We Don't Need To Stop Women From Competing In Men's Sport...

Last month, the International Olympic Committee announced that transgender women athletes would be barred from competing in all Olympic events in the women’s category – but not the men’s events.

Well, that’s right, they are men, after all. No-one’s suggesting they not be allowed to compete at all, are they? 

The new rules effectively redefine womanhood – but not manhood – as a novel and previously unrecognized category consisting only of those with a specific set of genetic prerequisites.

No, they aren’t doing any such thing, they are simply expecting women to compete with women and men with men, like it was before the madness of transgenderism spread across the globe like a plague. 

To comply with this new requirement, women athletes – but not male ones – will be made to submit to genetic testing, to determine whether their womanhood meets the committee’s standards

Because women aren't trying to cheat their way into men's sport, you idiot! 

The move comes as increased political and media attention to the issue of trans rights and visibility over the past years – along with pressure from the Trump administration – has led athletic federations to ban trans women from sports competitions, a demand that has largely not been made for transgender men in women’s or men’s sports.

See my last point!  

Those who support the bans claim that testosterone, male puberty or male genetics confer an advantage in athletics, and that trans women must therefore be banned in order to preserve the integrity of women’s competitions. This sounds like the kind of argument someone could make without being unreasonably motivated by bigotry; the IOC, for instance, claims that its new ban is backed up by science and evidence.

It is, undeniably, as a fellow columnist points out.

This new insistence that a complicated scientific question is in fact a simple one – and that it is determinative and relevant only for women, and not for men – suggests that something other than a robust commitment to fairness is at play.

No, that's exactly what's at play here. 

It is possible to approach the question of trans participation in sports in a way that respects the dignity and identity of trans athletes and grapples with this range of possibilities.

Dignity? Lady, a man whose decided to play dress-up in womanface so he can cheat at sports hasn't got any dignity to lose.

Women who are not dainty, who are not weak, who are not reticent or passive or demure, will now be accused of being men. They will be hounded, smeared and degraded in ways that arise from transphobia but redound, finally, to more old-fashioned forms of homophobia and misogyny.

No, they'll simply have to take a swab to prove they are women. Far less undignified than peeing in a cup, which they are used to doing for drug testing.. 

Topical!

You can rely on Matt...

I'm Sanguine About This, Actually..

...because so could the next Abdi Waise, the next Elias Hussain Mahmud, the next Muhiddin Mire, the next Abdalla Ali Hemed, the next Muhyadeen Osman, Bilal Ahmed and Mowled Yussuf too.

And I'm happy with the 'sacrifice' of a tawdry bauble in some sport. I think we gain more than we might potentially lose.

Generation Snowflake Goes To Rio!

Unicode President Mark Davis confirmed the move, telling Buzzfeed 'The committee decided not to mark them as Emoji, but to add them as characters.' This means they will not show up on emoji keyboards.

Previously he responded to criticism in the New York Times, saying , 'Some people are bothered by the inclusion of the rifle as a candidate, but the reason that's included is because shooting is an Olympic sport.'

Not for much longer, if the usual suspects get their way...

Soon after it was announced, the rifle was protested by a British gun control group, which told the BBC, 'It would be familiarising and popularising the image of a weapon which is not a good idea.'

They aren't named. There can't be that many of them, though, surely? After all, we don't need gun control, here, we've already got it.

And it's doing such a good job.

I Don't Know Quite Why...

...but somehow, I always thought he'd have a chihuahua or something.

An Olympic Legacy They Don’t Want To Advertise…

…unlike the building projects:

Three west African Olympic athletes and a coach who vanished after last summer’s Games are among “missing people” Newham police are searching for, it was revealed this week.

Perhaps they thought they were entered for the 2012 Hide And Seek, and no one told them that wasn’t an official event?

The whereabouts of female sprinter, Assiata Toure, 20, from Guinea; Cameroon wonen’s football team’s reserve goalkeeper, Laure Ngako Tchimi, 25; Judo player Mandembo Kebika Cedric, 29, from the Democratic Republic of Congo; and Ivory Coast’s wrestling coach, Yves Adje, 30, remain a mystery.

Yeah. It’s not like they’ll stick out in Stratford.

Det Ch Insp, Dave Rock, investigating officer for Newham’s Missing Persons Unit, said: “We’re working with the UK Border Agency to find them, but I think we can assume they have simply wandered off to make a better life for themselves in this country.”

Oh, I think so too. Say, shouldn't there be a government agency set up to ensure that doesn't happen?

On Your Marks, Get Set, Go!

I didn’t think it’d be long before the whining started. Jackie Ashley on the upcoming Paralympics:

There is a crude, unthinking sports fan who confuses the human lottery with virtue; who worships a Bolt or a Phelps because they are big and physically impressive; or who thinks that Australian or British sportspeople are inherently "better". Why waste time talking about it? Because it's exactly the same kind of stupidity that denigrates other people because they happen to have been born with physical palsy or a learning disability, or to have had a car accident that resulted in both legs being amputated.

See, we shouldn’t have cheered for Mo Farah, because it makes us more likely to go out and tip a disabled man out of his wheelchair.

I think that’s what she’s saying, anyway.

… the Paralympics may be morally more important than the Olympics. For the stupid adoration of people because of their physical luck has as its flip side the stupid ridiculing or hostility to people because of their disabilities. In essence, it's the same thing. The comedian's vile insult, the punch at a bus-stop, the schoolboy mockery of wheelchair-users are all failures of empathy – failures to see the people who are actually there.

Ah. Yes, idiotic as it might sound, that is indeed what she’s saying.

And in Britain, at least, this is the time to worry. Official government figures show that the number of disability hate crimes reported to the police in England and Wales has reached a record high – there were some 1,942 last year.

Have they indeed?

So what's going on?

Well, it’s simple. For one thing, we’re recording them as such now, whereas before they would have simply gone down as crimes against the person (which, since you seem to dislike the use of labels, I’d have thought you’d be in favour of?).

For another, victims have realised that there’s an advantage to be had in claiming to have a ‘high profile’ crime, so it wouldn’t surprise me one little bit if a disability is claimed as the reason for a crime, when it may not have been the case at all.

Charities believe it must be linked to the rise in "scrounger" rhetoric by ministers, and the suggestion that huge numbers of people are dishonestly claiming benefits.

Of course they believe that. Given the alternative…

And because there are always a few bad apples, it is an addictively easy blame game. Yes, there are idle people with disabilities. Yes, there are crooks who happen to be partially sighted. It's the same with those who aren't disabled … except that they are a little harder to pick out, and pick on.

If you think people are more sympathetic to able-bodied criminals and benefit cheats, you really haven’t read many local newspapers…

As the Paralympics will remind us, there's a vast range of disability, and it's people with learning disabilities who are most at risk. According to the Papworth Trust, 90% of them report being bullied, with a third saying it happens every week or every day. These are the people at the sharpest end of the fear and insecurity that comes with hard times. What's happening to them is the latest episode in the sad saga of discrimination of old: "they're the same" – all black, gay or Jewish people. It's seeing the label, not the person.

Oooh, a Godwin!

Mostly, in modern Britain, we've moved beyond this. Mostly, but not quite. That's why the Paralympics matters so much.

Yes, to avoid labelling which leads to thinking of people as different we should have a great big separate event, exclusively for the disabled.

And not mention Oscar Pistorius. Not once.

Sunday Funnies...

So, as the events draw to a close this evening (please, not McCartney again!), some tips for Rio!

Sunday Funnies...

And it's all coming true, right here, right now...

What A Pity Whining About ‘Privilege’ Isn’t An Olympic Sport…

…Peter Wilby would surely be a quadruple gold-medallist, if it was:

Even in the middle of an international sporting festival, where nothing but raw talent should count, you can't get away from the British class system.

Because, obviously, those who went to fee-paying schools must not have any of that ‘raw talent’. They must have got where they are through privilege alone…

The preferred explanation for the over-representation of fee-charging schools among elite sports players is the same as that advanced for the dominance of such schools in Westminster politics, Whitehall, the judiciary, medicine, senior media positions and so on. State school teachers are in thrall to egalitarian ideology and therefore discourage talented children from aspiring to the top, whether in sport, academic work or career ambition. All would be well if we could bring state schools up to private school standards.

Well, there’s certainly a fair bit of that about, it can’t be denied. And if we could get rid of the ‘all must have prizes’ nonsense it’d help, but it still wouldn’t be enough.

You see, for a start, there’s that sell-off of playing fields, as even Wilby has to admit to:

We can attribute some of the declining success of state school alumni to the sale of playing fields and to teachers' greater reluctance to supervise out-of-hours sport, partly because of changes in their contracts, partly because of increased pressure to meet academic targets.

Odd. Is he saying that teachers at fee-paying schools don’t feel any of that pressure?

Even pop music is now, according to one recent analysis of the Top 40, dominated by the products of private education.

Umm…

We should be thankful that football, for all its faults, still gives children from less affluent homes a chance of success.

Yes, they can seek to emulate these sterling examples of the noble sport, can’t they?

Wilby isn't the only one peddling this nonsense, as MacHeath points out.

Those Pesky Thais/Japanese/Chinese…

Under-fire private security firm G4S was at the centre of another embarrassing Olympics scandal today after an employee allegedly called a soldier a 'baby killer' as they worked at a Games venue.

The Asian civilian guard, who faces the sack, is said to have spat at the serviceman and made the abusive remark at the archery contest at Lord's Cricket Ground.

And what prompted this, I wonder?

Misplaced anger at the Hiroshima or Nagasaki Bombs? A festering resentment over failure to intervene in the Boxer Rebellion or the Fall of Saigon?

The remark is believed to have been a reference to the soldier's service in Afghanistan.

Ah. Say no more. I suppose I should have known...

And as QM points out:

"There's that ubiquitous 'Asian' tag again, which is a gross insult to the vast majority of Asians who are polite, civilised and generally not Islamic in nature. You can pretty much accept that if the roles had been reversed the police would most likely have been called and an arrest made for a hate crime."

Well, indeed!

Sunday Funnies...

Well, c'mon. What else...?

Blog Title Of The Month - Special Olympics Edition

Taking bronze, who else, but Anna Raccoon?

A very creditable silver goes to Al Jahom:

And taking home the gold, it's Woman on a Raft:

Quote Of The Month - Special Olympics Edition

Bronze goes to Tom Paine:

I suspect these elements of the policy are pointless and therefore simply another example of LOCOG's tone deaf PR ability to make the inherently lovable despicable. Ergo they have failed to restrict your freedom of speech in any meaningful way. Relax. Chill. Worry rather about the costs of the games you will be paying for years to come.

Taking silver is A K Haart with a heartfelt paean to the true Olympic aspiration:

Sport is good, but the Olympics isn’t sport, it’s a circus. It’s a degrading circus too, because all is so deliberate and contrived and so very far removed from the simple exhilaration of running, jumping, swimming and the innocent pleasure of training hand and eye to do what once upon a time they could never do.

And a worthy gold, Heresy Corner points out that it's fitting we should host this farce, after all:

"The gigantic security budget, though, is part of a trend: in the midst of auserity and global recession, the past few years have seen an unpredented boom for the "loose confederation of defence, IT and biotechnology industries" that make up the domestic security sector. The Olympics operation belongs in the same realm as the government's monstrous proposals for email surveillance, now the subject of lacklustre Parliamentary scrutiny. As for the draconian protections - many legally novel and outrageous - enacted in the interests of corporate sponsors, these too are scarcely out of keeping with zealous copyright laws that see a young British student facing extradition to the United States for offences allegedly committed in his own bedroom.

The Olympics merely provide a uniquely public and unavoidable demonstration of the world, and the country, we have become."

Post Of The Month - Special Olympics Edition

Bearwatch wins bronze for the cheeky conflation of two huge overblown disasters.

Tim Worstall mounts the podium to receive silver for this sterling suggestion for how to handle union blackmailers.

The superlative Al Jahom takes gold by summing up this tawdry little spectacle in top style.

It's Finally Here!

Now, how to welcome it properly?

Hmmmm.....

*snaps fingers*

I have the perfect solution! Watch this space...

A Strange Sort Of 'Prejudice'...

Sascha, 34, and Nyree, 31 - who have an OBE and MBE respectively for their services to disability sport - have cerebral palsy (CP), a neurological condition that normally occurs before or during birth.

For a number of reasons, usually lack of blood supply and therefore oxygen, parts of the brain die or do not develop.

Despite this, their sporting achievement has been impressive. Though, as ever, it's not been without  heartache:

Both Sascha and Nyree have faced great obstacles. Not least among these is prejudice – whether from cruel bullies who taunted them...

Which is truly appalling.

...or well-meaning surgeons who offered to help ‘fix’ them.

I... What?

Hang on, how is that prejudice?

*thumbs through dictionary*

Nope!

Sascha has a form of CP known as hemiplegia – as well as walking with a limp, his right arm is thinner and weaker than normal and his hand is permanently clenched and turned inwards.

Nyree, who grew up in South Wales, has diplegia, meaning both her legs are affected so she cannot walk without support. ‘If I were standing in the middle of a room without my stick, I would fall over,’ she explains. She uses a wheelchair much of the time.

Wouldn't offering to 'fix' this be considered just what doctors are for..?

I have come across the bizarre phenomenon of 'deaf culture' before, but I've never seen this concept ascribed to other disabilities. It seems both were denied a real choice in the matter from a young age, though.  Phillip Larkin was right:

Both were offered surgery as children, but neither has ever felt the need for medical intervention, arguing that exercise help them to manage their symptoms.

‘Mum was told I could have an operation to stretch the tendons in my leg but she said no. She wanted me to do it naturally with physio and exercise,’ says Sascha.

Nyree’s father, John Lewis, and her aunt also had CP, and they didn’t want her to have surgery. ‘I was offered an operation where they cut the tendons in the back of the ankles, knees and groin,’ she says.

‘My father didn’t want me to have it – his sister had it and he said she still had difficulty walking. A friend with a similar disability has had so many operations – little tweaks to fuse bones and make her legs more stable, things like that. To me, it’s not worth it.’

Maybe so. But that's not 'prejudice'. And to label it such - whether you are responsible for the wording, or the 'Mail' reporter - is to bring the entire concept into disrepute...

When Did We Decide This?

'This' being the idea that changing our habits and our lives and accepting restrictions in response to a terrorist threat was a good thing, and not something that would mean the terrorists have won?

Not much more to say about the M6 bus debacle that hasn't already been said by SBML, Leg-Iron or Anna but I was struck by just how many comments to websites and especially newspapers seemed to think that this - the sight of innocent passengers herded onto the tarmac and guarded by gun-toting police for hours - was acceptable.

Acceptable because 'You can't be too careful!' and 'What if it had been a real incident!' and 'Well, there's the Olympics to think about, after all!'....

All said as if that was a perfect justification for the way the passengers were treated!

The police, of course, are in CYA mode, and idiots like these are helping them do it:

The police spokesman added: 'Given the nature of the report, we responded swiftly and proportionately, treating the information as credible and extremely seriously.'

The force rejected suggestions it had over-reacted and said a 'sufficient number of officers attended the incident'.

Oh, right. It wasn't a case of 'Send everything!!!' then? Because I couldn't help but think it'd be a god time to be a mugger or bank robber in Tamworth while this was ongoing...

Over at Inspector Gadget's blog the attempt to excuse the inexcusable has reached epic proportions:

Oh, gawd!! Why stop there? I mean, if you are going to make up a scary story to excuse your overreaction, make it a GOOD one!

Go for weaponised anthrax, bio-engineered Ebola, or maybe even VX (‘Your muscles freeze, you can’t breathe, you spasm so hard you break your own back and spit your guts out. But that’s after your skin melts off’).

Hell, say you suspected the zombie virus from ‘The Walking Dead’. You aren’t going to look any stupider than you already do.

It’s Going To Take A Bit More Than Holding Hands & Singing ‘Kumbaya’, Isn’t It?

The family of murdered schoolboy Jimmy Mizen joined forces with Boris Johnson today to call for “100 days of peace” over the Olympic Games.

I can see why Boris got involved. Who wouldn’t ‘call for peace’? Look at the PR opportunity!

But what is this really likely to achieve?

Jimmy’s father Barry Mizen wants young Londoners to stage a series of events over the next 100 days promoting peace.

“There is a lovely feeling in London at the moment around the Jubilee and the Games,” he said.

Is there? These people, it seems, would beg to differ. For them, it seems it’s ‘business as usual’…

His wife, Margaret, added: “If young people feel that they have a stake in their local community they will feel connected to it.

If we are to make our city safer for our children, they need to be apart (sic)of the conversation.”

These ‘young people’ are letting their fists and knives and guns do the talking for them. They don’t want to be a part of the conversation, or a part of the community.

They want to run the community.

As part of that they are working with charity London Citizens to set up a network of “safe havens” around London, where youngsters under threat would be able to seek refuge in shops or businesses.

Not to pour cold water on this great idea, but…well, it’s a little passive, isn’t it?

Rather than provide places of safe haven for the attacked, why not ensure that the attackers feel in need of a place of safe haven?

Why not make them feel under threat, afraid to walk the streets, and forever watching over their shoulders?

The Mayor signed a “peace car” which will travel across London promoting the campaign.

He said: “What the Mizen family and Grace are doing is fantastic. It’s about getting youngsters to help each other.”

How about we, the adults, help the youngsters, Boris?

By ensuring those that attack them go down for many, many years, rather than be given every chance in the book and then a few more just for good measure?

Wouldn’t that do more for ‘peace’ than all the pledges and PR opportunities? It’s immeasurably harder to achieve, yes, but that’s what you get paid for...

Pure Theatre...

Border police swooped on town centre businesses in Faversham alongside firefighters, housing and environmental health officers in a secret spot-check.

Seven premises, including cafes and restaurants, received random visits from the team, which checked for illegal immigrants and hygiene and fire safety breaches on Friday last week.

Woohoo! At last! How many did they catch?

Errr...

No arrests were made...

*sigh*

Karyn Dunning, head of the Border Agency's Immigration Team in Kent, said the exercise was an "excellent example" of cooperation between Kent Police and council officers...

Apart from that wholesale failure to catch anyone, I guess? Still, just another pointless exercise.

Why pick sleepy Faversham, though?

As one of the towns along the route of the Olympic torch relay, Faversham is likely to come under increased scrutiny from emergency and security services and more secret checks are planned.

Ah.

H/T: Rob Cullen via email