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I am not a huge sports fan. I didn’t watch a lot of sports growing up. But one of my favorite professors in university happened to write their thesis on the politics of mobility rights in EUFA Soccer in the European Union and his fascinating paper lent itself to an interest in the politics of sports. And there is no question at all that the single most talked about political issue in professional sports today is where transgender people stand in the arena of athletic endeavors which have been divided by gender for many years.
The debate on whether transgender men and women should be allowed to compete in the events of the opposite sex has been done to death. And I don’t plan on weighing in too much on the actual issue itself but rather why these issues are occurring and at the heart of this issue are patriarchy, privilege, and, as is referenced in the title, rape culture.
So we know how the narrative goes. People are allegedly more dismissive of rape than they actually are. That they tend to blame the victim for what skimpy clothes they are wearing or assume that the victim themselves is promiscuous and slut shaming clouds the issue of victimhood. Oh and let’s not forget, male consumption of rape porn desensitizes them to rape in real life as the line between fantasy and reality become blurred and they proceed to inadvertently rape poor innocent young girls. Kind of like I, as a boy felt these uncontrollable urges to stomp on the heads of baby turtles by the river after playing a violent game of Mario. I’d make a snarky reference about shooting up a school after playing Call of Duty, but I never did enjoy first person shooters so the sarcasm would be based on a false premise.
So we know from rape culture and white male privilege and the overarching oppression of women by the patriarchy that 95% of all violent crimes are scenarios where men perpetrate violence of women. (And yes I know that not all feminists cite such outrageous statistics but most of the feminists who believe in those concepts aren’t going to concede to studies that demonstrate much more equal violent activity among the sexes either so in fairness to those who might actually be more fair and less biased, I will refer to those who would push the violent male narrative as PC-ers.)
And if we dare point out that men can be victims of domestic violence or sexual assault, then of course the fact that testosterone lends itself to men being significantly physically stronger than women, let alone the “well he has to get an erection to get raped which means he was aroused and therefore enjoyed it (ignoring the fact that male just like female erectile tissue can erect involuntarily with enough stimulation)”.
And that’s if they’re in a good mood. In all likelihood if I were to point that out, I’d be branded a misogynist, alt right or an MRA. The latter two are simply comical because while I submitted this article to an MRA website, I made it quite clear to the editors the first time I submitted an article to their website I did not self identify as a Men’s Rights Activist and I even said so in the article I submitted to them and they published it anyways. But the likely backlash I would receive in pointing out that rape amongst homosexuals by virtue of their definition mean a 100% likelihood of the presence of a male victim or the absence of a male perpetrator and you don’t need an academic study to confirm that is more than enough for me to believe very wholeheartedly that PC-Culture is about man hating and man bashing using their supposed care about ethnic minorities and LGBTQ+ and persons with disabilities (As someone with high functioning autism, bipolar and a recent development of seizures from the medication I was taking, I laugh at that simply to deal with the pain of how untrue that is) to do it.
Now at this point, I’ve established the concept of rape culture and a brief summary of my thoughts on it. I don’t need to do a play by play of the problems that I have with it that have nothing to do with the topic at hand except to say, obviously, not a fan. But there is one more rebuttal I have to make before I delve into the transgender portion of this article and that is the issue of sexual interference because of its relevance in a sports context.
Sexual interference is, by legal definition, a form of sexual harassment that arises when a man, while breaking up a violent altercation between two women, inadvertently touches their breasts or genitals to do so. Now, obviously, it goes without saying, that there are few if any situations in which two young girls or women beating the crap out of each other where a man would have no choice but to grab their genitals (except if being so close to a drop kick that they have to grab the thigh and then slip but that is an extremely unlikely scenario but since it can happen, worth mentioning) to stop them but the same cannot be said for breasts which just happen to fall in the same horizontal axis as arms on the human anatomy and arms happen to have fists attached to them.
The question of whether or not a man would inadvertently touch a woman’s breasts while trying to stop them from punching each other is not a question of whether or not it would happen, it’s how they would go about pushing two women apart in the heat of the moment without doing it. I mean it would be nice if men could multitask avoiding getting punched in the face by themselves while honoring an obscure sexual harassment law, but few have the reactionary capacity to do so.
Where this ties into sports and transgender rights is actually very simple. One of the trans rights activist criticisms of gendered sports is that dividing sports by sex serves no purpose other than making demeaning social statements towards women by implying they are athletically inferior to men and this is therefore a gendered issue as well as one in sexual equality. And yet for all of this criticism, the fact remains that… how exactly does a man get around accidentally touching a woman’s breast in a contact sport? And we’re not just talking about mixed martial arts or wrestling or football where such allowances might be made (and even then those “protections” are dubious since it’s something of an inevitability that a male athlete would stand trial for prolonged contact with a breast or some other loophole for a sexual harassment accusation).
But in a sport like basketball, do you think Lebron James, if he were to block a shot from a tall female basketball player but in striking the ball from her hands, and inadvertently hitting her breasts and then losing his balance and risking falling, would be more interested in not sexually harassing a woman or would he be more interested in where his feet are going as opposed to his hands? I mean it seems a tad unfair in the context of a competitive sport to expect a man to break his ankles because he has to focus his mental energy on removing his hand from a woman’s breast first. No I’m afraid that sports are divided by sex to protect male and female athletes from such litigious situations and to save sports organizations from having to deal with the legal headache of codifying conduct that would be fair to both sexes women.
So what am I trying to say here? Am I posturing and continuing to bash patriarchy theory for no reason? What does this have to do with transgender rights? Well, the answer is actually very simple. The narrative is very clear. If you have testicles and/or testosterone, you are to be feared. Your perverse and violent nature precedes you. You are the abuser. You are the rapist. You are man.
This is what PC Culture advocates have pushed for. They’ve pushed that society adopt the underlying principles of dated feminist theories in which man is the victimizer so now the phallus is the symbol of violence and the symbol of rape. This is what society has come to accept and normalize.
So if you are a man transitioning into a woman and you live in a world that has been indoctrinated into believing in the differences of physicality between a man and a woman to be that significant in areas of violence and sexual crimes, then a sport, by its very nature of having physical contact is going to experience some rather unfortunate overlap.
People aren’t going to see a woman competing in women’s league, they’re going to see a man who got surgery inflicting violence upon poor helpless women. They’re going to see to see transgender rights activists as forcing male on female violence because of their traditional victimhood in the patriarchy narrative.
And they aren’t going to listen to trans-inclusive rhetoric coming from the mouths of the very people who convinced them beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is all true. PC Culture advocates have backed themselves into a corner in which they cannot get out of. They cannot credibly advocate for the inclusion of trans women in female leagues and simultaneously perpetuate their patriarchy and rape culture narratives. You can’t proclaim the power of testosterone and the helplessness of women and then say it’s transphobic for someone to say that the testosterone levels in trans women who are in transition are a problem in competitive sports.
There is one easy solution here which would allow them to fight far more effectively for the rights of transgender people and that would be to disavow patriarchy theory and rape culture in their entirely and revise their theories. In the absence of a male vilification narrative, it becomes far less of a challenge to advocate for transgender inclusion in sports.
At the end of the day unfortunately, that isn’t going to happen. PC Culture is not about equality for women. It’s not about black lives mattering (and let’s throw in the psychologically tormenting effect of being assigned white privilege as a mixed race minority for good measure). It’s not about ending the discrimination towards LGBTQ+ and I can say as a person with disabilities, with absolute confidence, it is definitively not about inclusion of persons with disabilities.
It is about the subjugation of vulnerable populations to their theoretical framework and the control of their thoughts and their actions through identity politics. It is about controlling what we say and how we think and making it subservient to one true political ideology at the expense of every cause they claim to stand for.
And in this case, that cause is transgender rights. As for my personal views on transgender women in female sporting events, my personal position is given the toxicity created by the mess above, we are not in a position as a society to even have that conversation. But one thing I do know for certain. PC Culture advocates are the bane of minorities and transgender athletes who are suffering in the service of their political cause. And I personally wish they would stop demanding such a cost of the transgender community to be allies of them. They deserve better than such piss poor advocacy.
