Why Conservatives Love Trans Sports

And why the best response is just to see through it.

In 2014, a harassment movement toward female game designers that came to be known as Gamergate was orchastrated by members of the far-right dominated website 4chan, and excecuted on platforms such as Twitter and Youtube, as well as in real life where the targeted women were subjected to threats and doxxing. The official claim of the campaign was to expose "corruption in video game journalism" -- the fundamental evidence of this corruption that game developer Zoey Quinn had slept with a game journalist for a good review of the video game Depression Quest, a claim thoroughly debunked. But debunking it usually doesn't work -- having and entertaining the discussion at all is the true goal. Journalist Jenn Frank writes:

Crucially, a good troll knows how to attack a woman’s “professionalism” – particularly if you’ve never read, watched or played anything she has produced. Your method is to undermine her credibility and devalue her work by hardly discussing it – and maybe discussing her full sexual history instead.

The goal of the debate is not morals, it's not ethics. It's that misogynists enjoy discussing the sexual history of women, and insinuate that it's the only reason they're succeeding. I do think that today, most people see through this and does not entertain debates on wether or not certain women have slept their way to the top. Already by 2015, Stephen Colbert was making fun of how seriously the claim "protecting ethics in video-game journalism" was taken as a façade for open misogyny. What's more likely, that someone cares deeply about ethics in game journalism, or that they enjoy focusing on a woman's sex life?

Another thing misogynists like discussing is male superiority over women -- the problem, is that this is a hard claim to make -- though a desirable one, if your ideal society is one where men maintain power and advantage over women. Men are not more intelligent than women; men do not succeed better in the workplace than women. Really, the only thing men have left to claim superiority in is the claim of biological physical advantage.

This is the real reason conservatives love the debate on trans sport: it's an excuse to portray women as weak, small, inferior, and men as strong and naturally superior. It's why Trump loves mocking women athletes during his speeches in scenarios where they compete against men, and it's why situations for this debate to be manufactured, like with the boxer Imane Khalif, are longed for -- there's no actual interest in women's right, there's no actual interest in sports, usually -- it's an excuse to remind us that women are weak and men are strong. Even women seem content in participating in this -- wizard woman has herself stated that she believes a woman is "the producer of the larger gametes" (if this sounds odd and arbitrary, it's because if you're deep enough into trying to exclude certain women from womanhood, like Rowling is, you know that saying "a woman is someone with XX-chromosomes" is passé, since that would fail many a woman, and put every woman's identity under DNA-based dispute), but seems confident to put the gender-sorting hat on Imane Khalif and proclaim she's has "the smirk of a male who’s knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment" and who's "enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head" -- uncaring of Khalif's ... gametes. (I hope someone cares about my gametes. My gametes feel very uncared for right now, ifyouknowwhatimsayin) When Ben Shapiro produced a movie about a group of men invading female basketball, a movie that repeatedly and for humerous effect portrays female athletes being violently dominated by men, he said he first wanted the movie to be a documentary, only to find out this wasn't how womens sports worked in reality, and made it a fictitious movie instead (womp womp.) I wish more women especially would see through this.

The second reason this debate is brought up is because it normalizes open transvestigating as normal and acceptable behaviour. "Transvestigating", a behaviour common in anti-trans spaces, is the act of examinating someone's physical features, medical history, personal life and childhood to out them as transgender. I hope I don't need to explain why this is extremely invasive for anyone to go through, wether or not they're transgender or not, and I would hope that it's behaviour most people would find creepy and weird and would be uncomfortable to go through themselves. It also, a lot of times, portrays not-cisgender as the worse thing to be, even if the reason for why is unclear (it's why Lady Gaga's response to invasively being essentially transvestigated -- something I suspect she was specifically for being a queer, inovative artist -- is so perfect: "my fans don't care and neither do I.") But I don't know if people understand that being transvestigated is an inherently humiliating ritual, born out of cementing who's "really" a woman. When Imane Khalif was accused of being a man in women's sport, despite being raised female and passing the IOC's criteria for competing, there where many who were willing to engage in public discussions about her genitals, her chromosomal composition, her hormones, pictures from her childhood, both on her side and against her. Again, "engaging" in the "debate", is in and of itself a win for the person critizing Imane Khalif, because it establishes speculating someone's sex characteristics in public as acceptible behaviour. Once this is established as acceptable behaviour in sports, the goal post can be moved to be acceptable behaviour in politics, culture and so on -- if a woman is too masculine, too successfull, too outspoken, too queer, it's fair game to speculate on whether she's a woman at all.

In one scene of the transmisogynistic movie I mentioned earlier, Lady Ballers, the gang of men pretending to be women to play women's sport arrive at their first game, only to find the stadium completely empty. Their coach remarks, "this is women's basketball, boys, nobody watches this." This highlights the hypochrisy of the trans athlete debate on the dot. A large chunk of the people advancing this debate view women's sport as an uniteresting side activity that it's sweet women get the chance to do on the sidelines. Are we really ready to believe that JD Vance, who believe childless women have no stake in the future of their country and should not be in goverment, cares deeply about women's sport? Are we really going to be so naive as to think this is a broken clock being right twice a day, and not a part of a bigger narrative that peolpe like him gladly participates in? We live in a time when there's more female athletes at the Olympics than ever -- at a time when women's gymnastics are being reshaped from a sport for young girls for one of adult, strong, groundbreaking women. If someone seemingly finds no interest in this, but wants big debates on why a woman being punched too hard in a sport that usually understood, at least in the men's class, as about being punched until you can't get up again, I suggest you just call their bullshit.∎