at the
time Turfs kind of tried to make this a big
deal but were unsuccessful. And it was not really until
Austin won a race in New Mexico, a big race
tour of the Healer, that it became again, Like it
wasn't twenty eighteen a very big deal? Right? So one
(17:33):
of the key leaders, as I said, is Inga Thompson.
Inga's a very accomplished cyclist, There's no doubt about that, right.
She's a Bicycle Hall of Fame inductee, five time national champion,
three time Olympic team member, a Tour de France firm,
and a podium finisher, a three time silver medallist at
the U Show World Championships, but I think she's arguably
more famous now for her anti trans bigotry, and she's
(17:57):
appeared she tried to encourage cyclist to take a knee
in protest at the ucis transgender inclusion Yeah, which like.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Fox News finally finds something that they're for.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
Yeah, they've finally. She was actually removed from her role
on the board of a France based American protein for
her statements there. I thought that their statement is kind
of interesting. They said, if shared in the absence of politics,
her knowledge and experience would benefit many in advanced cycling
for everyone. However, she has decided to dedicate her time
(18:34):
to excluding people that otherwise currently eligible to compete and
UCI events. She is also tempted to use our team
as a platform for political activity, which like is a
very neutral stance, but it's also it's also like it's fine, right, like, like,
our cycling team isn't here to hate trans people. If
you're going to use it for hating trans people, please
(18:55):
go somewhere else like it. It doesn't you don't have
to like take a hugely radical stance to be like that,
this isn't a hate platform for hate speech. Like like
go away, and that they added to be clear, Miss
miss Thompson is entitled to her opinion's an advocacy, but
her methods and personal attacks are inconsistent with ciniska's mission
to advanced opportunities for women. These methods, well documented on
(19:19):
Miss Thompson's social media presence, include dehumanization of transgender people,
spreading misinformation, demagoguery, and personal attacks on anyone who opposes
her views spellow alert that includes me. She doesn't like
me it all, I don't don't be mean to trans people,
don't missgender my friends. So I did think it was
very funny that like this team isn't like the like
(19:40):
I don't knowe that like the woke team for woke people.
They're just trying to get along with helping women cycle
and they can't do that if they're one of their
board members is so consumed by hate that no no
one wants to have anything to do with it. So
in the wake of this protest, the twenty twenty one
Save Women's Sport protest fliletted they're unofficial with USA Cycling,
(20:03):
published an open letter calling for the resignation of the
organization's CEO and the safe sport coordinator Kelsey Rickson, who's
responsible for preventing hate speech and bullying. They gather one
hundred and five signatures from racists and other cyclists in
support of their demands, and a day after they sent
the letter, De Martini announced he was stepping down. So
(20:25):
he has a bit of a failure of just like
there's a statement he made an interview where he said
it would be different if our athletes were going to
be affected. When he was talking about bands for trans
athletes in interscholastic sports, he said, we don't believe they
will be which look in technical and in technical sense
(20:45):
because cyclists could be for clubs, not schools. They might
not have done. But if you think that a ban
on trans kids playing at school isn't going to affect
participation in trans athletes in all sports everywhere, either completely
myopic or bearing your bigotry. He claimed he was quoted
out of context, but it was part of a pretty
(21:06):
big block quote. I don't see how that could be
taken out of context. They did say at that time
that they're against any legislation limits trans inclusion. It's worth
pointing out that cycling has a body as to all
Olympic sports. It should prevent hate speech, bigotry, and bullying, right,
And that's called Safe Sport set up in twenty seventeen,
(21:26):
and that was following what happened at USA Gymnastics, right,
which was widespread sexual abuse of athletes. People I'm sure
will remember that Safe Sport, I feel fairly confident in
saying has completely failed in preventing abuse, preventing harassment, preventing bullying.
What it has done is is perhaps given a legal
(21:47):
shield to governing bodies, so has prevented them getting sued.
But it's done nothing to prevent this kind of bullying,
which is why athletes and the community have had to
taken upon themselves to do that. Right, Like, if there's
one thing you should expect a governing money to do
to make sure everyone feels safe at races. But people
(22:07):
were legitimately worried about racing in areas where they knew
there were a lot of not just turfs, but like
groups like the Proud Boys right, who have kind of
hung their hat on transphobia. I know people who didn't
go to races in areas where they were worried about that.
I know people who, like you know it went out
of went to an effort every day to drive a
(22:27):
different way back to their hotel at races because they're
worried about like people genuinely felt unsafe doing something that
no one should feel unsafe doing, which is playing. So
as I said, you know who won't make you feel unsafe?
Speaker 2 (22:49):
I I'm going to say the products and services, and
then I'm gonna.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
They will wrap you up in a cocoon like blanket
of gold and coin and meal kits. How can do
you not feel so safe when you're surrounded by Reagan coins?
Speaker 2 (23:07):
No one fact checked.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
This is a fact check free zone. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
The following and preceding thirty seconds have not been fact checked. Right,
Please enjoy these adverts, and we are back and we're
(23:31):
still talking about turfs. So says Women's Sports, which is
this organization that put on the protests, presents itself as
an organic reaction to the participation of trans women, who
it repeatedly misgenders in women's categories. Claimed that several races
in the cycle across national championships privately contacted the organization
to express concerns, but only one, Evie Edwards, competed under
(23:53):
the SWF Team banner. SWS at the time was not
a nonprofit, so it was relatively hard to find out
what exactly their financial ties to various other transphobic and
right wing groups were. It's registered in Minnesota as a business,
but it appears to be assault. At the time, again,
it was a sole prop run by someone called best Steltzer.
(24:15):
The both Ev Edwards and SWS used the race to
aggressively fundraise for their campaign. Steltzer, for instance, at the time,
was making three hundred and eighty five bucks per month
on Patreon by quote creating awareness of males invading female spaces.
Page has been taken down since then. She turfed too
close to the Sun. She also received donations on her
(24:39):
venmo page, which is very funny because I don't think
she realized her venmo page was public. Checked it out
in the judge. Yeah, that there is no there There
was no distinction made between advocacy spending and personal spending
on that account, I will say, And she was taking
advocacy donations and you know, making emoji purchases it on
(25:01):
a venmo at the time. I think maybe since has
made it private, but this.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Is something that like if you ever want to just
like I don't know if someone just like appears in
the news and they suck, like, go try to find
them on venmo because people just don't realize that stuff.
And oh yeah, you know, people like people recently caught
like I think we talked about Clarence Thom.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
I think it was.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Clarence Thomas people amazing paying his staffers on venmo, Like
you can find a bunch of very funny stuff because
people people are bad at doing crime.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Now, yeah, I cannot tell you how many people, uh
literally had things on their venmo like travel to DC
and like like on January sixth, right like ven boing
each other for like revolution tacos after they divated the
Capitol smart stuff and no, no, please keep doing that
(26:00):
if you're planning transphobia or coups. So much of this
awareness that save women's sports awareness, Like I think if
you're ever donating to someone who's promoting quote unquote awareness
of anything, there should be a large red flag. It's
an extremely nebulous concept that very ready does anything to
help anyone. But much of this awareness seems to be
tied to pre standard right wing anti trans talking points
(26:23):
and not the many dozens, maybe hundreds of instances were
trans and sists women happily compete alongside each other, have
a nice time, do exercise, go home, and don't engage
in any bigotry. In the past, just WS has worked
with far right organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the
Family Research Council to prepare a guide to quote help
parents understand the transgender issue. Again, if you're framing the
(26:45):
existence of other people as an issue, you're not that
far from flaming it as a question, are you. Yeah,
I'm impressed to the self awareness avoided the transgender question,
but only by you know, using the thesaurus to reframe
it as an issue. I guess the guide refers to
the transgender trend quote unquote and repeatedly calls trans women men.
(27:10):
They of course also you know Steltzer In particular, it
appears anti abortion rallies, anti marriage equality rallies, things like that. Right,
this is part of a wider space of painting bigotry.
It's not just about support. Cyclists have taken it upon
themselves to protect trans riders. So access of solidarity, of
range for blocking SWS protesters and national championships announces refusing
(27:33):
to allegedly refusing to mention races on the team.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
That's pretty funny.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
Yeah, it is pretty funny. Also, this mo money Cameron
has this organization called Ride, which is let trans kids ride,
and money Mate sees wristband which like a trans flag,
the Transpride flag, and like one of my friends won
the biggest race in the US. It's cis guy with
his Transpride ristband on, which, you know, a little thing.
(28:02):
But also like it's it's nice to see people show up, Like, yeah,
it's nice to see and like it's rare that you'll
go to a race when people won't be you won't
see a few people wearing that like in pro men,
pro women, you know, both, like it's there are overwhelmingly
people don't give a fuck. They're just happy if you're
enjoying riding bikes. It's not like it's a big sport.
(28:24):
You know. The real threat cycling is all of us
getting killed by people in Tesla's playing pong like it's
not it's not trans women. But unfortunately this solidarity hasn't
extended to the governing body, so two years after this
initial protest right, the UCI effectively banned all trans women
from participating in elite level cycling. This happened just a
(28:48):
few weeks before the World Championships. Like, I have friends
who had to cancel their flights. Yeah, it was the
most bungled, fucked up pseudo science kind of half fast,
Like it was just a mess. The whole thing was
a fucking mess. They had an extraordinary meeting in August,
(29:09):
just a few weeks for the World Championships, and like
people previously had to have a to have a submit
blood numbers to show a testosterone level to compete, right,
which is a thing lots of governing bodies have been
doing for a while now. They had certified people like
weeks before this, they'd be like, yeah, you're good to
go for another year, and then that psyche, No you're not.
(29:29):
You can't compete ever again. And like this is people's jobs, right,
this is their livelihood, it's how they pay rents. It's
also like being an elite cyclist is hard. It is
most of your life, right, Like you're you've got to
sleep or you got to eat, right, You've got to
train all the fucking time. You can't go out. You're
going to be resting when you're not training to take
all that away from someone with a click of the
(29:50):
fingers and bringing no consultation for them. It's incredibly cruel
and the U see, I'll just read their statement because
I think there's a couple of things in it we
should pick apart. Obviously, you can't take woying for it
being inherently transphobic. From now on, female transgender athletes who
have transitioned after quote male puberty will be prohibited from
(30:11):
participating women's events on the UCI International Calendar in all
categories in the various disciplines. Notably, they also said it's
also impossible to rule out the possibility that biomechanical factors
such as the shape and arrangement of the bones in
their limbs, may constitute a lasting advantage for female transgender athletes.
And yeah, it's yeah, there's a lot going on there, right,
(30:35):
Like they use female where where most people would use women.
The barrier they set is to rule out any possibility
of an advantage, right, which is a very high barrier.
That's like a kind of guilty and to prove it
innocent situation, right, Like I'd also like the arrangement of
the bones in my limbs changed significantly when I was
racing bikes because I broke them all the fucking time.
(30:58):
Such such a strange category to choose. Also, the requirement
that you transition before puberty. That's not the same as
taking puberty blockers, right, They're requiring that they're taking homemones
before puberty, like like eleven or twelve, yeah, which.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
Which is just also now illegal in an enormous number
of states, like.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
Yeah, and even most from what I understand, most gender
affirming care takes the approach of taking puberty blockers rather
than yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
Well this is this is sort of like I mean,
this is sort of the disaster that's been happening in
the last like four or five years on this, which
is that like like taking puberty blockers was the compromise position. Yes,
Like that was the position that was taken because people
thought it was too dangerous to like let kids do HRT,
(31:44):
which it's not like it's completely fine. In fact, it's
actually like you know, you're you're going to go through
puberty anyways, right, You're like like if if you are
in a human body, you were doing uncontrolled puberty, and
that is less safe than doing a controlled really which
is what you know, doing like doing it urty when
you're a child, is yeah, but yeah, the young vice
(32:06):
position was like, oh well we're not we're gonna do
those will do puberty blockers, and then like everyone went
insane about puberty blockers. And now like even the compromise
position has been sort of like you know, I mean
like we're away that, and it's like okay, like you know,
but then and then like and then you know, like
now and then having done this right, and it's like, oh, well,
now you can set up all of these rules that
(32:27):
are like require you to have done a thing you've
now made illegal. It's like this is.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Great, Yeah, exactly right. You now have a rule that
basically bans almost anyone from participation, like you have to
begin transitioning at eleven. It's also very nebulous, like male puberty,
like like what does that mean? What what point are
you defining you have been through male puberty? Like are
we going to after able to submit that fucking test
(32:52):
of stone numbers from when they were eight?
Speaker 3 (32:54):
Like yeah, like what like it's it's just man, it's
what it is, right, it's you can't ever transition satisfactorily enough.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Yeah, or like, for example, I don't know, so, like,
let's say you you are onlike let's say you don't
start hormones until you're like twenty four, but but you
rearrange the bones in your body, it just allows you
you now have feminine bone arrange.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
Bit does this now allows you to cycle gender affirming
orthopedic surgery? Yeah? And like also this, and I want
to get into this a little bit because it completely
obfuscates or ignores I guess what we know to be
(33:42):
true that there is not a binary puberty process, because
there is not. Humans don't exist in a binary sex,
nor do they exist in binary genders. Right, So, I
think probably the best example of this would be Marie
Jose Martinez Patigno. If people aren't familiar with her, obviously
Google is right there for you. But she was dismissed
(34:03):
from a Spanish Olympic team in nineteen eighty six for
failing the gender test. She's publicly shamed for being like
a secret male. She loses her fiancee, she loses her funding,
she loses almost everything. She fought and won a successful
court battle, illustrating the fallacy of this binary gender approach.
But she's not a trans woman, to be clear, she's
an intersexu woman who has androgen insensitivity syndrome, but she
(34:28):
was able to They were using chromosome typing, right, Like
like you'll often this is a thing that you'll still
see turf trotting out right, something that was outdated in
nineteen eighty six, that like xx or x y, that
is that's not a binary that fits the entirety of
the human species.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Yeah, there's like a lot of people for a lot
of other different.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
Kinds of yeah, mosaicism. Like it's again like I get it,
you didn't you're not a biologist. That's fine, It's okay
to shut the fuck up if you don't understand something.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
Yeah, that's one of those things that's sucks because it's
like like I wish these people had decided to like
try to build airplanes based off of like pre Deutnean
or something work, because it's like like there's no consequence
for them for not understanding biology. But it's like I
don't know, like like if if you, if you, if
you're trying to argue that like general relativity doesn't exist,
like your you're like your satellite is gonna fall on you.
(35:20):
But this this is the one thing where you can
just like you can say ship that it's not even
like like people people make a joke it's like high
school biology. It's like it's not it's just like elementary
school biology. And it's not right, like like YouTube biology,
isn't it That's what it is?
Speaker 1 (35:35):
Yeah, yeah, yes, exactly, yeah, but unfortunately the consequences of
people who are not them, Yeah, and that's hugely unfortunate. Right,
Like even we see like Cassa Semenia when a court
case this month or last month, like allowing her to
compete again, like we found time and again that this
notion of a binary sex is as nonsense to call
(35:58):
as emotion of a binary gender, and yet we continue
to try and force people into these different competitions. I
just want to read a statement that Austin made and
like it's very hard not to see this as them,
specifically seeing Austin winning a big stage race in New
Mexico and going like, right, we can't fucking have that,
Like as soon as trans women win stuff, Right, it's
(36:20):
fine if they come and then don't win, but as
soon as they win stuff, And again, if she had
this inherent massive biological advantage, she would have won everything
which hasn't happened. She said, I'm devastated by the UCI
decision to renege on the policy and framework it previously
set out for inclusion. My journey in professional racing has
allowed me to see the world, build lifelong friendships, and
(36:41):
most importantly, give my absolute or something I find deeply fulfilling.
No one should be denied the opportunity to chase that
same joy that I and others have found through racing,
which I think is great, and I think it's important
to lift up her voice in this and other transathlete voices.
In theory, there is what's called open category, which is
(37:01):
the men's category. The problem is that there are no
open races and that this category, like, if you line
up as a trans woman in the fucking open category,
you're being very clearly othered, right, yeah, you're being like
you're Some of them also will have women's licenses, like
(37:22):
it's not clear what men's category they can race in.
But more importantly, I think, as Chris Mosia pointed out,
people will be familiar as Chris as the first trans
athlete tend Olympic trials in the US. The open category
contradicts both international Olympic Committee guidelines on Fairness and Inclusion
and extensive research at states trans women do not have
an inherent advantage in sport. Chris is a good follow
(37:44):
on Twitter, it's the Chris Mosia, but it contradicts even
like the IOC. Again, not like on the bastions of wokeness,
people who sent the Olympics for the Nazis have a
better policy see them this. And yet cycling has chosen
to go above and beyond, And in large part I
(38:06):
can't not see that as because of the attention paid
to this by people who do not give a fuck
about cycling. Yeah, because they found a wedge, and because
our community has generally been inclusive, Like even after this
at the World Championships there were people with trans flags
the course, you know, like World Championship or which trans
women could not compete, advocating for inclusion right it was
(38:30):
in Glasgow. And as a rule, the sport I think
has been accepting. Like I've never cycled, not known there
being trans people in cycling, and I've cycled a lot,
but this has allowed trans people to thrive. And when
trans people started describing these fucking bigots decided to make
this a wedge issue and that's why it's happening here,
(39:02):
but it's also fucking happening in chess. So do you
want to do you want to talk about chess?
Speaker 4 (39:06):
Man?
Speaker 5 (39:07):
This is this is insane, Okay. The weird part about
the chess one is like I I don't know, I had.
This is not something that anyone in chess was like
talking about.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
Like chess has like a lot of incredibly weird and
bizarre political stuff going on, but like they're I had,
I don't know, Maybe I just missed it, or maybe
it was just like a part of the chess discourse
I wasn't following, But like I I don't know, really
truly weirdly just seemingly out of nowhere. I don't know
(39:39):
what is going on with this seemingly out of nowhere
fee Day, which is like the International Chess Federation released
this statement, released this like policy that says that like
it has a lot of weird stuff. It effectively sets
up fee Day as like what I can only describe
as a gender counsel, where like, if you want to
(40:01):
like change your gender, you have to like submit it
to fee Day, and then fe DA gets to decide
what gender you are so great, great things happening here.
And then also for some reason, Okay, so chess has
had this thing for a while where chess has like
(40:21):
there are like women's sections for stuff, and there's a
lot of some weird stuff going on here. So like
there's the regular title like grand Master, there's also like
a women's grandmaster thing which has different qualification, is slightly different,
and this was this was set up basically because like
the guys who play chess are insane, Like I've talked
(40:41):
about this some of the Bobby Fisher episodes right, like
they're like most of the most famous chess players in
history are like utterly deranged Neo Nazis or like like
people who are even weirder than Neo Nazis, like like
like unreconstructed like nineteen seventeen Zon artists, like people like that,
(41:02):
like just people with with like truly truly deeply weird
political ideologies that are like unbelievably right wing, and you know,
and like part of part of what like happens here
is that like just chess in general is like unfathomably sexist,
Like it's it's really really bad, and you know, like
(41:26):
their solution to this effectively was like to create this
like kind of parallel like women's infrastructure, which kind of
works and kind of hasn't in a lot of ways.
And you know, like part of what's going on is
just like, okay, so a lot of girls, like young
(41:47):
girls play chess, but there's this bottleneck that happens around
when you're like thirteen or fourteen, while this is twelve
to thirteen, So there's fourteen where like the number of
girls playing chess just like collapses, right, And the reason
that happens is because boys are fucking dog.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
Shit Like this is this is this is like literally.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
What's happening, right, is like you have a bunch of sexist,
like really sexist boys. And then the product of this
is that because there's so many fewer like women who
played chess and there are men you play chess, like,
there's just like, for example, like there's way less like
women who are like really high rated chess players. And
that's because there's just like like the barrier of institutional
sexism to like become a woman who's really good at
(42:28):
chess is so high. And then yeah, okay, so so
this this is the sort of background, So like there
are these separate like women's like tournaments and stuff like that,
and so fee DA, which is the Chess Federation, released
this thing where Okay, so they say a few things.
(42:53):
One is that, okay, the the the big one is
that if you, like, if you are a trans woman,
you cannot play in official fee Day events or women
until fee Day does something. And it's not entirely clear
what that is.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
So is it like a testosterone level you have to submit?
Speaker 2 (43:16):
Wait, literally, I'm just gonna read this sentence because it's
it's utterly unclear what is going on here. In the
event that the gender was changed from male to female,
the player has no right to participate in official fee
Day events or women until free Day's decision is made.
Such decision should be based on further analysis and should
(43:37):
and shall be taken by the fee Day Council at
the earliest possible time, but no longer than within a
two year period. So it's you can be out for
two years. Well yeah, wait, wait, why what the fuck?
Speaker 4 (43:51):
Like?
Speaker 2 (43:51):
What what?
Speaker 1 (43:52):
What?
Speaker 2 (43:53):
What?
Speaker 1 (43:53):
Like?
Speaker 2 (43:54):
What what are they possibly like analyzing here?
Speaker 4 (43:58):
Right?
Speaker 1 (43:58):
Like I I it is it?
Speaker 2 (44:01):
Like like what what what? What? What it? What is
supposed to be the thing that differentiates like the genders
that like lets you that makes you not be able
to compete in the women's category. Like is it like
like is it like if you played you aggressively or
some ship like what what?
Speaker 1 (44:15):
Yeah, well it's baffling. Yeah, that is a bizarre decision
like and yeah, like you said, it's just completely it's
not even that they're not it's not an Olympic sport, right,
it's not like they have to conform to any IOC guidelines.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Yeah is the chess cartel right, Like they can do
whatever they want, you know, I mean, like I know,
expecting Fede to do stuff that isn't insane is like,
look like this is the organization that after uh that
after Bobbie Fisher went on the radio in the Philippines
(44:53):
and said that he hopes that the government like rounds
up all Jewish people and kills them like they let
him back into feed A after that, So like, you know,
a great organization run by amazing people here. Yeah, but
this is I don't know, it's it's incredibly deeply weird.
Like the thing I keep thinking about is, I don't know,
(45:17):
this is kind of a weird, kind of silly story
in someways, but like so, like the first trans person
that I was like aware of it was a trans
StarCraft two player named Scarlett, and she's great. She's awesome,
Scarlet rules she actually she she she's She's one of
(45:38):
three non Korean players ever to win a tournament in Korea, which,
like I don't know how to express how difficult it
is to win a StarCraft tournament in Korea. Like it
would be like if a football team from like Siberia
showed up to the US was somehow allowed to play
in the NFL and then like won the super Bowl.
Like that, That's about the level of difficulty it is
to win a StarCraft tournament in Korea. Yeah yeah, Jamaica
(46:01):
bove say team moment, Yeah yeah, but like like yeah,
so like you know, it's it's one of those sort
of like really wild things. But like one of the
things I remember about that was like she was always,
as best I could tell, like always allowed. Like StarCraft
also had a women's division because you know, very very
similar like probably even more intense sort of sex ye
going yeah, yeah, being pretty toxic, you know, and like
(46:23):
like yeah, like it was actually you know over the
arc of like the like the like over a decade
she's been playing, like you know, like I've seen the
scene get less transphobic, but like, as much as I
could tell, there was never like a thing in the
women's tournaments. They're always just like yeah, sure, hey, look
a girl wants to play StarCraft like this rips and
yeah yeah, yeah, well more of us like yeah, yeah,
(46:43):
like you know, and she's also like and she's like
again really really good at the game. But like, you know,
but like it like this is the thing that like
historically hasn't I don't know, like like Jenny Wiley like
in in games like this that are like not, well, okay,
StarCraft is enormously more athletic than chess, but like yeah,
like you know, like this has been a thing where
(47:04):
people like there's if you're in one of these like
incredibly sexist environments, there's like a real, like really obvious
like both trans women and women like we're all in
this together thing because you get to look at like
the fucking ravening hordes of like absolutely deranged psychos in
(47:26):
like the Twitch chat and be like, oh god, they
hate both of us. Yeah yeah, which is also like
I think the other thing about this is like it's
unclear like who at feet day like decided this, Like
this doc just like appeared, and so there's like a
non zero chance this decision is being made by men,
(47:47):
Like pretty high that this is just like a decision
made by a bunch of men, because fuck them, and
they've just decided that, like you know, after just like
literally are giving a shit about women's dress for like
the entirety of its existence. They've finally decided to do something,
and they do something is make me not be able
(48:09):
to play women's tournaments.
Speaker 1 (48:11):
Like right, yeah, you didn't take action when Bobby Fisher
went full Nazi, but you decided to.
Speaker 2 (48:16):
Yeah, it's like, okay, this is great, great, great things
are happening. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
Yeah, talking of Nazis, there was a it was I
think actually a a again a nonbine or okay, an
intersex woman who competed for the Nazis in nineteen thirty
six at the Olympics. Yeah, with I'm not entirely sure
of her, like like external external sex presentation, I guess,
(48:46):
but later definitely served as a man in the German
Armed Forces. But that could have been a forced social transition.
But yeah, there's a long history of us trying to
work out gender ship through sport, and I guess I
just want to finish by like, if you don't give
a shit about sport, you have to understand this is
still important because like, sport's always about like who's on
(49:10):
our team and who's not right. That's why we didn't
let black people play baseball in the fucking country. It's
why they took like Olympic medals away from indigenous people
for violating stupid amateurism rules because they were designed to
only let people have a certain class pay. It's why
Colin Kathmack doesn't have a job, right, Yeah, that's why
(49:32):
people didn't want to go to the Nazi Olympics and
went to one in Barcelona, and it was bigger. Like
sports not just about being the best to exercise. It's
it's a social tool to include or exclude people. And
if you care about including people, then I think you
have to care about sport right now, because that is
a wedge that transfers are using to exclude people. So yeah,
(49:58):
that's that's what I have for you. I don't know,
if you have money, you can give it to Molly.
Molly Cameron you can. You can find her online. She
will help more trans kids ride or yeah, yeah, go
go ride it back. It's fun.
Speaker 2 (50:11):
And uh if if if if if you are one
of the seven people in the world who still thinks
that Colin Kaepernick doesn't have a job because he's not
good enough of football, come fight, Come find me in
the Bears parking lot. I will force you to watch
an entire season of the Chicago Bears, Like, like, watch
every quarterback we've ever fucking had in my lifetime, and
then I will beat you. You will you will you
will you will you you will be you will be
(50:31):
in a catatonic state after that.
Speaker 1 (50:34):
Yeah, I just found proven right. Money's website is ridegroup
dot People want to check that out. Oh oh yeah,
find find Colin Kaepernick on the internet watch videos.
Speaker 4 (50:51):
It Could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot com or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
monthly at coolzonemedia dot com. Slash sources. Thanks for listening,
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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