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[av_hr class=’invisible’ icon_select=’yes’ icon=’ue808′ font=’entypo-fontello’ position=’center’ shadow=’no-shadow’ height=’20’ custom_border=’av-border-thin’ custom_width=’50px’ custom_margin_top=’30px’ custom_margin_bottom=’30px’ custom_border_color=” custom_icon_color=” id=” custom_class=” template_class=” av_uid=’av-2sxn3v’ sc_version=’1.0′ admin_preview_bg=”]<\/p>\n
[av_textblock size=” av-medium-font-size=” av-small-font-size=” av-mini-font-size=” font_color=” color=” id=” custom_class=” template_class=” av_uid=’av-ksa8d7qh’ sc_version=’1.0′ admin_preview_bg=”] 13 August 2021<\/b><\/p>\n Radio New Zealand\u2019s (RNZ) Media Watch on <\/span>August 8<\/span>th<\/span><\/a> was headlined, \u201cGOAT in a boat – and a trans trailblazer in Tokyo\u201d. It focussed nine of its eleven minutes on the latter \u2013 the transgender weightlifter, Laurel Hubbard.<\/span><\/p>\n \n The inclusion in the Olympic Games\u2019 women\u2019s weightlifting of someone who had set national records at junior level as a male and transitioned to living as a woman in 2012, resulted in extremes of opinion for and against.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \n Hubbard failed to make it into the second round of the competition. The weightlifter admitted subsequently to having been \u201coverwhelmed by the occasion\u201d and acknowledged an age-related reliance on anti-inflammatory drugs in order to be able to compete.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \n An unseemly scramble<\/b><\/p>\n \n The scramble for media places at an event which usually attracts comparatively little attention was an insult to the female athletes. That insult was compounded by the graceless exit of a third of the media as soon as Hubbard was eliminated. Laurel had left the building; nothing more to see there \u2013 only natal women. (Almost all women of colour as it happens, but I imagine the irony in that escaped the hacks.)<\/span><\/p>\n \n Maja Burry, who was present, said the sound of the cameras when Hubbard appeared was deafening. It was not as deafening as the silence of the three medallists when asked at the post-competition press conference what they thought about the inclusion of a transwoman in their event.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \n Hubbard\u2019s rather ignominious exit did nothing to calm the media frenzy, and RNZ\u2019s description of the weightlifter as a <\/span>trans trailblazer<\/span><\/i>, alongside Lisa Carrington, is an outcome of that.<\/span><\/p>\n \n Why was \u201cgender the agenda\u201d; why was there so much media noise about the mere presence of a forty-three year-old transgender weightlifter who had lived as a highly privileged white man for thirty-five years? Why were there global headlines about an athlete who failed; whose achievement was to identify as a trans woman and to enter a women\u2019s sport in which the average performance advantage for natal men is in the region of thirty per cent?<\/span><\/p>\n \n Is Hubbard the shy, modest, and self-deprecating person of the carefully managed press interviews, or a coolly calculating and driven competitor intent upon becoming a medal winner in the only category in which that was possible? Or, as some would have it, is Hubbard an ideologue working to push trans athletes\u2019 participation in women\u2019s sports into the media spotlight and to garner public support?<\/span><\/p>\n \n The back story<\/b><\/p>\n \n As a promising young weightlifter in the newly created super heavyweight division, Hubbard set the New Zealand Junior weightlifting record of 300kg in 1998, before retiring from the sport in 2001.<\/span><\/p>\n \n In 2012, having been appointed as Executive Officer of Olympic Weightlifting New Zealand, Hubbard transitioned to living as a woman, entered the tiny world of New Zealand women\u2019s super-heavyweight weightlifting, and took the New Zealand spot at the 2017 Commonwealth Games, only to sustain an elbow injury when trying to break the Games record.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \n A subsequent return to competition saw Hubbard represent New Zealand at Olympic qualifying events, culminating in clinching the Oceania spot in the Olympic Games, only to fail to make it through the first round.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \n After the Commonwealth Games, and while preparing for the Olympics, Hubbard was charged with careless driving causing injury but was discharged without conviction and granted name suppression. The former judicial decision was to enable international travel to sporting events, and the latter was to avoid any media scrutiny which might interfere with Olympics preparations. Hubbard fought for a year to maintain name suppression \u2013 which seems like the action of a strong-minded and success-focussed individual.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \n Although claiming never to have been involved in sport for \u201cpublicity or profile\u201d, the intense media attention of competing at the Oluympics as a transgender athlete was completely predictable, as was the wider public attention. Was all that highly focussed effort and fighting back from serious injury purely because of a love of the sport \u2013 a non-competitive purist\u2019s love of lifting? If so, surely that could have more easily been expressed in other ways \u2013 like coaching and smoothing the pathways to success of less privileged young people, for example.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \n Putting all that together, it is quite hard to believe Laurel Hubbard is actually, or at least totally, the intensely private, shy, and self-effacing person of the curated public image.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \n W\u0101hine toa<\/b><\/p>\n \n But what got up a lot of noses about the RNZ report, which is part of a significant increase in trans-positive media pieces over the past two years, was that crass juxtaposition of Hubbard with Lisa Carrington.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \n Carrington is an extraordinary athlete who is a great ambassador for New Zealand sport and for M\u0101ori. A w\u0101hine toa who, by winning three gold medals, became New Zealand\u2019s most decorated Olympian ever.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \n And there\u2019s Dame Valerie Adams, another great ambassador for her sport and her country. A w\u0101hine toa who, having had two children, and in her very last international competition, won a bronze medal.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \n Then there\u2019s Emma Twigg, a proud lesbian and spokeswoman for lesbian and gay rights; a w\u0101hine toa who came back from retirement to win a gold medal.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \n And how about young Ellesse Andrews, a track cyclist who rode an astonishing race in the keirin to win silver, and who set a New Zealand record in the sprint. A w\u0101hine toa on wheels.<\/span><\/p>\n \n Every one of these great female athletes, and all the others who competed, could be beaten by mediocre male athletes because of the average performance advantage that genetic males who have gone through male puberty have over genetic females \u2013 advantages that, Brendan Telfer, please note, are NOT all lost on transition.<\/span><\/p>\n \n When is doping legal?<\/b><\/p>\n \n Telfer was cited in the Mediawatch report for his response to Duncan Garner on the question of the loss of performance experienced by male to female trans athletes post transition. He coyly referred to \u201ccertain medical procedures which reduce testosterone level\u201d and claimed that meant Hubbard no longer had male strength.<\/span><\/p>\n \n Clearly, he had not bothered to read the science which shows that male average performance advantage is <\/span>not<\/b> all lost on transition – which is why Hubbard, aged forty-three, eight years after transition, can still lift to within fifteen kgs of what was achieved over half a lifetime ago as a man.<\/span><\/p>\n \n Telfer ignored the fact that many trans athletes do not have an orchiectomy, and those who retain their testicles only need to reduce endogenous testosterone to a level that is above the bottom of the standard reference range (SRR) for males, and <\/span>four times<\/b> the top<\/b> of the SRR for females.<\/span><\/p>\n \n
\nBy: Aphra<\/strong><\/p>\n