{"id":1542,"date":"2022-07-04T19:21:37","date_gmt":"2022-07-04T07:21:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/womensliberationaotearoa.org.nz\/?p=1542"},"modified":"2022-07-05T09:16:42","modified_gmt":"2022-07-04T21:16:42","slug":"when-the-chickens-come-home-to-roost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/womensliberationaotearoa.org.nz\/women-s-lib-stag\/when-the-chickens-come-home-to-roost\/","title":{"rendered":"When the Chickens Come Home to Roost"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nWhen the Chickens Come Home to Roost<\/strong>
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\nBy: Aphra
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

04 July 2022<\/b><\/p>\n

Kate Weatherly, a New Zealand transgender athlete in women\u2019s downhill mountain biking, has spoken out<\/a> against FINA\u2019s (F\u00e9d\u00e9ration Internationale De Natation) new rules for trans inclusion in women\u2019s events.<\/p>\n

In a sense, Weatherly is right, there are bigger issues in women’s sport than the participation of a few transgender athletes.<\/p>\n

It must be galling to people who’ve been involved in, and advocated for women’s sports, to see people who barely acknowledged its existence previously, now leaping to its defence \u2013 some of them not being for <\/em>women athletes, as much as being against<\/em> trans athletes.<\/p>\n

But, like people’s knowledge of female biology having increased in line with the need to construct arguments against ideologies which minimise or even deny the material reality of reproductive sex, there\u2019s some good in the increase in interest in women\u2019s sports, and some of the wider issues have become better understood as a result of it.<\/p>\n

What Weatherly, and others with a vested interest, need to realise is that way more people now see the elephant on the top of a grand piano in the corner of the room \u2013 the one that radical trans activists and allies still insist does not exist, or is just a figment of bigoted imaginations.<\/p>\n

The elephant is sex self-ID; the piano is its under-pinning ideology.<\/p>\n

Trans athletes\u2019 rights to compete within women\u2019s sports piggy-backed the case taken to the Court of Arbitration in Sport (CAS) by Dutee Chand, an intersex athlete.<\/p>\n

The International Olympic Committee and international sports federations tried the compromise of a testosterone reduction to 10 nmols\/L (four times the top of the standard reference range for natal females) for one year prior to competition.<\/p>\n

When the successes of the push for sex self-ID emboldened radical trans athletes and allies to argue for no<\/strong> limits on endogenous testosterone, and for exogenous testosterone limits to be individually assessed, the IOC bureaucrats threw their hands in the air and said it was down to individual sports federations.<\/p>\n

These trans activists argued that any forced change in a trans athlete’s body was a breach of her or his human rights, and all that should count for entry into women\u2019s competition is a self-declared, individual sense of gender identity.<\/p>\n

The athletic performance advantages accrued by going through a testosterone fuelled male puberty were declared to be just another set of naturally occurring physical attributes, no different in essence from Michael Phelps\u2019 arm span or Michael Jordan\u2019s height and reach.<\/p>\n

That was always going to be a step too far for a wide range of people, and anyone with half a tactical brain should have known that the piano would eventually collapse under the elephant\u2019s weight. The ideology could not stand up under the weight of its own contradictions.<\/p>\n

It was the entry of a natal male transgender athlete into women\u2019s college level swimming \u2013 an almost exclusively white and middle-class dominated sport \u2013 that was the game changer.<\/p>\n

Lia Thomas proved to be the step too far for some influential people.<\/p>\n

Thomas\u2019 entry into US women\u2019s college level swimming events fuelled the outrage already generated in college athletics, but it is the socio-economic profiles of US college swimmers, and the competitive conveyor belt which runs into world championships and the Olympics, which tipped the balance.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s noteworthy that it took a population of affluent, white people to push for, and get the strictest criteria yet for the inclusion of trans athletes in women\u2019s sports.<\/p>\n

This section of the population proved to be way more influential than the women who have been arguing for years about the potential (and actual) ill-effects of unregulated sex-self ID on vulnerable women, eg. prisoners, domestic violence victims etc.<\/p>\n

There is a wider political fire raging which radical trans rights demands have helped to fuel, in some instances, inadvertently. This is the rise of the far right in the USA, and elsewhere \u2013 a rise in which a number of political and economic agendas, have coalesced.<\/p>\n

A key catalyst in that process is the perception of radical trans demands as a threat,<\/em> not just to women\u2019s sex-based rights, but to a number of other deeply entrenched interests, especially in the area of parental rights.<\/p>\n

What all people who really care about human rights and civil liberties should be worried about is \u2013 when the trans rights pendulum swings the other way in the land of its birth, with the added momentum from a coalition of right wing interests, what else it might sweep off the table.<\/p>\n

Those feminists who find common cause with the far right on trans issues should heed the warning that when supping with the devil, there\u2019s no free lunch. There\u2019s always a price to pay. History provides us with ample evidence of who pays first and most.<\/p>\n

And no, it\u2019s not the rich and powerful, white, natal males who sit at transgenderism\u2019s top table.<\/p>\n

HOME<\/a>
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Kate Weatherly, a New Zealand transgender athlete in women\u2019s downhill mountain biking, has spoken out against FINA\u2019s (F\u00e9d\u00e9ration Internationale De Natation) new rules for trans inclusion in women\u2019s events.<\/p>\n

In a sense, Weatherly is right, there are bigger issues in women’s sport than the participation of a few transgender athletes. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1558,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[52,44,55,47],"class_list":["post-1542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-gender-identity","tag-left-politics","tag-women","tag-womens-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/womensliberationaotearoa.org.nz\/women-s-lib-stag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/womensliberationaotearoa.org.nz\/women-s-lib-stag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/womensliberationaotearoa.org.nz\/women-s-lib-stag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/womensliberationaotearoa.org.nz\/women-s-lib-stag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/womensliberationaotearoa.org.nz\/women-s-lib-stag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1542"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/womensliberationaotearoa.org.nz\/women-s-lib-stag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1542\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1690,"href":"https:\/\/womensliberationaotearoa.org.nz\/women-s-lib-stag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1542\/revisions\/1690"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/womensliberationaotearoa.org.nz\/women-s-lib-stag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/womensliberationaotearoa.org.nz\/women-s-lib-stag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/womensliberationaotearoa.org.nz\/women-s-lib-stag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/womensliberationaotearoa.org.nz\/women-s-lib-stag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}