It Could Happen Here - How the TERFs Ruined Cycling

Episode Date: August 20, 2023

James and Mia talk about how transphobes have targeted sport as a way to advance their agenda and how they’ve managed to persuade cycling’s governing body to effectively ban trans women from elite competition.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Wonderful. Good podcast. Introduction. Always the worst part of a podcast maybe that could just be our intro uh hi mir how are you we're doing a podcast uh i've been fide the the chess world has decided that my chess powers are too strong. And I'm now being discriminated against. It's a good time. I'm very excited. Yeah. Having a great time with my biological advantage at chess.

Yeah, that's right. Well, you know, you've got to reach those chess pieces somehow. And it's all to do with your hip angle. This is what I've learned from trans investigators. My wrists are too powerful this allows me to write down my moves faster than my opponent thus giving me an advantage on the clock yeah i can also reach the clock faster it's incredible stuff happening in the world of chess and not just chess uh sadly but in fact the Turfs have got their claws, I guess, into many sports, which is what we are talking about today.

Specifically, I thought we could talk about how the Turfs ruined cycling. Yeah. Because that is a thing they have been trying to do for some time. It's a thing I've written about before and hopefully a thing I'll be able to write about again. written about before and hopefully a thing i'll be able to write about again uh unless unless the cycling press just kind of gives itself over to the turfs which doesn't seem to have done to be fair generally generally the cycling press i think it's fair to say has lacked an intersectional analysis of anything uh but they've been better on this than i had expected uh especially the outlets which are not run by white cishet dudes in boulder which

to be fair is a minority uh but yeah strange that odd how odd um but yeah shout out in particular to outside for including a gear guide to the gear the cops used at the 2016 rnc uh which could perhaps be included as the most tone-deaf article ever written and yeah yeah incredibly and and then to leave it up in 2020 to not like cover your tracks you know this is one of those this is one of those like when the workers take boulder like no biker will go hungry moments like this is oh oh yeah boulder color Colorado is a special place for bad things. I won't say bad things don't happen because they had an awful mass shooting, but like social...

Yeah, intersectional analysis has not made it to Boulder, sadly. Great, great shame. But we're not talking about Boulder. Today, we're starting out with a little discussion of cyclocross. So cyclocross, are you familiar of cyclocross. So, cyclocross. Are you familiar with cyclocross, Mia? No. Okay, so it's a fundamentally silly sport in which I've competed, of course.

It's when competitors race skinny-tired drop-bar bikes on an off-road course. For it? Yeah. I would... Please Google... Perhaps... course um yeah i i would please google uh perhaps okay i'm gonna send you one uh one cyclocross video uh it is iconic uh for people who are who are at home uh the video is called is joey okay we can we can have me reacting live uh the the first picture that i saw when when i googled this is two people not riding on there two people carrying their bikes yes so this is a thing right you get really good at cycling you

train your entire life and then uh and then in cyclocross there are parts where you have to get off unless you're very talented you can hop the barriers um i've tried that with mixed success um uh you can also you can ride the stairs uh but you you do have to be a bit of a boss so there are barriers and challenges which you have to get off it's called field riding in dutch which is about riding have you watched the video? Holy shit! We'll include a link in the notes for everyone else. Did you watch it with the sound on? Yeah. Okay, I'm trying to figure out how to describe this.

Effectively, what has happened is this guy, okay, so this guy's like going at full speed. And then while the bike is still moving, he's attempting to get off the bike before he gets to this barrier. And he like, he just goes, he does not get off in time. The bike's going too fast. And he like, he is, he's like sprawling,

but in mid air as he's flying off his bike over this barricade thing. It is incredible yeah all the time people are shouting his name and that's what you're supposed to do you're supposed to dismount and just carry the speed you kind of you can either swing your leg through or throw your leg to the outside and then carry the speed and jump and then hop back on it's a very strange sport right and a big part of cyclocross is heckling um so uh the the crowd will heckle you right they will they'll do all kinds of things like often like crowd hand-ups are a big thing in cyclocross so like i've been handed dollar bills

what is happening in this sport oh yeah it yeah, it's very funny. The moment you're not competitive, you're just grabbing shit off the spectators. So, like, I remember racing in Las Vegas at night. There was a race in Las Vegas at night, and I ain't going to win, right? And so I'm just grabbing dollar bills and shoving them down my, like, rescue seat. What is happening? People hand you, drinks i've had beer hand ups donuts bacon uh one notable occasion a cookie

that was not just a normal cookie uh which you should fucking disclose to someone uh before you yeah that was a bad day uh i also had a pretty rough traumatic brain injury that day oh no yeah i'd already sustained a brain injury then ate the cookie i thought my blood sugar was low so i was like yeah i'm gonna get that cookie and it's gonna be great it was not it wasn't the blood sugar it was it affected my cognition so cyclocross is fun and silly and and heckling is part of it but like heckling occurs within a certain certain bounds right like you're not supposed to be mean it's just supposed to be funny like everyone's supposed to laugh so i think in 2021 everyone was rather as funny signs a part of it too right but in 2021

we saw some shit that was distinctly not funny uh when a group called save women's sport posted up at the race and held what were as you can probably guess by the name transphobic signs uh throughout the race uh so a lot of people were upset by this and by their own admission nobody wanted them there one woman told the protesters your shit feminism isn't welcome here which i think would be a great t-shirt uh if she's listening please let us we'll license your t-shirt from you uh and they were pretty roundly rejected by most of the community which is great um but the bigotry they bought really wasn't a surprise to anyone who'd been paying attention to online discourse for a while especially with respect to cycling the harassment of trans cyclists has been escalating for years um for at least five or

six years now uh the governing body usa cycling has known about this and chosen to done nothing to stop it right so this particular focus on cycling came about in 2018 when anti-trans cadres began to focus on the sport because of the success of a woman named veronica ivy and that she wasn't called veronica ivy at the time and she was using she had a different name then uh but that's her name now so i'm going to use that name out of respect for her choice for that to be her name um it she um she won a world championship in the women's 35 to 44 spring category now like i have no disrespect at all for masters athletes it's great i'm glad people are out there exercising this is not the same as an olympic gold medal right like uh the the big i would i mean people may disagree

the biggest determinant of your ability to win a master's track cycling gold medal is the amount of free time you have to exercise and the amount of money you have to buy fast gear and get to the event right wait what what what is like the difference between like masters is it's competitions for older people so uh it's it's so in cycling you have juniors and there are various you know obviously the eight-year-olds don't compete with 18-year-olds but up to 18 is juniors and there are various you know obviously the eight-year-olds don't compete with 18 year olds but up to 18 is juniors espoirs is 18 to 23 uh we use a french name because you know you don't want to be cool what what is what it's what jesus christ yeah uh yeah the french name uh under 23 right you can call it if you want it to be an anglophile uh and then uh from there you go into the elite competition uh elite competition is uh it's actually 18 and for like an 18 year old could

compete in an elite competition so could a 50 year old right but it's the highest level of competition and then you get protected age categories again once you get to 35 so so 35 to 44 45 to 54 go in 10 year blocks right um and that's for people who uh are only of that age now it's the older you get the less competitive it gets just because more people will fewer people will be racing right but um 35 plus masters sometimes they call it baby masters is um not you don't have a significant decrease in your endurance performance at 35 so like some of these people are still very good and uh that's why they call it baby masters i guess but like track cycling is not a big sport to begin with right that's going around in circles on an indoor velodrome masters track cycling it's a smaller

sport and the amount i know some excellent masters track cyclists who just don't care to go to worlds right they've been professional cyclists are very high level amateur cyclists and once you reach your mid-40s some people don't care to travel and spend that money and do that competition right um san diego has a really great track scene uh some people who i know very well have recently won multiple world championships on the track like we have a very thriving scene but not all of those people even care to go to LA to race worlds like let alone travel across the world right so it doesn't necessarily truly mean the people who win masters are the best athletes in the world for their age group and uh certainly I wouldn't say there are lots of things that make this competition unfair one of them is how much track bikes cost how much

track time costs and how much travel costs to get to the event but of course it didn't matter to these people right uh what mattered is that a trans woman had won and she became the center of the culture war um and this was really at least the first one that i was aware of um sort of instance of someone, a trans person winning a very, like a notable event in cycling. And maybe trans people have been competing in elite races in cycling for 40 years. Like Molly Cameron was the first trans woman to race in a World Cup and Monty's been racing for a while. and no one said shit no one cared right but around 2018 the the culture war around trans people was becoming heightened and so people got

mad about her winning the race and since then there's been this steady increase in transphobic sentiment towards bike races um it's really the sort of leading voice in this has been former pro bike racer Inga Thompson. She's been joined by a few amateur women in various fields voicing their feelings about the participation of trans women. And Thompson has made a lot of statements, some of which I'll choose not to share with you.

You can Google them if you want, but most of them will be... She misgenders people all the time right that's what you can find her on twitter misgendering people and i think that that is kind of the giveaway that this isn't necessarily about sport right and i think yeah that it's really important that people regardless of where you stand on sport understand that this is a wedge and it's a wedge that's designed to push trans people out and away from femininity and away from inclusion yeah i think one of the reasons why it's important is that it it's a way of like focusing the discourse

like on trans people on like really really weird interpretations of physical characteristics yeah and then this is something that you can use to sort of like you know this this is the wedge that you can use to sort of like tear this sort of issue open it's been really really effective at this and it's also been like you know it's something that's sort of like vaguely plausible to not plausibly deniable and it also plays on a really kind of effective branding strategy that these people had which is that like you know if people remember what feminism was like in like the 2010s it was almost entirely about you know and not I didn't, not just in the 2010s, like even sort of previous to this, right? Like the,

the, the notion that like women are weaker than men was something that was like, like broadly considered to be sexist. Like that was not a feminist thing. That was like, like saying that women are weaker than men. And then, you know,

when you're getting into people complaining about like, like trans women, like being on jeopardy or like this shit that's happening in chess that we're going to talk about later. It's like, okay, if you go back in time to before trans derangement syndrome set in, and you told someone that in the future this person is going to be arguing that trans women have a biological advantage in Je jeopardy because men are smarter than women they'd be like what the fuck are you talking about like this person is like a neo-nazi yeah it's or that women are only defined by their ability to bear children right and and that yeah that is your sole characteristic and value as a woman like yeah and like like this is and this you know if you go back to like simone bevoire god i hate french it's really a true it's a truly terrible language

i don't know that is the official stance of this podcast anti-french action yeah yeah but like you know i mean always has been you you you know like you you actually read the second sex and like in in the second sex is talking about you know i like her famous line it's like women like no one is born a woman like woman is made right because it's it's it's it's a social process not a biological one and then you know and and because there was like a kind of cultural victory for feminism where it suddenly became really really difficult to be a mainstream person and like call yourself uh like call yourself an anti-feminist like all of these people who believe all of the same shit that like phyllis schlafly did like have to relabel themselves feminists and yeah you know and sports is the sports the thing they pick

to do that because sports is the like it's the area they can pick where they can like with some plausible deniability start doing all of this like oh women are inherently weaker than men and have to be protected from men like shit again yeah yeah and it's just it's very much sort of like unreconstructed stuff that we would have seen as not feminist that 10 20 years ago now sadly it's being advanced by people laying claim to feminism i guess yeah so in the most recent cycle across nationals trans athlete uh austin killips finished third uh at the event local john brown gun club members had attended uh to step in and protect trans athletes where the sports governing body wouldn't and it was actually a really i mean what you saw was a lot of discourse online about austin quote-unquote blocking

uh and a cis woman athlete um and then you saw like a lot of people sort of saying that and like cis women had been uh i guess like you know that austin's inherent biological advantage i'm using heavy scare quotes here had allowed her to come third she got beaten by two two cis girls right this is always the thing like there was one of these in skateboarding where like this turf skateboarder was like yelling about how she'd been beaten by a trans woman and you look at the results she was getting beaten by eight she was she lost to an eight-year-old like she was outplaced by an eight-year-old like shut the fuck up. It's all just bullshit. And a lot of the discourse about Austin, quote-unquote, blocking someone, I don't know.

To me, it very clearly seemed to come from people who hadn't watched many other bicycle competitions. That's what we do. You push on each other, you lean on each other. If you didn't do that, people would fall over a whole lot more. It's a race. You're trying to get to the finish line first but she didn't do anything that anyone else wouldn't have done and at the time turf's kind of tried to make this a big deal but were unsuccessful and it was not really until austin won a race in new mexico a big race, Tour of the Gila, that it became, again, like it was in 2018, a very big deal, right? So one of the key leaders, as I said, is Inga Thompson. Inga's a very

accomplished cyclist. There's no doubt about that, right? She's a Bicycling Hall of Fame inductee, five-time national champion, three-time Olympic team member, a Tour de France feminine podium finisher, a three-time silver medalist at the UC tour de france feminine podium finisher a three-time silver medalist at the uci world championships but i think she's arguably more famous now for her anti-trans bigotry um she's appeared she tried to encourage cyclists to take a knee uh in protest at the uci's transgender inclusion yeah which like fox fox news finally finds something that they're okay yeah right i stayed in the new for yeah yeah they finally uh she was actually removed from her role uh on the board of a france-based american pro team for her statements

there um i thought that their statement was kind of interesting they said if shared in the absence of politics her knowledge and experience would benefit many in advanced cycling for everyone however she has decided to dedicate her time to excluding people that are otherwise currently eligible to compete in uci events she is also tempted to use our team as a platform for political activity which like is a very neutral stance but it's also it's also like it's fine right like like uh our cycling team isn't here to hate trans people if you're going to use it for hating trans people please go somewhere else like it it doesn't you don't have to like i do take a hugely radical stance to be like no this isn't a hate platform for hate speech like like go away yeah and uh they added to be clear miss thompson is entitled to her opinions and advocacy but her methods and personal attacks are inconsistent with siniska's

mission to advance opportunities for women these methods well documented on miss thompson's social media presence include dehumanization of transgender people spreading misinformation demagoguery and personal attacks on anyone who opposes her views. Spoiler alert, that includes me. She doesn't like me at all. I don't, don't be mean to trans people. Don't misgender my friends. I did think it was very funny that like this team isn't like the, like, I don't know, like the woke team for woke people. They're just trying to get along with helping women cycle. And they can't do that if they're, one of their board members is so consumed by hate that yeah no one wants to have anything to do with it um so in the wake of this protest the 2021 safe women's sport protest uh flit

lettered uh they're an official with usa cycling published an open letter calling for the resignation of the organization's CEO and the safe sport coordinator, Kelsey Erickson, who's responsible for preventing hate speech and bullying. They gather 105 signatures from racers and other cyclists in support of their demands. And the day after they sent the letter, De Martini announced he was stepping down. So he has a bit of a failure of just like there's a statement he made in an interview where he said it would be different if our athletes were going to be affected when he was talking about bans for trans athletes in interscholastic sports uh he said we don't believe they will be which uh look in technical in a technical sense because cyclists compete for clubs not schools they might

not have done but like if you think that a ban on trans kids playing at school isn't going to affect participation trans athletes in all sports everywhere yeah if you're just either completely myopic or you're burying your bigotry um he claimed he was quoted out of context uh but it was part of a pretty big block quote like i don't see how that could be taken out of context. They did say at that time that they're against any legislation that limits trans inclusion. It's worth pointing out that cycling has a body, as do all Olympic sports, that should prevent hate speech, bigotry, and bullying, right? And that's called Safe Sport.

It was set up in 2017, and that was following what happened at usa gymnastics right which was widespread sexual abuse of athletes and if people people i'm sure will remember that safe sport i feel fairly confident saying has completely failed in income in preventing abuse preventing harassment preventing bullying what it has done is uh it is perhaps given a legal shield to governing bodies, so it has prevented them getting sued. But it's done nothing to prevent this kind of bullying, which is why athletes and the community have had to take it upon themselves to do that. If there's one thing you should expect a governing body to do, it's to make sure everyone feels safe at races. But people were

legitimately worried about racing in areas where they knew there were a lot of not just turfs but like groups like the proud boys right who have kind of hung their hat on transphobia i know people who didn't go to races in areas where they were worried about that um i know people who like you know it went out of went to an effort every day to drive a different way back to their hotel at races because they're worried about... People genuinely felt unsafe doing something that no one should feel unsafe doing, which is playing.

So, as I said, Mia, you know who won't make you feel unsafe? said you know who won't make you feel unsafe i i i'm gonna say the products and services and then i'm gonna um they will wrap you up in a cocoon like blanket of gold and coins and meal kits how could you not feel so safe uh when you're surrounded by reagan coins no one fact-checked this this is a fact-check free zone yeah yeah yeah yeah the following and preceding 30 seconds have not been fact-checked all right please enjoy these adverts welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

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Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we are back, and we're still talking about TERFs. So, Saves Women Sports, which is this organisation that put on the protest, presents itself as an organic reaction

to the participation of trans women, who it repeatedly misgenders, in women's categories. It claimed that several races in the cycle across national championships privately contacted the organisation to express concerns, but only one, Evie edwards competed under

the swf team banner sws at the time was not a non-profit so it was relatively hard to find out what exactly their financial ties to various other transphobic and right-wing groups were um it's registered in minnesota as a business but it appears to be a soul or at the time again it was a soul prop run by someone called best stelzer um uh the both evie edwards and sws used the race to aggressively fundraise for their campaign uh stelzer for instance at the time was making 385 bucks per month on patreon by quote creating awareness of males invading female spaces uh page has been taken down since then uh she turfed too close to the sun uh she also received donations on her venmo page which is very funny because i don't think she realized her venmo page was public i checked it out in conjunction yeah that there is

no there there was no distinction made between uh advocacy spending and personal spending on that account, I will say. And she was taking advocacy donations and making emoji purchases on her Venmo at the time. I think maybe since has made it private. This is something that if you ever want to just, I don't know, if someone just appears in the news and they suck like go try to find them on venmo because people just don't realize that stuff and oh yeah

you know people like people recently caught uh like i think we talked about uh clarence thomas i think it was clarence thomas like people amazing paying his staffers on venmo like you can find a bunch of very funny stuff because people people are bad at doing crime now yeah i cannot tell you how many people uh literally uh had things on their venmo like travel to dc and like like on january 6th right like yeah then they're each other uh for like revolution tacos after they invaded the capital smart stuff and no notes please keep doing that uh if you're if you're planning transphobia or coups uh so much of this awareness that safe women sports awareness like i think if you're ever donating to someone who's promoting quote-unquote awareness of anything

there should be a large red flag. It's an extremely nebulous concept that very rarely does anything to help anyone. But much of this awareness seems to be tied to pretty standard right-wing anti-trans talking points. And not the many dozens, maybe hundreds of instances where trans and cis women happily compete alongside each other, have a nice time, do exercise, go go home and don't engage in any bigotry um in the past sws has worked with far-right organizations like the heritage foundation and the family research council to prepare a guide to quote help parents understand the transgender issue again if you're framing the existence of other people as an issue uh yeah you you're not that far from framing it as a question are you yeah yeah like i'm impressed that self-awareness avoided the transgender question but like only by you know uh using

the thesaurus to reframe it as an issue i guess the guide refers to the transgender trend quote unquote and repeatedly calls trans women men they uh, of course, also, you know, Stelzer in particular appears at anti-abortion rallies, anti-marriage equality rallies, things like that, right? This is part of a wider space of hate and bigotry. It's not just about sport. Cyclists have taken it upon themselves to protect trans riders.

So actions of solidarity have ranged from blocking SWS protesters at national championships, announcers refusing to, allegedly refusing to mention racers on the SWS team. That's pretty funny. Yeah, it is pretty funny. Also, there's Molly,

Molly Cameron has this organization called Ride, which is let trans kids ride. And Molly makes these wristbands, which is like a trans flag, a trans pride flag um and uh like one of my friends won the biggest race in the u.s uh he's this guy uh with his trans pride wristband on which is you know a little thing but also like it's it's nice to see people show up

like yeah it's it's nice to see and like it's rare that you'll go to a race and people won't be you won't see a few people wearing that like in pro men pro women you know both like it's rare that you'll go to a race and you won't see a few people wearing that, like in pro-men, pro-women, both. Overwhelmingly, people don't give a fuck. They're just happy if you're enjoying riding bikes. It's not like it's a big sport. The real threat to cycling is all of us getting killed by people in Teslas playing Pong. It's not trans women. but unfortunately the solidarity hasn't

extended to the governing body so two years after this initial protest right the uci effectively banned all trans women from participating in elite level cycling this happened just a few weeks before the world championships like i have friends who had to cancel their flights. Jesus Christ. Yeah. It was the most bungled, fucked up pseudo science kind of half-assed. Like it was just a mess.

The whole thing was a fucking mess. They had an extraordinary meeting in August, just a few weeks for the world championships. And like people previously had to have a to have a submit blood numbers to show a testosterone level to compete right which is a thing lots of governing bodies have been doing for a while now uh they had certified people like weeks before this they'd be like yeah you're good to go for another year and then psych no you're not you can't compete ever again. And like, this is people's jobs, right? This is their livelihood.

It's how they pay rent. It's also like being an elite cyclist is hard. It is most of your life, right? Like you got to sleep or you got to eat right. You got to train all the fucking time. You can't go out. You're going to be resting when you're not training. To take all that away from someone

with a click of the fingers and bringing no consultation for them is incredibly cruel. The UCI, I'll just read their statement because I think there's a couple of things in it we should pick apart. Obviously, can't take warning for it being inherently transphobic.

From now on, female transgender athletes who have transitioned after, quote, male puberty will be prohibited from participating in women's events on the UCI international calendar in all categories in the various disciplines. Notably, they also said, it's also impossible to rule out the possibility

that biomechanical factors, such as the shape and arrangement of the bones in their limbs, may constitute a lasting advantage for female transgender athletes. What? Yeah, it's... Yeah, there's a lot going on there, right? Like, they use female,

where most people would use woman. The barrier they set is to rule out any possibility of an advantage, right? Which is a very high barrier. That's like a kind of guilty until proven innocent situation, right? Also, like, the arrangement of the bones in my limbs changed significantly when i was racing bikes because i broke them all the fucking time

like such a strange category to choose also this requirement that you transition before puberty that's not the same as taking puberty blockers right they're requiring that you you're taking hormones before puberty like like 11 or 12 yeah which is just also now illegal in an enormous number of states like yeah and even most from what i understand most gender affirming care takes the approach of taking puberty blockers rather than yeah well and this is this is sort of like i mean this is sort of the disaster that's been happening in the last four or five years on this, which is that taking puberty blockers was the compromise position. Yes. That was the position that was taken because people thought it was too dangerous to let kids do HRT, which it's not.

It's completely fine. In fact, it's actually – you're going to go through puberty anyways right you're like like if you are in a human body you are doing uncontrolled puberty and that is less safe than doing a controlled puberty which is what you know doing like doing it or two when you are a child is yeah but yeah my position was like oh well we're not we're gonna do this we'll do puberty blockers and then like everyone went insane about puberty blockers and now like even the compromise position's been sort of like you know i mean like right it roaded away that and it's like okay like you know and then like and then you know like now and then having done this right and it's like oh well now you can set up all of these rules that

are like require you to have done a thing you've now made illegal it's like this is great so yeah exactly right you now have a rule that basically bans almost anyone from participation like uh you have to begin transitioning at 11 uh it's also very nebulous like male puberty like what does that mean what what point are you defining you have been through male puberty like are we going to ask people to submit their fucking testosterone numbers from when they were eight? It's just a man. It's what it is, right? You can't ever transition satisfactorily enough.

Yeah, or like, for example, I don't know. So let's say you don't start hormones until you're like 24, but you've rearranged the bones in your body. Does this allow you, you now have feminine bone arrangement. Does this now allow you to cycle? Gender affirming orthopedic surgery. You heard it here first.

Yeah. And like, also this, and I want to get into this a little bit because it completely obfuscates or ignores, I guess, what we know to be true, that there is not a binary puberty process because humans don't exist in a binary sex, nor do they exist in binary genders, right? So I think probably the best example of this would be Maria Jose Martinez Patiño. If people aren't familiar with her, obviously Google is right there for you.

But she was dismissed from the Spanish Olympic team in 1986 for failing the gender test. She's publicly shamed for being like a secret male. She loses her fiance. She loses her funding she loses almost everything uh she fought and won a successful court battle uh illustrating the fallacy of this binary gender approach but she's not a trans woman to be clear she's an intersex woman who has androgen insensitivity syndrome uh but she was able to they were using chromosome

typing right like like you'll often this is a thing that you'll still see turf trotting out right something that was outdated in 1986 um that that like xx or xy that that is that is that is not a binary that that fits the entirety of the human species yeah there's like a lot of people with a lot of other different kinds yeah mosaicism and like it's again like i get it you didn't you're not a biologist that's fine it's okay to shut the fuck up if you don't understand something um yeah this is this is one of those things that sucks because it's like i i wish these people had decided to like try to build airplanes based off of like pre-newtonian or something because it's like

like there's no consequence for them for not understanding biology but it's like i don't know like it like if you if you if you're trying to argue that like general relativity doesn't exist like your your like your satellite is gonna fall on you but this this is the one thing where you can just like you can say shit that it's not even like like people people make the joke it's like high school biology it's like it's not it's just like elementary school biology yeah and it's not right like like youtube biology isn't it that's what it is yeah yeah um yes exactly yeah but unfortunately the consequences are for people who are not them um yeah and that's hugely unfortunate right like even we see like casta simenia won a court case this month or last month, like allowing her to compete again.

We found time and again that this notion of a binary sex is as nonsensical as the notion of a binary gender. And yet we continue to try and force people into these different competitions. I just want to read a statement that Austin made. It's very hard not to see this as them specifically seeing austin winning a big stage race in new mexico and going like right we can't fucking have that like as soon as trans women win stuff right it's fine if they come and don't win but as soon as they win stuff and again if she had this inherent massive biological advantage she would have won everything

which hasn't happened um she said i'm devastated by the uci decision to renege on the policy and framework it previously set out for inclusion my journey in professional racing has allowed me to see the world build lifelong friendships and most importantly give my absolute all to something i find deeply fulfilling no one should be denied the opportunity to chase that same joy that i and others have found through racing which Which I think is great. And I think it's important to lift up her voice in this and other trans-athlete voices. In theory, there is what's called an open category, which is the men's category.

The problem is that there are no open races. And that this category, like if you line up as a trans woman in the fucking open category, you're being very clearly othered, right? Yeah. You're being like, some of them also will have women's licenses.

Like it's not clear what men's category they can race in. But more importantly, I think as Chris Mosier pointed out, people will be familiar as Chris as the first trans athlete to attend Olympic trials in the US. The open category contradicts both International Olympic Committee guidelines

on fairness and inclusion and extensive research that states trans women do not have an inherent advantage in sport. Chris is a good follow on Twitter. It's the Chris Mosier. But it contradicts even, like, the IOC, again uh not like on the bastions of wokeness people who sent the olympics to the nazis have a better policy than this and yet cycling has chosen to go above and beyond and in large part i can't not see that

as because of the attention paid to this by people who do not give a fuck about cycling yeah because they found a wedge and because our community has generally been inclusive like even after this at the world championships there were people with trans flags at the course you know like it went world championships which trans women could not compete advocating for inclusion right it was in glasgow and as a rule the sport i think has been accepting like i've never cycled not known there being trans people in cycling uh and i've cycled a lot but this has allowed trans people to thrive and when trans people started thriving these fucking bigots decided to make this a wedge issue and that's why it's happening here welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. But it's also fucking happening in chess. So do you want to talk about chess, man? This is insane. Okay, the weird part about the chess one is like, I don't know. This is not something that anyone in chess was like talking about like chess has like a lot of incredibly weird and bizarre political stuff going on but like they're i i i had i don't know i maybe i just missed it or maybe it was just like a part of the

chess discourse i wasn't following but like i i don't know it really truly weirdly just seemingly out of nowhere i i don't know what is going on with this seemingly out of nowhere fide which is like the the international trust federation released the statement released this like policy i that says that like it has a lot of weird stuff it effectively sets up fide as like what i can only describe as a gender council where like if you want to like change your gender you have to like submit it to fide and then fide gets to decide what gender you are so great great things happening here and then also for some reason um okay so chess has had this thing for a while where chess has like there are like women's sections for stuff and there's a lot of some weird stuff going on here so like there's the regular

title like grandmaster there's also like a women's grandmaster thing which has different qualifications slightly different and this was this was set up basically because the guys who play chess are insane like I've talked about this some of the Bobby Fischer episodes right they're most of the most famous chess players in history are

utterly deranged neo-nazis or people who are even weirder than neo-nazis unreconstructed like 1917 czarists like people like that like just people with with like truly truly deeply weird political ideologies that are like unbelievably right wing um and you know and like part of part of what like happens here is that like just chess chess in general is unfathomably sexist. It's really, really bad.

And their solution to this effectively was to create this kind of parallel women's infrastructure, which kind of worked and kind of hasn't in a lot of ways and you know like part of what's going on is just like okay so a lot of girls like young girls play chess um but there's this bottleneck that happens around when you're like 13 or 14 well this is like 12 to 13 so that's 14 where like the number of girls playing chess just like collapses right and the reason that happens is because boys are fucking dog shit like this is this is like literally what's happening right is like you have a bunch of sexist like really sexist boys and then the product of this is that because there's so many fewer

like women who play chess and there are many play chess like there's just like there's like there's way less like women who are like really high rated chess players and that's because there's just like like the the the barrier of institutional sexism to like become a woman who's really good at chess is so high and then yeah okay so so this this is the sort of background so like there are these separate like women's like tournaments and stuff like that and so fide which is the chess federation is that if you like if you are a trans woman uh you cannot play in official fide events for women until fide does something and it's not entirely clear what that is so is it like a testosterone level you have to submit okay literally i i'm just gonna read this

sentence because it's it's utterly unclear what is going on here in the event that the gender was changed from male to female the player has no right to participate in official fide events or women until fide's decision is made such decision should be based on further analysis and should and shall be taken by the fide council at the earliest possible time but no longer than within a two-year period so it's you can be out for two years oh yeah wait wait why what the fuck like what what what what like what what are they possibly analyzing here, right? Is it like... What is supposed to be the thing that differentiates

the genders that makes you not be able to compete in the women's category? Is it like if you play too aggressively or some shit? It's baffling. Yeah, that is a bizarre decision. Yeah, like you say, it's not an Olympic sport, right? It's not like they have to conform to any IOC guidelines. It's fucking Sandy here.

Yeah, FIDE is the chess cartel, right? They can do whatever they want. FIDE is the chess cartel, right? Like they can do whatever they want. I mean, like I know expecting FIDE to do stuff that isn't insane is like. Look, this is the organization that after I. That after Bobby Fischer went on the radio in the Philippines and said that he hopes that the government like rounds all jewish people and kills them like they let him back into fide after that so like you know great organization run by amazing people here um yeah but this is i don't know it's it's incredibly deeply weird like i the the thing i keep thinking about is, I don't know.

This is kind of a weird kind of silly story in some ways, but like, so like the first trans person that I was like aware of, uh, it was a trans Starcraft two player named Scarlet and she's great. She's awesome. Scarlet rules. Uh,

she actually, she, she, she's, she's one of three non-korean players ever to win a tournament in korea which like i i i don't know how to express how difficult it is to win a starcraft tournament in korea like it would be like if a football team from like siberia showed up to the us was somehow allowed to play in the nfl and then like won the super bowl like that that's about the level of difficulty it is to win a starcraft tournament in korea yeah it's a jamaican bobsled team moment

yeah yeah but like like yeah so like you know it's one of those sort of like really wild things but like one of the things i remember about that was like she was always as best i could tell like always allowed like starcraft also had a women's division because you know very very similar, like even more intense sort of sexism stuff going on. Yeah, sure. I can see that being pretty toxic.

You know, like, like, yeah, like it was actually, you know, over the arc of like the, like the,

like over a decade she's been playing, like I, you know, like I've seen the scene get less transphobic, but like, as best I could tell, there was never like a thing in the women's tournaments. They were always just like,

yeah, sure. Hey, look, a girl wants to play Starcraft, like rips and yeah yeah yeah that makes uh one more of us like yeah yeah like you know and she's also like and she's like again really really good at the game um but like you know but like like this is the thing that like historically hasn't i don't know like like genuinely like in in games like this that are like not well okay

starcraft is enormously more athletic than chess um but like yeah like you know like this has been a thing where people like there's if you're in one of these like incredibly sexist environments there's like a a real like really obvious like both trans women and cis women like we're all in this together thing because you get a look at like the fucking ravening hordes of like absolutely deranged psychos in like the twitch chat and be like oh god they hate both of us yeah yeah which is also like i i i think the other thing about this is like it's unclear like who at fide like decided this like this doc just like appeared and so there's like a non-zero chance this decision is being made by men like pretty high but this is just like a decision made by a bunch of men because

fuck them and they've just decided that like you know after just like literally not giving a shit about women's chess for like the entirety of its existence they've finally decided to do something and they do something is uh make me not be able to play women's tournaments it's like right yeah you didn't take action when bobby fisher went full Nazi, but you decided to... Yeah, it's like, okay, great things are happening. I don't know. Yeah, talking of Nazis, it was, I think, actually a... Again, an intersex woman who competed for the Nazis in 1936 at the Olympics.

Huh. Yeah. I'm not entirely sure uh of her um like uh like external gender external sex presentation i guess uh but later definitely served as a man in the german armed forces but that could have been a forced social transition uh but yeah there's a long history of us trying to work out gender shit through sport um and i guess i just want to finish by like if you don't give a shit about sport you have to understand this is still important um because like sports are always about like who's on our team and who's not right that's why we didn't let black people play baseball in this fucking country uh

it's why they took uh like o like Olympic medals away from indigenous people for violating stupid amateurism rules, because they were designed to only let people of a certain class pay. It's why Colin Kaepernick doesn't have a job, right? Yeah. It's why people didn't want to go to the Nazi Olympics and went to one in Barcelona and it was bigger. Like sports, not just about being the best at exercising.

It's a social tool to include or exclude people. And if you care about including people, then I think you have to care about sport right now because that is the wedge that transphobes are using to exclude people. So, yeah, that's what i have for you i don't know um if you have money you can give it to molly uh molly cameron you can you can find her online and she will help more trans kids ride or uh yeah no no go go ride a bike it's fun and uh if if if you are one of the seven people in the world who still thinks that colin kaepernick

doesn't have a job because he's not good enough at football, come find me in the Bears parking lot. I will force you to watch an entire season of the Chicago Bears. Like, watch every quarterback we've ever fucking had in my lifetime and then I will beat you. You will be in a catatonic state after that. Yeah. I will be proven right.

Molly's website is ridegroup.org if you want to check that out. Oh yeah. Find Colin Kaepernick on the internet. Watch videos. It could happen here

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