In a previous rant on the issue of transgender sports, I posited that the argument of inclusion is a false one, because we already have inclusion in sports for both body types. Got a male body? We’ve got sport for you. Got a female body? We’ve got sports for you, too. What’s going on in your brain, how you like to dress, and what pronouns you prefer don’t belong in the discussion.
As a “for instance,” I gave the example of Dennis Rodman. In context there to show that how The Worm liked to dress up and wear makeup didn’t argue he belonged in the WNBA’s inaugural season. In other contexts, I like to bring up Dennis to show that the other men in the NBA didn’t give a damn, either (Karl Malone, perhaps, notwithstanding), especially when he was pulling down twenty boards a game.
It’s also a thought exercise: what if Dennis did say he was Denise in 1997 and demanded a trade from the NBA to the WNBA. Salary decimation be damned, she has to live her authentic self! I can imagine Denise pulling down every board and scoring 30.
Then I had an “aha!” moment. Didn’t Caitlyn Jenner1, by definitions we’re given today, compete in the 1976 Men’s Decathlon? And, thus, she was competing in a sport that did not match her gender, but instead, her body?
What if, by today’s enlightened standards, Caitlyn competed in the 1976 Women’s Pentathlon? Where East Germany’s Seigrun Seigl won gold with a 13.31 100m hurdles, 12.92m shot put, 1.74m high jump, 6.49m long jump, and a 23.09 200m dash?
Well, Caitlyn in the Decathlon competing against men notched a 14.84 110m hurdles, 15.35m shot put, 2.03m high jump, 7.22m long jump, and a 47.51 400m dash.
It’s kind of an apples-to-oranges (or, testes to ovaries, if you will) kind of comparison. But Caitlyn ran nearly as fast over higher hurdles over a longer distance, threw a heavier shot father, jumped higher, jumped farther, and nearly matched the speed in a race twice the distance.
In other words, Caitlyn would’ve blown Seigrun out of Montreal. Seigrun would get a silver. Her teammate Christine gets bronze, and her teammate Burglinde doesn’t medal at all.
Yes, but under today’s enlightened standards, Caitlyn would have been on at least a year of performance-decreasing drugs hormone therapy that reduces her testosterone to four times the upper-bound of the standard reading for women.
Oh. Now there I go, assuming. I was still under the impression the International Olympic Committee was requiring trans women athletes to maintain a testosterone reading below 10nmol/L, where women usually range from 0.5 to 2.4nmol/L. Nope. That went away in 2021. Now they say testosterone doesn’t really matter.
I first thought I was old when Playboy’s Playmate of the Month was born after I graduated high school. Then I thought it was when all new music started sounding like cacophonic drivel. But now I know I’m old because I just cannot for the life of me understand how society has seemingly decided that male and female are irrelevant distinctions; now, being one or the other or neither or both of those nouns is a completely self-realized subjective discovery, and all of society that has organized around a historically recognized, statistically verifiable tendency of the males to sexually prey on the females, and the objective reality that at all ages, levels, and abilities the males are stronger and faster than the females, are to be completely erased for fear of harming the feeling of 1 in 100 males who want to be females, even to the point of castrating the ‘o’ in ‘Latino’ to ‘Latinx.’
Why can’t a Lia Thomas perform in a cross-gender sport like Caitlyn Jenner did? Oh, right, Lia Thomas did, and competing against men, she totally sucked. Why can’t a Laurel Hubbard perform in a cross-gender sport like Caitlyn Jenner did? Oh, right, Laurel Hubbard did, and competing against men, she totally sucked.
Yep, I’m old. I don’t ever think I’ll understand how woman is just a feeling anybody can have, even males. Maybe someday, it’ll be a male who doesn’t suck at his sport. At least the WNBA will be a little more watchable when there’s a few Denises on the court.
1 Yes, the record books and Wikipedia refer to the winner of the 1976 Men’s Decathlon as “Caitlyn Jenner (competing as Bruce Jenner)” because to do otherwise would be “deadnaming,” which is a social crime punishable by ostracization and shaming.