Shaun Newman Podcast - #533 - Linda Blade

Episode Date: November 16, 2023

She is the former president of Athletics Alberta, former Canadian track champion and author of Unsporting: How trans activism and science denial are destroying sport. Let me know what you think. Text me 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast

This is Graham Wardle. Mark Friesian. This is Marty up north. This is Alex Kraner. I'm Rupa Supremania. This is Tom Longo, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks. Happy Thursday.

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Now, let's get on to the tail of the tape brought to you by Hancock Petroleum for the past 80 years. They've been an industry leader in bulk fuels, lubricants, methadol, and chemicals, delivering to your firm, commercial or oil fuel locations for more information. visit them at Hancockpatroleum.ca. She's a former Canadian track and field champion and an NCAA All-American. She's spent 25 years as a sports performance professional coach in Eminton teaching fundamental biomotor skills

to athletes from beginner to elite in over 15 sports. I'm talking about Linda Blade. So buckle up, here we go. Welcome to Sean Newman podcast. Today I'm joined by Linda Blade. So first off, thank you for making the drive to Lloyd Minster. Well, you're welcome. Thank you for having me, Sean. Well, I was telling you, I interviewed April Hutchinson,

and in that she mentioned this lady named Linda Blade, and I'm like, well, who is that? And then she started talking about you, and I'm like, oh my God, like, you're like in my back door, you know, as Canada goes, you're right there. I'm like, I need to have this lady come to Lloyd Minster and sit across for me and tell me a little bit about her story. And so that's where I want to start,

because there's going to be, I'm certainly there's going to be people. like I was saying to you, I reached out to you, and it was like the next day my brother walked in. He's like, ah, one of the ladies gave me this book you need to read. And it was your book. And I'm like, oh, that's a weird quinkid ink, you know. In saying all that, there's going to be a lot of us, including myself until I picked up your book and started reading it, that don't know your backstory, don't know anything. So I was hoping we could just start there and we'll ease into this thing. Sure.

I was born in South America. My parents were missionary Bible translators, so I was dead. down there just for the first 15 years of my life. They were Bible translators? Yes. Like they were in a project where they were translating. They had a team where they had to get people from all the different denominations and Catholic, Protestant, everybody, even a Jewish rabbi, to help them in a project where they were trying to translate the Bible from Spanish into the language of the Inca Empire, like Machu Picchu. So Quechua language.

Yeah. And so it was a big, huge project, 15-year project. was born at the beginning of that project down there. And I grew up. So what I was third child in, they ended up having five kids. And I was just this little girl. I had a, my closest sibling was a brother. And we would just play soccer in the streets of South America.

I mean, I watched Pelle play in my home stadium long before he came to North America. I was such a sport fanatic. And it was just me and the boys all the time. I was like a complete tomboy. And, you know, to the point where other people. people in the religious community were like, what's wrong with your daughter? Like talking to my dad, right? Like, what? Why? Because you like playing sports? Yeah, well, just because I was always out there and like rough and tumble and like, you know, get that girl, you know.

And then later when I was on the Bolivian national team, because I made the national team for that country first. For soccer? Yeah, for eventually track. For track. Okay. Because at some point, you know, when you go through puberty, the guys are just way better than you. And it's kind of hard at that point. And I just decided to go independent and, be a runner. And so I started training with certain Bolivian clubs and then made the national team. At 14, 15 years of age, I was doing the South American circuit. And so, you know, even like

I'd be going on a run with the national team, like up in the hills. And then it was like a Sunday morning. And then I'd just put up, like skirt over my shorts and ride my bike dusty and sweaty to church and sit in the back pew. And like, like, what is, what is, what is. wrong with this girl? Like it was, it was definitely, and then sometimes in the summer I had an aunt and uncle who were doing another project in the Amazon rainforest. So I would spend sometimes my, well, what would be summer holidays here was winter there, but it didn't matter. It was hot. So I'd be down like three hours, Sessna flight deep into the Amazon rainforest and just running around bare feet. Like it was my whole life, I had no TV, like don't play Jeopardy with me because I know nothing

about anything before 1978. Yeah, but look at the experiences you had. Yeah, it was pretty amazing. And the really cool thing, Sean, that happened when I was down there was the Bolivia National, like, Bolivia was going to have this massive international competition, and they hired a German coach.

Like, it was sort of a track and field coach that was brought in from Germany to try to help develop the Bolivia national team because they'd never won medals international. and was right during the time I was there. So in the time between just before I came back to Canada, from the time I was like 14, 15 and just in that range, I actually had one of the best coaches in the world

who had been hired through like a German embassy sort of help developing countries program. And I had one of the best coaches in the world that came and coached me track. And my technique was just perfect. Like when I got to Abbotsford, like when we came back to Canada, when I was in high school, it was grade 10. Great technique. Like people on track and community, track and field community didn't have a clue.

Like, where does this girl come from? Like, I'm starting to win everything. And, you know, right away NCAA recruited me and stuff. And it was like, my gosh, like, where did this girl come from? Like, South America, right? And I had a really good coach. Running around in the Amazon. Yeah.

So I was only in British Columbia in Abbotsford for like, two years and then I got recruited to the states and then I ended up sort of doing being an NCAA all-American in the hiptathlon and where did you go where did you go to division one yeah yeah yeah University of Maryland Terrapins uh and I was team captain and um did all of the events so I was able to score a lot of points because when you do decathlon hiptathlon you do the full hipathlon like if you have a championship you know ACCC championship you know ACC championship Like you can, I actually won meet down there. I scored more points just because they could put me in all these different events.

I scored more points entire Wake Forest women's team in that one competition just because it was a four-day, you know, championship, ACCC, Atlantic Coast Conference in those days. Maryland has changed now. What were the five you were competing in? Well, it actually ended up being seven. So it started as a pentathlon. Oh, I'm thinking pentathlon. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so headtathlon, they added two more, which I would.

wish they would have just gone ahead and added another five and called it the decathlon because I think women should do 10 events just like the men. Like I think, and to this day, they still only have seven events that they do, whereas the men do the whole decathlon, like Bruce Jenner did the decathlon. So it's a whole combination of running, jumping, throwing events, sprinting, distance running. Like, so you have to do all of the events, and then it's the test of who's the best all-around athlete. And so I finished the NCC. Such a, I got three old brothers and we argue about this all the time and we we created back in the day the pentathlon although it was a little less there was some physical attributes in there but there was a whole lot of

other things as well so boys being boys yeah and and so you know like throwing the spear javelin yeah to like high jump and long jump shot pudding and like so basically um the point is that I was kind of an all-arounder I wasn't really super really top top in any one event but I was really a good all-around athlete. And by 1986, I'd won the Canadian championship. So I was on Team Canada for a while. Missed the other 88 Olympics, which we can get into, but that was going to be my year. And I was injured. Well, you can't skip, you can't skip over it for the listeners if they haven't picked up your book and read a little bit about it. I mean, you're the Canadian champ. Yeah. You're, you know, this all-around athlete, which kind of throws the old, like, you know,

hockey right now. Everybody wants to specialize, specialize, specialize, and you're completely the opposite. Yeah. So what happened was during the 80s was huge amount of doping, cheating. And what happened...

You're in Canada. Well, in Canada, with a certain group, Ben Johnson's group, but I mean, the rest of us on Team Canada, so there was like a... It was actually like a two-class system on the Canadian team as well, which was tough because I knew as early as 1986

that was my first major international event. which was in Scotland, Commonwealth Games. And I was, we were at like the team rah-rah event. You know, they always have the team rally for all the Team Canada members. And then I had to compete the next day. So I went back to the bus because they had it at a town hall. And I went back to the bus that day early to sit there and rest while I was waiting for the rest of the team to get back on.

I just didn't want to stand on my legs any longer. I had to compete. and two or three rows behind me on that school bus was a bunch of Ben Johnson's teammates, like the group that was like the group that belonged to Charlie Francis. And they were just speaking openly like, oh, of course we're doping. Like what do they think we're doing? Like they want us to be top in the world and we're doing what we have to do because everybody else is cheating and of course we're cheating.

Like they were literally talking amongst themselves. I was like in shock because I like, I'm hearing it from the horse's mouth. These people are in the bus just talking about what they're doing, what they're doping. And I was shocked that, you know, with all the testing that was starting to happen, why they weren't getting caught. But obviously the people who knew how to dope, knew how to beat the test.

And meanwhile, Ben Johnson, Carl Lewis, like the American, they were having this big rivalry. And they were making a lot of money like it. They would be filling stadiums between, you know, just doing like these races. Like, who's going to win this time, Carl Lewis, Ben Johnson? And so I thought right away when I watched over that ensuing two years between 1986 and 1988 while I was there having sort of a, you know, right on the sidelines watching it in person, like how does this work? And it was pretty clear to me that there was so much money in the system to be gained by those who were doping and the people around them that there were times like, for example, when you'd go to an invitational competition in Europe. the meat directors would

these guys were saying this on the bus they would literally promise they wouldn't test them so they could just run and make it like fill the stadium with 100,000 people and everybody walks away with money there was like an incentive to not catch people and believe me there was way more cheating beyond Team Canada like it was only a few people

on Team Canada but like all across the world so well it's just funny to me when I hear you tell the story. I was born in 86. So you can imagine like a lot of this. I'm like, yeah. Happening a long time ago. Yeah. And I kind of remember parts of it obviously Ben Johns, like everybody knows the story. Yeah. But I would say as a Canadian, they really focus

on Russia and and East Germany. Yes, and how they were cheating and you know, and we kind of get glazed over. Well, and then we only got caught that one time. It was in the 88 Olympics and I was not at the Olympic Games that year because

the way the Canadian national team or Olympic Committee decided to pick their athletes for the Olympics, was to just compile a list of the top performances in the world and say you have to be top 15. But in my event, there were women from Soviet Union and East Germany who were flooding the top lists with their performances from meets that were never being tested. So we had a drug-tainted world list against which I was trying to compete, clean, to try to get even on to my own national team, my own Olympic team. And frankly, it's informing me to this day since I, I mean, the long story is I'll eventually

get to the point where I'm now a sport performance fitness professional because I have my PhD in kinesiology, which I got a little bit after that. But the point is that I worked and pushed myself way too hard to get into that, like in that last year. To compete against people who were doing things that were illegal. Yeah, and I didn't have the proper recovery because, you know, like when you take drugs, you obviously helps your recovery, like if, you know, if you're going to lift heavy and then you can help you recover. And so I was stupid. I actually overtrained and then ended up hurting myself. So in the end, I didn't even finish the Olympic trials. I got hurt in the middle of that. So I can't say that I should have

been there because I got hurt, but I can say that I was training too hard. And if I knew what I know now as a coach, I would have never been in that position and I probably would have made the Olympic team. But there was so much I learned through that injury and through that process about energy management. And I've said this to a young man just yesterday, a tennis player, like the number one thing, once you've done all the good training and stuff and you've got the technique and everything, the number one factor to be a high performance athlete in any sport is energy management. you have to understand when to put the energy in, when you're going to spend your energy, how are you going to manage your energy?

I mean, you can be the top, you know, you can be McDavid, but if you show up to a game and you're exhausted, then what good are you? So you have to figure out your energy levels, and I didn't do it that year. And, I mean, it was bad, and I, you know, hurt my own chances. But eventually then I went, well, I met Alberta Farm Boy, just, as I was working on my master's degree while I was still training for the, you know, Olympic team. And this was in the late 80s. And then he ended up, like we met at University of Saskatchewan because that's where I was actually,

when I got back from the NCAA, I was training in Saskatoon. And he was there doing his master's in agronomy. But immediately his goal was to work in Africa with African farmers, like trying to improve their crop yields and stuff like that through drought resistance. pest resistance, plant breeding. So once I finished, like we got engaged over the phone, he was already in Africa when I was still training for the Olympic. What?

And yeah. You can't say things like that and then not at least tell the story. You got engaged over the phone? Yes, because he had left. We had made a connection. Obviously, we started going out dating in Saskatoon. But as soon as we realized we were in love, he took off and started working on his Ph.D.

through McGill in West Africa. so our entire relationship was sort of writing letters because there wasn't even, you know, any kind of email in those days. So I'd wait for three weeks. Like, I'd write a letter. And then I'd wait for three weeks for his reply to whatever I said in that letter. And it was just getting really hard, and that was like an 87. And so I was in the middle of all this hard training because the Olympics were in 88, so I was still training. And I finally just said to him by about, I think it was,

probably April of that year of 88, no, of 87, excuse me. I just said, look, I can't keep doing this. I'm way too much in love with you. It's, again, draining my energy. I can't do, I can't, there's nothing I can do without thinking about what's going on. And I can't, I hate having a conversation where I say something and then I have to wait three weeks to hear what your response is. Yeah, kids today can't even, like can't even fathom that.

So I basically wrote in a letter just basically saying, look, we get it either. decide that someday we're going to be together or we just stop because I can't this is too much energy for me like I just can't my emotional I just can't I can't do all the stuff I'm doing for I was trading five hours a day still working on a master's degree like I just I just couldn't do it anymore and so all of a sudden I get a phone call three weeks later or two weeks later from this little outpost in West Africa where it was the it was the apparently he says it was the post office in a where they, that was the only phone that was working that you could actually pay to call anybody overseas. And he called and said, hey, I got your letter. Will you marry me? And I was

like, in that very moment, on his end, a guy started to jackhammer and he couldn't hear my answer. So like, he, I had a visiting athlete from Rice University, another hipto-athletes, you're sleeping on the living room floor visiting us at the training center. And it was five in the morning and I'm yelling at the phone in the phone. Yes, I will marry you. And then he wouldn't hear my response. And then I yell it again. And she's like, she wakes up and she's like, what is going on? Like we're five in the morning and you're telling somebody you're going to marry them and you're like you're yelling. And she was so confused, but it was funny. So eventually he got my message. So we ended up, okay, we were engaged. But I wasn't going to see him until, you know, a year hence. So we just, you know, but at least I knew,

okay, I'll put that, I can park that emotion. I knew, at least I know my future. Honestly, that's right up there with some of the greatest stories I've ever heard, right? Like, I mean, that's, that's a fantastic story. Thank you. Well, it was just funny because that girl that was from Rice University is laying on my living room floor that day. She is now a world athletics official starter. She was at the World Championships starting the men's sprints. the sprinting events this last year. Like, I mean, she's way high up as an official in track and field now and, like, official, you know, and she's like one of the top women in world athletics.

And she was there to witness my little moment there. But, you know, she and I still laugh about that day. She's like, what was going on? And, you know, it worked. Like, as long as I knew what the goal was, I could put it aside now and say, okay, like, I'm confident. Like, I'm going to see this Alberta farm boy. My little, my dairy farmer guy, you know, someday we're going to end up together, and I can just train and not worry about it anymore.

So that was kind of like good, and so we were engaged. And then as soon as I didn't make the Olympic team, of course, I retired because I did want to get married to him eventually. So we got married in Millett, Alberta, in a little country church. Millet? Yeah, Millet to Alberta. and where his home farm was like in that December of 88. Where is Millett, Alberta? Millet, Alberta is in that Highway 2A when you go between Ladook and Wattasquan.

So like you can either the highway diverges. Millett's the sort of the little township, the little town just between Ladook and Wattaskin. So we were married in a little country church there. And then immediately he had to go back to McGill and that I started my Ph.D. at Simon Fraser in Vancouver. So then the next about three years ensued where he was going West Africa, McGill, like Montreal,

and I was going Vancouver, sometimes flying to West Africa. Like, we were floating around the world. It's like sometimes seeing each other, sometimes not. And people are looking at us like, you're really married? Like, you never see the guy. And there was people, there were athletes that, they didn't believe I was actually married. Like they thought I was making this story up.

And but eventually, um, I did make it finally. I got my Ph.D. And I was working. I finally joined Stan. Stanford Blade is my husband. He's now the dean of agriculture at UV. Really? Yeah.

And I finally joined him in West Africa. And we were at that point and he was working just south of the Sahara Desert. So, um, we were in that town. You know where Boko Haram has kidnapped all those girls? And sure. That was the region. So it was an Islamic area. But I was just like, well,

I don't have much to do. Like I was working a little bit on some papers and stuff. So I toggled on down over to the local university called Biro University of Conno. And that was, I just found that phys ed department. I said, look, I got my PhD in kinesiology. Do you need any help? Like I can teach, you know, biomechanics, nutrition, whatever. What do you want me to teach? Exercise fizz. And they said, Well, listen, this is great because even the dean of that department at that point had only had his master's degree. So I was like one of the only lecturers who would have a PhD. But they said the one requirement, you know, we insist that all of our lecturers and the university are willing to teach an activity class. Like you have to teach something.

And I thought, well, track and field. I'm going to teach because I have all the events. Like I can teach it? But then I thought, can I teach it? Because I'd only been an athlete. I had never been a coach. of, you know, like at that level and teaching teachers how to teach kids kind of thing, like future phys ed teachers.

And so I agreed. And actually one of those funny stories was my welcome to faculty dinner there. We had an outdoor sort of little picnic area, and there was like a fire and chicken and rice and stuff. And I was given my plate of food. This is my welcome to faculty dinner. I was given a plate of food. and then they led me into a separate building because of an Islamic area,

my welcome to faculty dinner consists of me sitting in a room building by myself eating my chicken rice. So it was interesting. It was like right away getting a deep dive into that local Islamic culture and dealing with it. And they were very, they, you know,

they were respectful of me and there were things I was probably allowed to do that their own women, women probably would have been allowed to do. But I started to become familiar with what happens, like what, what's the culture, how do you, how do you navigate this culture? So I wrote a letter right away to world athletics, like the World Center for Track and Fields in Monaco, just like FIFA, I think, is in Geneva. A world track is in Monaco.

So I write a letter to Monaco saying, look, I'm now, this is who I used to be. I'm now into blade. I am now trying to teach track and field as an activity option for a bunch of men in my university. It was all men. And I need some textbook or something on how do you coach, like just a basic textbook that I can actually use for my course. So I wait a little bit and I'm sort of making my way through and I get a call so this is like okay like I had been in South America 1977 and this was already like 1994 I get a call in my house south of the Sahara desert and it's a guy calling for Monaco and he goes Linda you wrote me a letter what don't you know who I am like it was the the global director for all of sport education

it was Bjorn, the guy who is my coach in Bolivia. Really? Yeah. It was like... Small world. Like all of a sudden he's like, well, you're doing exactly what I want you to do. He says, listen, this is exciting. He says, you know, so almost 20 years later, whatever, or less, like maybe 17.

But anyway, so the point is he says, I went to Bolivia. My experience was I went and coach you guys. I did all this. When I left after my three-year term, the whole program fell apart, right? And so he said what my new idea is for the world athletics is that I want to have a system where we train people to lecture local coaches, teach local coaches how to coach their own athletes, and then get out of there and then you leave a legacy because then if the expert leaves, you've got a bunch of guys who know how to coach.

So he had this whole new program globally where he was going to teach, like you go into countries and you get a group of top coaches. you teach them how to coach the kids. And when he found out that I was coaching in my region, and the Islamic part is important, he said, I have a job for you to do. I'm going to send you to Nairobi, Kenya. You're going to get your World Athletics lecturer certificate, and then I'm going to send you into Islamic countries to teach women how to coach the girls, because I was one of the few females who would have passed that course. It was a really tough course to be a lecturer. So I did that.

And so I was teaching in the university in Africa. I was then being sent to my first big international thing was like I was sent into Iran, to run to teach the women. I was the first Western woman those females in sport had ever seen since the revolution. Like I, they brought me in and I did this whole course for like 30 of the top female coaches in Iran teaching them how to coach the girls. That was in 95. we had moved back because Stan's dad on the farm had passed away and he wanted to be closer

to us to mom. So that's when we moved back to Edmonton. But in that time period before I started having my own children, I was a global traveler. I would be sent by World Athletics to Singapore, you know, like Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana. Like they sent me everywhere to, not only to Islamic countries, but a lot of different places where I could teach the coaches how to coach, like the athletes. So I was basically sitting in Edmonton,

an international lecture of coaches with my PhD in Kinesiology, and I couldn't get a job at U of A. I was like, just like what's going on? Like I can't make inroads in Edmonton, but I'm this world expert. And I can't, you know, I'm just sitting here in Edmonton. And so thankfully, after a while, my PhD supervisor in Vancouver had done some work with Curtis Brackenbury,

who used to be with the Euler. He was at the time working with the Edmonton Oilers on talent identification and the junior programs. And apparently, like all of a sudden I realized, Curtis and I had crossed paths in Vancouver when he came to ask my supervisor about how to talent. ID junior hockey player, like little hockey players, like how do you find the talent? Because we were doing the body measurements and relating it to growth and development and how you could predict performance and stuff like that. So Curtis right away is like, Linda is in Edmonton. And Bill Ross, my supervisor said, yeah, absolutely. So Curtis calls me. He's the only guy in Emmington I even knew

at that point. Like I was like, I didn't know anybody. I came to. I came to. a city that I didn't. I knew a lot of people in Saskatoon, a lot of people in Vancouver, knew nobody in Edmonton. And all of a sudden, I'm helping the Oilers. Like, it's, you know, and Curtis, Curtis was, his, his idea was to pick my brain on that whole idea of, can you measure a kid, like all the body, size, shape, proportion, skin, full thickness, muscle mass, arm lengths, all the physical features of an athlete, and then have any sort of predictive capacity to, like, watching the move, how are they going to improve, or who's going to end up being the best player? And so he really had this idea. He had all these spreadsheets. I remember going through that.

So I helped him for a couple of months with this idea, like how are we going to improve your ability to recruit, right, and on spot talent. And then one day he asked me, he goes, Linda, what, like, what is plyometrics? Because he had heard this term from track and field and from sport performance training like what is like it's power explosive training what's play explain it to me like what what do you guys do and track like for this for speed and power oh that's easy so i just started explaining him what we do i said let's go out to the field i'm going to show you some drills like this is how you get faster this is how you get more explosive he we went back to his house still had all the spreadsheets on the table on the talent ID stuff he goes what you know what i think

we're not getting very far on this stuff because it's not very predictive you should drop this and actually just start training athletes on their speed and power with your plymetrics and your track knowledge i said oh oh okay so he says well i have some athletes that might like might need your help and actually the first guy on the oilers that i helped and he might not even remember me but it was louis de bresque like i went out there and because he was he was was a big defenseman, big broad shoulders, tough guy, but he wasn't moving very fast. And Curtis wanted figure out what's going on. And so, you know, Curtis, well, Louis got traded very quickly after I started working on. But there's one thing that we had a breakthrough on. And I was watching him do

like your typical track and field, like the marching, heinie marching run, like working on the coordination. And there is this principle and track that in any human movement actually, that the range of your shoulder swing, like when you're running, the range of the shoulder, the split, should match your hip, like how your knee comes up. And so when those things are perfectly matched, you're going to actually be able to produce better power and speed on the move. And I noticed, of course, Louis, because he was very strong, I mean, he had big shoulders. when I asked him to swing his arm, like he wasn't getting his elbow back past mid, like, mid chest,

like it was just like stopping there. And so it was pretty clear to me in his case, probably the thing we could do that would help the speed right away is give him more shoulder flexibility because you can imagine if you're doing this when you're running instead of getting a full, a full swing, you're not getting the amount of, you know, distance on each stride. you're going to need to get that acceleration going. So in his case, I was already on route to making him fast. I felt I could make him much faster by just improving his shoulder range of motion

so that he could have a, because when you see his leg swing, like when I'd stand there and get him to swing his leg, well, there was nothing wrong with his hip flexibility. It was a good rotation. But when your shoulder, like mechanically, if your shoulder's not got, the same level of swing, your leg is going to be limited to what your arm does. So your leg is going to stop there too. So if you don't work on that shoulder, you're not going to get the hip power that you need.

Sorry for my dumb brain. So what you're saying is if you can get your shoulder, your arm to have a bigger range of motion, you can run faster. You'll run faster because it'll trans. Because it'll translate to your legs. Yeah. And all of a sudden, you become noticeably faster. Yes.

And it's worked. It's worked in other athletes, too. So the first one I had, though, in Eminton was depressed, and then he got traded. Traded. Yeah. But the point is that all of a sudden I had this thing like, oh, I can do this. Like, I'm this international coaching expert. I don't need to be a university professor.

I can just go and help people. I can go and find athletes and help them. and this was a revelation to me that I could just have my own private business and just consult so I thought fair enough like they don't need me at the university for some reason I keep applying and they don't want me there so I mean I'll just I'll just do this I'll just go into private sport performance consultation and I had a few and then I then Curtis Brackenberry had invited me to the one in massive like this was a huge critical pivotal moment for me in 96 and I seven where we had it was a Canmore NHL coaches sort of little seminar that they all had with

themselves and so there was like coaches there from New Jersey Devils all across the board Chicago Blackhawks and they what Curtis wanted me to do was present pliometrics to these coaches and say like there's a kind of training you can do that improves your speed and power. And these are the kinds of techniques that you can use. And so there was a lady sitting in that group because she was also there to work with figure skaters, but she was interested to see what some of us would say. And it was actually a professor at U of A was there to present VO2 max like cardio. And he said, Linda, listen, we don't know any, like back in the 90s, they just didn't know that much about the speed, explosive power stuff.

And he says, like, can I get you to come in to my U of a level four phys ed class on exercise physiology and just explain what you just showed the hockey coaches here? And no problem. So in that group was a PhD student who was working with Glenora Club figure skaters. and I was explaining how whatever the principles I have in terms of training methodology, those same ones would apply to getting more height off the ice, like on a jump. So improving your jumping,

your speed, whatever. And she says, I need you in the club, in the Glenora club, to train the figure skaters and help them to increase their vertical off ice, obviously. And so she got me in there. I became sport performance. fitness trainer at the Glenora Club, Roy Glenora Club. And within a few years, all of sudden, Jamie Saleh and David Peltier came to my door and I planned their Olympic gold medal moment. I was the fitness trainer that planned their peak at Salt Lake City Olympics. So that was the gold medal

where the French judge was caught cheating and, and, but they won, you know, they were perfect. and it was a tremendous opportunity for me to help them and be part of their coaching team and be the one. I was the one that was turning the energy on and off. Like you have to cycle the energy properly and the training volume and intensity to peak properly. And so I was one that was sort of in charge of that cycle of training, the cycles, whereas the on-ice coaches who go with them to the Olympics, they're just doing the same program every, like trying to perfect the program every day on the ice.

But I'm the one that takes them off. This week you're going to do hill sprints hard. This week you're going to do this really dangerous workout that we have to get it right. You have to be a little bit, you know, so like I was the one who was behind the scenes building up their capacity, their physical capacity. And they had such a good experience with me.

So David Peltier right now even works with the oil. And back around, I think when, I don't know, but in like 2016, even more recently, like 2017, once in a while they'll bring me in because of the connection with David and he's recommending me sometimes for the prospects, like in the, in the Oilers prospects, some of the summer trains for Thailand. And so he, you know, I've helped. And Craig McTavish really liked what I had to say. Some of the things I explained what we were, what we were trying to do.

And it's even more like the expertise goes into like the sequencing. Like when should you do a heavy deadlift? If you're going to do a heavy deadlift on a Tuesday, should you sprint on a Wednesday? No. Like you got to figure out your cycles. You got to figure out your recovery and when. Can an individual figure this out or is this something? Like I'm just talking to everyday person, not the elite athlete at this point.

Yeah. Oh no, yeah. Like I think a lot of it is just you look at, it's a trial and error thing sometimes. but and every athlete can be different. Like every player, you have players that can be really explosive and fast no matter what they do. But you have other players who get fatigued and if you push the nervous system too far one day, you can't, they can't come back and be really crisp and fast. So you have to figure out each player like within a range, like what can they manage?

Like what can they actually, what does this input? But when you give somebody a stimulus, a training stimulus, what's that going to do to their overall performance a day from now, two days from now, three days from now? And even the kind of stretching you do, like, where do you stretch? You stretch a lot before you work out or after. Like, I think there are some things that are pretty obvious to track coach what you should and shouldn't do. But I think a lot of – What are obvious to a track coach on what you shouldn't do? So there's various kinds of like a yoga type stretching that they like to do now in hockey,

where you get, you know, your long holds and it's supposed to activate. But if you hold, if you do anything slow and long holding slow stuff before a speed workout, forget it. Like, it's not going to work. It's just not, the speed is, you have to do elastic and dynamic. And the other thing is, speaking of elasticity, you have to do. elasticity. You have to do stuff that is revving you up to the moment of where you're going to have to require the kind of what I call RPM. So like RPM is like the rotation around a joint.

Like if you're going to need a high RPM, you don't start by sticking your leg in one position and holding it for a minute. You've got to do more like dynamic elastic kind of let's go. Let's get going because you're going to have to need that. It's going to be a stimulus. It's like the nervous system has to be primed to do that kind of workout. And yet you do need flexibility so that needs to happen at night maybe before you go to bed. Like you don't have to do it in the gym. I always tell the kids now, do it before you, do the long holds before you go to bed and makes you sleepy anyway and then you go to sleep, right? Like do that if that's the time of day that you're going to do nothing afterwards, that's when you should do your stretching.

So, I mean, there's just sequences that work in others that don't work. And so even the idea. Is that something you learned along the way or was taught to you? When you talk about the German coach, is that something like the secret? The German coach taught us that a long time ago. But also, I've seen a lot of research on what is. On the sequencing. Yeah, yeah.

And, of course, lots of experience. So you got to get it, you start getting an instinct for it. And so ultimately, like, all of that is to say that I've ended up helping athletes in 17 different sports. Not just hockey, not just figure skating, volleyball, basketball, rugby, soccer, volleyball. Like, I get lots of, any given year I've got maybe since 1997, I've had, like, anywhere from five or ten different sports, athletes from different sports that come. and we just work on whatever it is they need to improve. Yeah. And so I can usually get.

And so basically that's been my life. I just enjoy it so much because every single kid that comes to me, like if you go into a normal fitness training, you usually just have one workout you deliver throughout the year to keep somebody fit. Like if you're just doing the health and wellness training. But sport performance training is completely different. If your sport performance fitness involves getting ready, for you're at point A and you got a championship at point B.

So every, like you work backwards. Like what, what's going to, so when do you stop the hard work so you can peak? And then before that, what workout do you do so that you can build it up, whatever the system is you need to build up, if it's cardio or whatever, to that point? And then there might be things that you need to have that are weaknesses in the system. So you have an actual plan, like it's like a template blueprint of getting you from where you right now, filling in all of the weak gaps and doing the right cycling of the workout until you get to that important, like an NHL final, whatever it happens to be. So sport performance, and the other thing

about sport performance fitness is that if, let's say, let's say for the sake of argument, I got hurt, for example, training for the Olympic team too much. I overtrained. Well, overtraining or pulling a hamstring. Let's say that, let's say that. Let's say that. we call that falling off a cliff. You're going to fall, you push the limit, you push, push, push. The point in the whole point in sport performance training is that you push athletes as close to the cliff as you can without letting them fall off. Like you're pushing them to that moment where they might almost get hurt and either they're

going to hurt or that you understand that they're going to get hurt really soon so you back off again. And now you've pushed it hard again, now you back off again. And you get an instinct for that. And obviously my insurance is much higher than your normal fitness trainer. But like I'm just saying that you're pushing limits where you might risk people getting hurt. Because you do have to do that. You have to push a limit.

Whereas normal fitness trainers are just going through like as general like, okay, you're going to do something like cardio. You're going to do some weightlifting. No, we have things that we do. And in my training, in my training, it's a lot more than just even the dead lifts and the squats. because when you go in the gym and just like squat and go up and down with a weight, where in sport do you ever do that movement? Like do you stand on the ice and like literally squat up and down? Like no, it's wippy actions around joints.

You want to be elastic. So I do a lot of elastic work. I notice that a lot more coaches now work with the elastics. One of the guys that really has brought that into the, I guess, to favor, that whole methodology is, who's a quarterback? Tom Brady. Like, he's kept his, he kept his fitness a lot longer by being, having that youthful elasticity in his body.

And he did that by working with elastics. Like, that was, that's a principle too, by the way, because we are biological beings, and this is going to lead into this whole trans stuff. But we're biological beings. And part of the beauty of the human body, is that we adapt to our environment. So you see the guys in the gym who just lift heavy, solid, straight weight all the time,

and they walk around they're stiff. Like you get the properties of the things you put on your body. So if you're only going to lift heavy weight, you're going to be this guy. If you want to move and your body's going to be whipping and it's like an elastic band and a slap shot, like then you've got to get something on your body, move that way.

and so I use a lot of like elastic bandwork, like legs swinging through with a little bit of elastic resistance. Like there's a lot of different kinds of techniques you can do to actually try to mimic the qualities that you want in that athlete. And the nature of the material you use impacts how the body looks when it moves. So like if you want to be more fluid, go into the water. do water work. And so I bring the oilers like in when I was doing the, uh, like the summer dry land, we spent days one day a week at least in the pool doing deep water running and water like

different like you're just trying to get more fluidity through your body. And, and there's a characteristic of that that you can actually develop in certain ways in a safe way, especially in this water training is amazing. So like as a, as almost like a recovery workout as well. So you're, you're doing like the sort of fluid kind of elastic motion with a little bit more range of motion, a little more of flexibility. It's kind of like this whole combination of things that make you feel more fluid. So, you know, and that's not the fluid we're talking about when they talk about gender fluidity, but, you know, we're, my whole methodology has developed over 30 years. And I really, really love, like helping athletes just find their optimal points. And sometimes an athlete's too

like Lucy Goosey. Like I coached one lady for a heptathlon who used to be a rhythmic gymnast and she was her part-time job off training was being a contortionist. Well, she was way too flexible. I had to get her more solid. So then you would lift a little bit more just straight up weights. So, I mean, you have to decide what qualities you want in that body to say, like, what are we trying to achieve here? Like, what's the end point? And so it's a constant sort of puzzles, like a big Sudoku puzzle, just trying to put it together all the time for these athletes. Like, you have to interview them all the time, find out what's going on, get the feedback. Is that working?

We tweak this thing. We tweak that thing. We're trying to get to a certain point. And that's the beauty of sport performance fitness training. And being an expert in that, very. Versus just having the same boring routine, you repeat over and over and over again, right? Like you're constantly trying to push, and then we get the hurdles in there doing the high hurdle jumps. And like, it's amazing.

Like the stuff you can do can really change a person's, you know, dynamic properties in terms of how their body is able to whip. Like even like a, you know, like a punt football. You don't just put your leg down on the ground and then hit the ball. You have a pre-stretch. You come in, pre-stretch your hip and whip your leg through. It's a whip. It's a wippy action. A lot of what human beings do is this wippy stuff where you brace one side.

Like if I'm going to wrestle you and put you down on the ground, I'm going to brace with one side and dynamically push you with the other side. So you're figuring out which sides of the body need to be brace. And then when you're doing like in football, if you're going to do a deke, then one side's going to be bracing and then suddenly you switch rolls. So like one side breaks and then you move the other way and the other side breaks and then you move the other way. And running itself is a toggle between the leg that's on the ground isometric holding, bracing, and the other leg is swinging through. So your RPMs, like somebody like Andre de Gras is super amazing because he wasn't strong at all. Like it was just this neurological whippiness that he had that could generate huge amounts of force.

course at high speed. And so it's just so fascinating when you watch different athletes and how, like how are they achieving that particular motion or speed or movement or power. And there, and some athletes have certain strategies to do that. And other people, like you see sprinters like Andre de Gras, who's like relatively weak when he started out in the weight room and he was already beating guys. And then you have other guys like Maurice Green or something who told muscle animals. like just they get their speed through that, right? And so it's not like it's all one answer either. You have to figure out the body, like what are you working with here?

And what is their innate physical features? And then how do you work with that to get the best performance out of them? And so that's been my life. Okay, so imagine me going having, that's my life. I get elected as president of Track and Field in Alberta. So I'm president of the board of direction. of Athletics, Alberta. I get elected in 2014.

By 2018, I'm sitting in a meeting in Ottawa, and they're telling me, look, we got this new policy, they may just read it, where a guy can come along one day and say he's a woman, compete as a woman, and then the next day, if he feels like he's a man again, he can go back and compete with men, like completely, complete self-ID. I mean, my whole life, I've coached only people who are only female or male, and I definitely know the difference. And we definitely have records that show this is male sport performance. This is what it looks like. This is the level that that's at.

This is female properties and characteristics. They're completely distinct. It's just like Formula One versus Stockcar, completely different models of human body. And suddenly we're saying we can get this Formula One to just come back and forth anytime they want. So like I met this thing where I've got a PhD. I'm a sport performance professional. And somebody's telling me I'm supposed to just say, oh. You're supposed to do the 1984.

Yeah. And it's just like it was so shocking, Sean. It was like it was so shocking to me that anybody would think in their right mind. They could tell us to do this. And I'm sitting there around the table with the presidents from Ontario and Quebec. like we're in Ottawa and I'm saying this can't be true like you you can't you got to be kidding me like this is this is crazy and they instead of looking me in the eye and saying well you know Linda yeah you're right but you know somehow this is a new law and Trudeau did this and then we

have to do this instead of saying even that they all sat there and they just looked down at their hands like they wouldn't look at me in the eye nobody wanted to say anything and it's like what like what's happening here you're you're telling us this is going to be a new rule you can't justify it you look at your hand like you're not there's no explanation for this like the shock was incredible to me like am i did i get step through the looking glass like are we in another sort of parallel universe like sport is male and female are two different categories and we know that it's no it's no secret so why are we doing this. So I went and I looked up, I went and looked up, okay, where is this coming from? So I looked at the source and this is the, the, I found this thing from the Canadian Center for Ethics and Sport.

It called, it's a document that was produced in 2016 called Creating Inclusive Environments for trans participants in Canadian sport. And I looked at that and I read through it. It was one of the most bizarre things I'd ever read, the things that they were claiming in there, I'll give you one example. I'll read verbatim. It says, one of the things it says, because you're wondering, well, if a man can self-IDI-D as a woman, doesn't have a competitive advantage over female competitors, even if he takes drugs or whatever. This is what this document, one of the things, from us says the expert working group acknowledges the concern that trans women athletes who grew up biologically male and who do not undergo hormonal intervention may be at a competitive advantage.

So they're recognizing that it's okay that they do have a competitive advantage when competing against women's women in sport. Nonetheless, it is recognized that trans females, now they create a new word because there's no such thing as trans females. Trans women, they can transition to seem like they're women, but they're not female, are not males who became female. Rather, these are people who have always been psychologically female, but whose anatomy and physiology for reasons yet unexplained have manifested as male. Like that is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Like, oh, they're imagining, okay, so they have this psychological predilection that they seem to want to appear as women, which is their right. If they want to look like a woman, any guy can do that.

but then to justify them being in women's sport is like well somehow they've always been women but but just somehow their bodies have manifested as male so it's not their fault like seriously that is complete religious dogma that has there's no evidence that just because somebody in their brain thinks that they might be a woman one day that they were always from birth a woman a female but just had male body parts like what are you talking about? Like, this is the kind of stuff that was in this document. And, you know, when I looked at who's the member of the expert working group? So I looked at the next page, who are the people on the committee?

Who would have done this? Was there any biological expert on this group? So I'm going through the names under the acknowledgments of who are the expert people. And I'm seeing, let's say, the former CEO of Ottawa Soccer Club and blah, blah, blah, blah, all these sports people. Associate Director of BC Hockey, this guy. I go through this, and the one person who would either have medical training, biological training, or whatever, have any authority in this area, was a man named Stephen Federer,

Dr. Stephen Federer, and his role, when I look him up, because I'm thinking, well, this is the guy that would be sitting around the table telling everybody else what to do. He's guy in in Ottawa who does sex changes on children sexual transition on underage minors. This is a guy who is completely ideological and doing the surgery on children. And he's now coming in sitting on a sport panel, consider to be the expert working group on trans and sport. And then they take this document and they travel around the country and they go to every single sport and say, this is the new rule now. This is what you have to do. And it was the most extreme thing.

It was the most extreme thing that you can actually ever imagine. Because even internationally, the International Olympic Committee at first in 2003 said, well, men could be a women's sport if they had the surgery, if they actually, you know, got castrated. Then by 2015, oh, well, you know, it's too harsh to say that a guy has to get castrated. So maybe we just reduce their testosterone. Okay. So they, they, even the International Olympic Committee said, you've got to do something to try to make it fair. And even then it was never fair. But we can get into that too, but it was never going to be fair. Just because you, listen, you can undergo surgery and you can get castrated. It's not going to make your lungs smaller than, like to the woman's size. It's not going to make your heart. Like, it didn't make any sense to allow a guy into a women's sport. Okay. So, but this, the, and these people, the, the ultimate irony, of the Center for Ethics and Sport, is that this is the governing body

who's only, this is not the government, a government non-sort of, not-for-profit organization, whose key role after the Ben Johnson affair, after Canada was shamed by getting somebody caught in the Olympic Games with drugs, their only role was to spread the message around Canada,

you shouldn't cheat. No cheating, no doping. They would do the doping control test. That, and of course, you know, I had a direct link to not being able to make the Olympic team because some people on my team were cheating and then it was all using the drug lists for a selection. And now, all these years later, I'm president of Athletics, Alberta, and I'm seeing the same entity that was supposed to be protecting Canada from cheating, promoting the most, the worst kind

of cheating, which is, you know, way worse than doping. Because if you're a woman and you take, let's say, testosterone, you might get up to a seven, eight, seven, eight, nine percent advantage. If you're a guy in women's sports, you can have anywhere from 15 to 160% advantage. And they're promoting that. Meanwhile, they still do the doping control so a guy can do whatever he wants. But if a woman is even found with one drop of exogenous testosterone that she's somehow taking supplements in her body, and these people do the test, they could ban her for life for doing that. But applaud the gendered. Yes. So this same group then hires people because they get huge grants from, of course, Trudeau government is all in favor of all of this. So they get, they get huge. I shouldn't laugh, but carry on. Well, so they get huge grants to go around and they get, they would pay a bunch of, you know, younger university age women. Like he was smart enough to not come in as a man saying that men should be in women sports. They would hire these university women to go around and have special seminars. And we had one. Athletics, Alberta, or Athletics Canada had a presentation that was given to us in, I think it was like

December 2008, 2019, maybe it was in 2018, but some lady comes into the room where we're having our AGM and she's telling us how, oh, 11%, you know, even if a man has 11% a male body, she wouldn't call him a man, a male body has 11% advantage, you know, that's not a really big deal. And then all the track coaches are like, excuse me? You wouldn't even make the final. Like you wouldn't even win the first heat if you had 11% disadvantage. Like, what are you talking about? So they'd send these people around with talking about the gingerbread, the gender bread person

where you have like your sex is one thing, gender identity is another. Fair enough. But then, like acting like biological sex, the differences is no big deal. like then we should just overlook it and just look at identities. And so this, but the point is, is this group that was pushing that were acting like they were the authority and they were being treated, whether it's Hockey Canada. Because even the Hockey Canada inclusion policy now cites this document. The cites this erroneous, non-scientific, completely biased document as their reason why now are we going to get into the dressing room. kids can identify as whatever they want. So this is the single most culpable document that has led

a lot of Canadian sports groups right down the wrong path, away from accepting and acknowledging that biological sex matters in sport. And in fact, it's probably the only thing that matters because we never cared. Like, did we ever pick athletes on the basis of their religion? Religion is, no, like we never cared. Like the whole purpose, the beauty of sport, is that ideology, whatever it is in your mind, you could put that to the sidelines and run your race. We didn't care.

Those are identities. Like if you're Muslim, Jewish, Christian, those are identities. Those are your personal belief systems and ideologies. And if you're, you know, we all change our identities. over a lifetime, one day you're a parent. Like, you weren't always a parent. Now you have a new identity. You're a father, a mother, whatever.

Do we make special policies for all the cousins who play sport? Do we, like, do we make a policy now? Like, we have a new identity, a parent policy. Like, no, you make an eligibility policy. You don't make a trans policy. You make an eligibility policy, and it doesn't matter what you identify as. You compete as male or female. and get it over with.

Like, it is just, like, this whole ideology has invaded all of our sports because of this document and because these people pretended like they were the new authority on what sports groups should be doing in Canada. And hockey fell prey to this. And that's why the dressing room thing happened. That's why all this stuff happens because all of our sport leadership have been led down the path of this ideology that is antithetical to fairness and sport. And it's going to destroy sport.

And I wrote a book in 2021 called Unsporting, how trans activism and science denial are destroying sport. And the reason I didn't say destroying women's sport is because it's going to ultimately destroy all of sport. Do you think officials in hockey, for example, want to deal with this dressing room issue? Like at some point it gets so bad that people who volunteer to run the sport just don't want to deal with it anymore. That's what I was getting at. That when an official in track, for example, if you're a starting line official and a young man comes up and says, he's clearly a boy, clearly biological male, comes up and says, well, I feel like a woman, a girl today and I want to run this race.

and you as an official say, that doesn't seem right to me, you look like a guy to me, that's going to be considered to be a hate speech now. What official who comes out on their, the volunteers their time to run a track meet wants to deal with this? You know, so I, my point is that

it might be hurting girls in the short term in terms of a male and a girl in a female race or on a female hockey team or whatever. In the long run, it's going to be officials, parents, everybody in the system just doesn't want to deal with it anymore and walks away. And that's where sport gets hurt. And here's the thing. It's not just sport, Linda. It's everything.

We're speaking double speak. We're literally enforcing something that is not true. Right. It's just not. Right. And that's, I wrote a story in a book about a hockey dad. in my book, there's a story about a hockey dad in Ontario who just wanted to help coach his son's team. Sure.

And he was forced to sign on and take this course. And then he, like a course that said the idea of the sex binary was a white man's idea that came in. Like, are you kidding me? That is so insulting to the Aboriginal First Nations people as if they never knew that what biological sex was before white men came along. like stop this nonsense right like and then the father couldn't sign on to like he had to learn like you had to agree to use pronouns in a certain way or he didn't want to sign that document because he didn't believe it he didn't you can't sign something and agree to something you don't believe in and yet too many people are and and he did he didn't sign it so he couldn't be a coach like

this is another way to destroy sport for kids because a good parent who wanted to help couldn't sign on because he couldn't agree with it And so it all boils down to this kind of stuff. These kind of groups who pretend like they can tell all the sports what to do. And the leadership class gets so scared. And in my experience being in the national meetings of Athletics Canada as president of Athletics, Alberta, was my experience was having one person like me have the courage to sit at the table and say, this isn't right.

We shouldn't be doing this. Everybody else starts to question a little bit. But if I, if nobody had been in the room to say, look, we got to think twice about doing this because this isn't the right. Oh, they just pass it. Like they just put it in their policy book. Like, and then everybody, oh, everybody's afraid. Oh, there's a new policy.

Oh, oh, now we're supposed to do this or we're going to get in trouble. That's how quickly it has happened in Canadian sport. We just, we just swallowed a lie that anybody can identify as any sex they want. And magically it changes all your cells. the trillions of cells to, you know, like it's a religion. We never picked sport on the basis of a religion, never. And we need to start saying, no, I don't agree with you. We're not doing that.

And so in Ethics, Alberta, I put my own policy in. You born male, you don't compete with the girls. Like that, you know, and this is what I'm talking about. National governing bodies don't have the guts. Even international governing bodies have a hard time having the guts to make the right call. This is an issue that's going to require what I call baseline leadership. Leadership from below. People at the local level just saying, look, I'm going to become a board member of my local hockey team, my local hockey association. We're just going to say no. We're not doing this.

And you, you know, of course you risk stuff. But I mean, I, the one guy who was the president of Athletics Canada, after the first time in 2018, when I, when I first ran into this nonsense. I'm like, what's going on? I said, what? I took him to dinner at Royal Glenora Club because he was in town. I said, Bill, explain this to me. Like, why are we doing this? Why would you say such a, you know our world records, Canadian records, the provincial records, everything shows the huge distinction between males and females in terms of their record. You can look at the record books. There's no mystery. I said, like, why are we even contemplating this stuff? Why are we doing it? And he wouldn't really say.

and I said, oh, okay, tried a couple more times, and I just said, I said, like, I know what you're doing here, Bill. I said, you're afraid, you're afraid that some person going to, like a trans-identified person is going to maybe sue you or something, sue our sport. There's a risk, but don't you think there's much more of a risk? There's, like, huge numbers of women and girls who would be disadvantaged by such a person and wouldn't they sue? aren't you worried about the risk of hurting them and and having huge litigation from that side of the coin and he said girls wouldn't do that and I'm like wait a minute female athletes are fighters you don't think somebody's bound to sue if they don't if they lose to a guy who's come into their sport but you see it's this whole the sadness to me isn't even about whether who will

sue? Will the guy sue? Will the girl sue? Why should we be even talking about setting up a situation where one of those two things might happen? That's another way to destroy sport. Why are we setting it up? So it's going to be contentious all the time between this group wants to be competing fairly and this other group just feels like it's in their blood that day. They want to come and compete unfairly with this group. And the funniest thing, it's not funny, but it's the most ironic thing of all, is to acknowledge, like, when Bill C-16,

so this was the one Jordan Peterson has always fighting against and everything. When Bill 16 came in, when they were debating it in Parliament, you had people in Parliament standing up their side, not my side of this story, their side. they were at the time saying biological sex is one thing but gender identity and expression is another thing well nobody disagrees with that the question is what powers do you give one of

those two things as soon as they passed bill c-16 they acted like even though they argued themselves that biological sex was definitely something and this other thing was something else they then proceeded to behave like biological sex doesn't exist anymore, that we're not allowed to have it as a, you know, you can't, it no longer exists in the charter as, as like, sex is a characteristic in the charter still, to this day, that you cannot discriminate on the basis of that characteristic. And putting a man into a women's competition is definitely discrimination on the basis of sex. Somehow in their minds, that doesn't, sex discrimination doesn't exist anymore. So we need to say, and here's,

my point. My point is, in order to have a functional society, you need to acknowledge that in some parts of some parts of society, biological sex still takes the preeminence in terms of deciding what's fair or what's safe. Like they're putting rapists in women's prisons now. So you're going to have to decide, okay, do we do that? Do we make a distinction on the basis of sex or on the basis of your identity. And there are times where it should be completely logical that your identity, your ideas, your ideology shouldn't matter at all. It's what sex you are that matters, whether it's in a locker room, a community center. There's other times in an employment situation. We don't care. You want to wear a dress to work? It's up to you. Right? Like so we, but see,

they never allowed that within the bill itself. It was poorly raised. because they never acknowledged that there are there can be sex-based exemptions to whatever this new law was and that's the UK like in the in in in the United Kingdom in Great Britain when they pass their their their gender their equity like equality act they did have sex-based carve-outs so when Trudeau passed his they the big mistake that's happened in Canada is they never acknowledged that there was still in the middle of that new bill on human rights, there was still the human right to have sex distinction in certain realms of life. And so when the conservatives get in,

I hope they can maybe they either repeal that law or they amend it. But having said all that, nobody can disagree with me that even the people who are ideologically captured in the trans movement do agree that there are two kinds of trans. there's going to be the female-born person who wants to identify as male as a man, and there's a male person who wants to identify as a woman. Interestingly, in sport, guess what happens? The female type who want to be non-binary trans or something else, they stay in women's sports.

We already accept them in our sports because they're female-born. It didn't matter. Like the Quinn on Team Canada Soccer, they stay and compete with women. So the only type of trans that we're really dealing with here in terms of these kinds of flipping floppy. Is the men going to the women's sports? So the male born ones. So here's what happens.

When there's a male born person who suddenly is identifying as trans and wants to compete with the women, that person is also discriminating against the trans who are female. So it's not about, it's, we aren't being the ones anti-trans. we accept women in our sport accept the trans cohort who are female. It's these guys who are coming over and discriminating against all the female athletes, no matter whether they're non-binary, trans, anything else. So it's actually anti-trans if you're saying a man can come into a woman sport because that guy is discriminating against another kind of trans person. And we forget about those kinds of trans people, the ones who are female and want to

in women's sports. So it's discriminating even against another, a fellow trans person. And that's the, that's the point of this. It's not about trans or not trans. This document is a piece of crap. And we should never, the sport groups in Canada, whether it's hockey Canada, figure skating, track, nobody should have been listening to these people. Because even what they were saying at the outset, if they were the anti-doping agency, what they were arguing was it absolutely, antithetical to their mandate and why they still get government funding is beyond me. They should be defunded. This group is the source of all, it's the source of the wrecking ball on Canadian's board right now. So this dressing room stuff, everything, none of that

would have happened if we hadn't listened to these people. That's what I'm here to tell you. And I mean, if you made me minister of support for one day, I'd fire the lot of them and I'd defund them, Immediately. I just think the grown-ups need to get involved. Yes. And you've already said it on a local level how you can do it. But it's funny, Linda, like you're saying all these things, and I'm going, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

And I go, it's not one of the things that I found fascinating about your book. I followed Jordan Peterson, not forever, but for a long enough time to know all about everything you talked about. And to be like, I remember thinking back then, geez, is it going to be that bad? And here we sit. and it's only been how many years and it's, it's pretty bad. And I go back, your book outlines that this has been, this hasn't, this hasn't been the last year. Like this has been decades long.

Yep. Like, a slow ramp up now quick. And now quick. Like, we're going down the, and everyone, you know, like, where are all the people that, like, I always wonder, I'm like, where is all the people? You've been sitting in Emmett. I had no idea you existed, you know? And I hear you, and I'm like, like, how do we have an expert of this magnitude where I basically just take a seat back and let you go for an hour?

And I'm like, this is fascinating. Where has this been? Oh, wait, media is corrupted. All the big corporations are corrupted into this. When you talk about it being a religion, it is absolutely that. You poke your head up. I mean, we've watched everybody who's talked about it. Your book lays it out very beautifully.

anytime somebody tried being like, no, this isn't right, boom, they're banished from a sport. They're removed from this. They're taking. And so this has been a war on people who talk openly about this. So now everybody knows the painstaking effort. If you go or if you're going to stick your head up, you're going to be attacked abruptly. And for most people, they will realize this from the last three years in COVID because the same thing happened with doctors and lawyers and professors and on and on and on. if you pokes your head up, the same thing has happened.

So now everybody's like, oh, and when I come to the hockey dressing room, because that is my world, I was just baffled at how many coaches I talked to. Well, we're just not going to implement it. I'm like, that's not the point. It's going to be in the law book for the next 20 years, and eventually it's going to get implemented. Yeah, and there's going to be lawsuits. There are going to be appeals, and it's like what's happening, April Hutchinson right now. Yeah, it's bizarre.

I got like the two-year ban, like a two-year suspension for speaking out because she wrote her sport and said, I don't like that. There's a man competing against me, a male person who now sees himself as a woman. But it's not fair. You know, the body is still male. She wrote privately to them back in January of this year. They ignored it. Every time she complained or protested and said that she wanted.

in a disciplinary hearing on what should happen here, they didn't even bother to answer her email. But meanwhile, so when she gets frustrated, she starts speaking out on social media because they're not responding to her inside the sport. And now she's getting a two-year suspension because she violated the code of conduct because she wasn't allowed to be,

you know, it was against the code to make us look bad and to speak about us and to speak about the guy. Like, okay, but there's, Then what about suspending that guy for bad-mouthing the women? He was insulting all the women and taken away their prizes. And they're like, no, they had to punish her because she dared to speak out. You know, we just in the United States, and they were asking about Canada. And I think you're epitomizing where we're at.

Oh, it is. This is exactly where we're at. And I don't mind saying so. that's the problem I don't I for some reason I'm in a position where I can say it

because I'm in an independent sport performance like if somebody fires me like let's say an athlete fires me don't like your reviews and so they get rid of you next yeah like it doesn't bother me well it's funny I'm an independent show

where I'm like if I drop a sponsor because of this it's like well that sucks but I'm just going to go find another one probably yeah right so this is why we need you and me to have this conversation because so many people, if you were, let's say, inside the university,

then you'd be going, oh, I might lose my job. Or, you know, like it's just, there just is a way where there's some people have the enough independence to be able to say something. And so I noticed right away that I was, I realized right away when this, when I ran into this in 2008, that I was able, I can say something and I will.

Well, what's baffling to me is your pedigree. Yeah. Of like where, not only just you being an athlete, because, I mean, there's a whole bunch of athletes. Right. I'm an athlete. I mean, but your pedigree for where you've been, what you've done, and then being across a ton of sports.

So you get to work with men and female, or male and female athletes. So you have a pretty. a good sense of like, gee, like, you know, male and females are a little bit different. They're different. Even before puberty, by the way, it's not good enough to say, oh, we only separate the sexes after puberty. Little girls don't want to compete with little boys. Sometimes we do if it's a fun, recreational thing. But if it goes for serious prizes in sport, puberty only enhances, it magnifies a difference. But there are clear distinctions before puberty.

and we could get into that too but in my research in all the papers I've read you look at the like the counter fitness test or like that like there is still little boys it might be like let's say in running

a three or four percent advantage and then later after puberty 15 percent advantage but in upper body it can be as much as 15 percent advantage even pre-puberty so it's interesting the shoulder girdle the way you leverage the way boys' bodies can leverage.

I've got a daughter who's six. I got a son who's seven and a son who's four. And when they wrestle, she's a tough little girl. I'm not knocking me. She's a tough little girl. But the four-year-old already is a mean SOB, and he's built like a dumb truck. Like, I don't like wrestling him.

And he's four, and he's just built physically different. They are different. And so don't insult little girls by saying, well, you're just going to have to put up with it until the boy goes into purity. And then the question of that arises is like, okay, so children go into purity at different ages. So how are you going to then pick where that point is where you suddenly tell the little boy you can't be with the girls anymore?

You've got to go. Like, if we don't have a consistent sex-based policy from day one, it's a mess. You're asking way too much of sport officials to make that determination. What were you born at birth? That's the category you're in. now we talk about your age category. And then if you're in a combat sport, what about your weight?

Like, we have very clear guidelines, and they didn't need to be messed up this way. When you've done your research and dug into it, what do you think the push for it to get mixed up? Because, like, you know, there's just, to me, it just seems like there's common sense, right? It is. We all know it.

You go, okay, yeah, makes sense, sex, but-da-da. You want everything to be inclusive. I get it. Yeah. But at the same time, you know, know, there's like this inclusive word is no, it's, it's been so common dared. It's just like, well, it's exclusive. See, this is the, these people, the, the people who have, and I'm just going to call it gender identity ideology. I don't know I could say woke, but I mean, whatever this is,

this new ideology on identities, I mean, it's basically, again, a denial, that they go bending over backwards to deny that biological sex is real, even though you need to have a sex. to transition. How can you transition if you didn't start with one thing. So you actually have to acknowledge that there are, it's just like saying like there's North Pole and South Pole, but then now we're going to navigate the waters in between without trying to know where we started from. Anyway, the point is this whole thing is to confuse children on their identities so that

you can talk them into changing or whatever you want them to change to. So why would you want that? Good question. Why would we want that? Why would we want to mess with? children. Because that's the, the,

uh, trans ideology demands it because there's, the whole thing started with white, about three white billionaire males who identify as women. They just wanted to put in the United Nations, yoghika Carter principles. Oh yeah, like gender identity has to be the main thing for human rights.

Who are the three? So there is like, uh, Jennifer Pritzker, who's the head of, uh, there's a Pritzker, the,

uh, I think it's, they have pharmaceutical companies. They're out of Chicago. Okay. John Stryker, and Martin Rothblatt, who was the guy who started Sirius Radio. And all three of them are transgendered women? Like they identify as women.

They're born, just so I have this clear. Born male. Born male, and all three of these billionaires transitioned to female. And a lot of times it's a fetish because at that age, when they transition, if you're middle-aged man, sometimes you watch too much porn and then you get like into sissy porn and then you just decided. just think I assume having that much money and yeah and there's nothing else they want to have and they there's a a blog called the 11th hour blog and that uh my friend jennifer be like i mean she's a colleague online i've never met her in person but she basically has covered if you look up the 11th hour blog

you can see all about the money behind this movement and the ultimate her argument is that the ultimate um the ultimate goal is to um get human beings to rethink their identities and their biology to the point where it's it's called transhumanism so you can actually just replace body parts so basically you can implant a womb into a man so you can have a kid like it's just it's a bizarre idea it's like it's not bizarre freaking insane insane and basically so they're trying to teach children now it's got into our schools under the guise of Soji 1, 2, 3 curriculum. It's got, they're indoctrinating people in our universities.

Like if you say anything against it, you're a hate monger. They've got, they've captured pretty much the whole system. And they're trying, you know, in Canada, because we're so nice. We see ourselves as being nice. I think we were particularly vulnerable to this all ideology because we want to be nice. We just want to be nice to people. Like, I think, why can't we let people live the way they want? Sure, but don't take our kids.

because there's a kind of guy and it's like the AGP type of trans. So there's lots of different kinds of trans. But there's the middle-aged man who probably watched too much porn or whatever, but gets turned on by seeing himself in the mirror as a woman. Like he's still heterosexual, but then wants to dress up kind of like the woman,

the prostitute of his dreams kind of thing. So that turns him on. So fine. But a lot of those kind of guys, including those billionaires, their idea was, it's too bad I had to wait until I was middle age to try to change my sex. Like instead of, you can't change your sex, but to change how the world sees me. Yes.

So why don't we just indoctrinate kids from the beginning that you could be born in the wrong body? And then, you know, that justifies all of what we're doing. So I think it was something along those lines. And they can't, you know, at once, like a lot of people in that, like as soon as you, as soon as you transition like if you tell a kid they might be born the wrong body of course if you indoctrinate a kid

and make them confused they might say they might come to a teacher or something say I think I might be born in the wrong body so then the teacher sends them to the well and then the teacher can't tell the parent because I mean until they put in

things in place they're supposed to keep the secret because the parent's not going to understand yeah and so then the kid then but that it's a racket because then a lot of schools some of the schools, then they have a counselor. The counselor is all hepped up on gender ideology. So the kid, now we've got another one.

Oh, yeah, we got a trans kid here. Yay. Another trans kid. Well, then what happened to that one girl in Vancouver, 12-year-old? Then they send her right away to the gender doctor who then gives her a first shot of testosterone within the first hour of her first visit. I mean, cross-sex hormones. And you know what that's going to do?

because my VHD was in sexual dimorphism of kids and going through puberty. You do that, you've sterilized a kid for life. They don't know, those kids don't know what they're signing up for. Because they're kids, oh my God. It's such a mess, and this is just the sport thing is one branch of it,

and of course, running into it with a sports thing then caused me to go down the rabbit hole into these other areas where it's going to be even worse, like men and women's prisons, kids in schools. Like, where does it stop? Can I, I want to, I want to make sure that I ask about this.

Sure. This was the, I was like, I read it and then I read it again. And I'm like, I'm like, this is, this is like counter, not counterproductive, but like it's counterintuitive? Yeah, thank you. It's, it's, so once again, the book, folks,

if you're like, holy man, I got to figure out where there's Linda Blade is, unsporting, how, trans activism and science now are destroying sport. And I got it showing there on the screen for the people watching. I wrote it with Barbara Kay, who's like a journalist, a journalist in one of the top journalists in Canada. And it's Chapter 7 is Olympic capitulation. And it's about Joanna Harper.

And I'm not going to read it through at all. I just highlighted this one paragraph and it said, under these rules, in other words, a female Olympian could now be required. to contend with a born male competitor who enjoys a host of advantages on a structural level. But if the female athlete were to take testosterone supplements simply to bring her levels up to those allowed in a self-identifying male athlete, she'd been the one disqualified for doping. So in order for a trans, like a guy who, this is where I get. So just say a man who identifies as a woman.

Thank you. A man who identifies as a woman has to get down to a certain level. According to the International Olympic Committee. But that's higher than what females actually have. So to make it fair, you would be like, well, then I guess women can at least go up to that level. But if they do that, they get booted for doping. Yes. You know how insane that is when it's put out like that?

I'm like, you can't be that dumb. That's it. You can't be that dumb. But they are. All these sports guys are just going like, okay, we're going to pass this policy. We won't ask these questions. And it's even worse than that. We won't even bring the experts in to have the debate.

You know, the monk debate you were on. Yeah. Was, you know, I... That was with the St. Joanna Harper, by the way. Yes, yes. And I realized that. It was fascinating to me. One of the things I've always said is we lack debate in our society.

Like in the middle of COVID, one of the things I wanted to see is I was like, why not just as a government, televise a group of... You can have people from all different aspects, scientists, and lawyers and professionals, but get intelligent people like the monk debates have done, but televise it for people. So then we can like come to consensus and stop yelling at each other

and wanting to punch each other and discriminate and remove and everything else and blah, blah, blah, blah. And this, what the monk debate did with you too was like really like, oh, this is like, it's not perfect, but dang, it's better than anything I've experienced in society. And like, and yet we, We've silenced the critic of what's going on in our, in our world.

Oh, you know, like, what do they say? Oh, you're being. Being mean. You're being mean. Being mean. Or, you know, like you're big. You tell us, you tell the story of rugby, international rugby, I think it is. Coming down and saying, oh, we did this, you know, we looked into it and men born biological men aren't going to compete against women.

And then everybody else came out and just slammed them. Media, everything. And that's our world today. Yeah. And yet the rugby people know that have one male person on the pitch during a women's either practice or a competition rugby game match raises the possibility of a female athlete having serious neck, back, brain injury, raises that at least 30% or more. somebody's going to die, Sean, somebody's going to die before this gets sorted. I'm worried about that.

Because, like, you saw what happened with Fallon Fox. I don't know if you ever heard of that guy, Fallon Fox, but he was an MMA fighter back in the early as 2014, believe it or not. But he got into the ring. He identifies as a woman. He acts military. Military does this a lot to people, too. I don't know.

I think their brains get broken and then they, oh, I want to identify as a woman. But anyway, comes into a woman's. MMA match and a female fighter named Tamika Brent gets in the ring, she's completely clueless, had no idea she's going to be fighting. Because if Alan Fox sounds like a, you know, it's a weird name, but they always have these weird names, but she thought she was going to fight a woman. So she comes into the ring, all of a sudden, this person who looks like a woman starts pounding on her and she feels the strength, like it's completely different than then fighting

another woman. And before she knows it, it's like, you know, pit bull hit her. like, you know, she's got a crushed orbital, like eye socket, cracked skull, seven, seven stitches, seven staples in her head because it broke her head right open. And, you know, it then after a while, like, okay, this came out online. It was Joe Rogan even talked about it. And then later, Fallon Fox said, yeah, he really enjoyed that. He enjoyed that. He enjoyed it. beating up a woman like that. And I found your debate on the monk debate.

Very interesting because when you brought that up. Joanna Harper, the guy. She was like, well, I mean, it wasn't that bad. And it was only a fractured skull. And I'm like, only like, come on. Come on. Come on. Yeah.

And I mean, this is what they do. They downplay all of the ways in which it discriminates and harms women. And here's the thing. You know, you're worried about, let's just tell. take it at UFC, somebody dying in the ring, a man versus woman. I look at it and I go, look at all the kids that are being just irreversible. You can't, like, once you go down this road, there's no coming back. That's the worst.

Like, for me, sport is one thing is very important to me in my life. Obviously, it's been my life. Yeah. But, I mean, like, when I went down and realized it was happening in prisons and happening in schools and happening to young children, and I'm like, that is way worse. Like, if you're going to, like, you know, when, it's so ironic. Sean, because my first year, when we moved back to Emmington from West Africa, after we moved back to Canada, there was an article in the Eminton Journal about, now I'm going to forget her name, Lelani Muir,

who was the last surviving person who had undertaken, you know, in Alberta, we had this terrible, terrible policy from like 1928, where it was like you could, it was a eugenics movement, you could castrate, you could sterilize children who were of low IQ. So a lot of kids who were, so it was a terrible thing. It's a black mark on Alberta history that we had for about a 30, I think it was 40 year period of time that we were going to foster homes or children in institutions, whatever, if they were deemed to be low IQ, and of course a lot of them were, you know, First Nations, which is awful as well. But Lelani Muir was one of those. She got caught.

She was a foster kid. She probably had a normal IQ, but she appeared as like she didn't go to school. And I don't know what happened. She was an underprivileged kid. So they basically sterilized her. And by 1995, when I had moved in, because I was never, I wasn't born and raised in Alberta. So I read the newspaper her horrific story about how all these kids were being under the guys of eugenics, all these kids were being sterilized in Alberta, and she was the last surviving.

She was taking the province to court. She got a $350,000 settlement. Good for her. I mean, you know, we did this to her. And then so when I was looking, when this started happening, I became aware of the kids transitioning, and I know in my heart from my expertise in my PhD work, that you're going to give the wrong hormone to a kid during puberty, you are going to disrupt their ability, their fertility. And the possibility, especially if once they go down the root of, like, young girls wanting to go and get the surgery and getting hysterectomy and all that. I mean, so basically, I was looking at the numbers that I could find, because in Canada, you're not even allowed to talk about it half the time. So we don't really know the true numbers.

But I can say this. 40 years of Alberta eugenics caused about 3,000 kids to be, like people to be sterilized, not just kids, but adults and children, okay? 3,000. In the first five years of this ideology, there's been at least that many sterilized.

And we aren't even talking about. And you know what the silly thing is? We talk about, you know, like we make a big deal about, like Trudeau did, about like, oh, maybe there was some bodies buried in Kamloops, like the 200 kids and what happened to them and we still don't have bodies that have been dug up,

but let's say that's true. Like it's horrific. We're talking about kids, native kids from before being maltreated and sterilized and under and treated poorly, while the same government is doing it to kids right now and we're not even talking about it. Yes. And a lot of them are native because a lot of, it happens four times more to the kids who are in foster care, which happened to be sometimes First Nations. So why are we talking about something that was horrific

that happened in residential schools, which is bad? I mean, we could talk about that. But why at the same time that we're doing it twice as badly? We're treating kids right today, 2023. This is happening in Canada, and we're somehow not allowed to talk about it. But we're allowed to say, oh, oh, all these, you know,

we were so bad. Like, well, what happened in the residential schools? Like, this level of, it's just, it's just terrible. I want to say the word evil. You know, it sounds religious. That's, but here's the thing. It is freaking evil. Like, I don't know how you can sit there and go down this road with, you know, like, I always go, you want to be 19 in Saskatchewan, 18, and in Alberta, you know, and you want to go make these choices?

Linda, you're an adult. What am I going to do, you know? eventually you get to go, but, you know, when we're talking about, we're not talking about, we're talking about 12 year olds. We're talking about like crazy stuff. Yeah. Like where it makes zero sense. No. And we're coddling that in sport now with our dressing room.

Yes. Like, let's just, where are we going to stop? When are we going to stop and say enough? That's enough. Well, I think, you know, with the one million March for children that happened. Yeah, that happened. You know, I think it was pretty evident that there's a lot of parents from. all different walks of life, all different skin colors, all different ethnic backgrounds,

et cetera, et cetera. And they all just got together and said, this is ridiculous. No more of this. And what did the, you know, what did the government do? I mean, half of it protested with the LGBTI2. Yeah. TOSLI. Yeah.

The other half, the conservatives, this is where I'm like, hmm, they said go dark on this and don't say anything. Yeah, they're worried about the reputations. Yes. But, you know, that's because we're still that the public is not educated, so they're going to think, oh, you're just. just far right. No, you're not. All of these people, all of us who, you know, we're all over the spectrum. I can tell you there's women's groups all over that we're, I'm meeting with, and most of

them are radical feminists and people from all over the spectrum who really care about this. This is terrible what's happening to our young people. It's terrible what's happening to our society, and it's not far right. It is absolutely the broad spectrum of normal-minded people in Canada who don't like what's going on. It's right in the middle, I think. It's right in the middle. I think it's pretty normal to be talking about protecting children. Because there are children.

Like, it's okay. It's finding Danny for that group to want to take our kids because they obviously can't have them anymore. So then you're going to want ours. Like, I'm telling you, it's just got to stop. It's ridiculous. I won't mince words. It's got to stop.

Well, the thing that I've stared at through COVID and now, into this is there has been a rise of independent media because everyone's been going where is the dialogue on this and now you can find more and more and more of it I'm not saying it's perfect you can find more yeah but for too long I mean the the CBC the CTV the global the on and on the mainstream has been the voice in Canada where you could find out information and you we've been known for a while now something something's missing oh they're totally extremely biased yeah and now you have the the things coming down with

trying to get, you know, like we've seen it play out on meta and now possibly Google, and now you get the CRTC trying to get all these podcasts to register and on and on it goes. And you're like, well, where does that lead? Well, it leads to them nobody being able to talk about. So we're in a race. We're in a race. We are in a race. Because that's exactly what I'm trying to.

Yeah. Because people like you, you better hurry up and say it before you're not allowed to say it anymore. And if we have enough people like you and me and everybody else that I know of, in my circles, if we have enough of us starting to talk about and say it, there will be enough people who understand that we have to change the laws,

the bylaws, because it's happening now. Now if we even change Bill C-16, it's not enough because it's warmed its way into the provincial human rights codes, it's warmed its way into city bylaws. And so we're going to have to change city bylaws,

provincial human rights rules, federal rules and go back, and now with my international affiliations that I've developed, we're going to go after the Yogi Akarta principles that put them into the UN to begin with. It started, it's in the UN, it's local, it's everywhere, somewhere, we've got to change it all that once again, and that's a heavy lifting.

And you know what I hate most about politicians? Yeah. Is when you bring up something like this, they'll go, well, that's a federal thing. Yeah, they'll just pass the buck. But that's what, yeah, that's what the eye. O.C. said too, like when they finally push came to shove after the 2021 Olympics, when Laurel Hubbard was lifting weights with the women, and of course the world got to see a man lifting weights with the women. Oh, yeah. I guess our 2015 inclusion on the testosterone level. I guess that was a little bit not fit for purpose. So they went back and they brought in a new set in 2021 in the fall. That was the very same month that all of a sudden Leah Thomas came up in C.O.A. But anyway, that the, the, um, Then they just punted, because in between that time, between the Olympic Games, so it was the three intervening months, July ended, and they started the consultation on the next transgender policy.

We wrote, because now we had an international women's group that were, like, from women's activists from all different countries in the world. Wrote letters. There's a lady from Australia, Catherine Deves, who wrote a letter, she's a lawyer, wrote a letter to the IOC, said, this time can we have women sitting at the table to, tell our point of view and have an input into your policy, the IOC policy. They wrote back, no, we've already consulted with people like you. And meanwhile, we could see people like Rachel McKinnon, John and Harper, they were all at the table. So all the trans activists come back to the table to try to spin another tale and they leave women out again on the discussion. They did not consult with women.

What a frustrating thing. And then by November of 2021, the new IOC policy is, oh, no, we'll just leave it up to each individual sport governing body. They don't want to make a decision. Yeah, pass the buck. Yeah, that's what they did. They're cowards. They created the problem in the first place, and then they passed the buck to the individual sport.

And that's why we're in a situation in 2023 where every single sport in the world has a different policy about this. And then you have, like, April Hutchinson, she gets caught because she's in the Canadian powerlifting union doesn't follow what the international powerlifting union says. Like, it just keeps going on and on. Like, it's a mess right now because the Iowa. see past the buck they don't want to put their foot down and say no we're going to go back to sex-based guidelines and because of joanna harper and people like that who have a seat at the iLC medical commission that's why we're in this mess it all comes from there so it's frustrating but

i'm telling you the more times we can have these conversations one one of the things that i love is that i found another like i so i started this podcast in 2019 Okay. And certainly it's had its ebbs and flows, if you would. Right. And, you know, like, you know, at the beginning, it was, it was getting to the level of, like, Don Cherry and Ron McLean and having some interesting people on. Sure.

And then, you know, Glenn, the oiler side of it, having Glenn Seather on. And then in the middle of COVID, I mean, I went off the deep end and I've had everything. Doctors, lawyers. I've been, you know, shut off a YouTube and a whole bunch of different things. But in, like, something is drastically wrong. wrong here. Yeah. And the thing is, is once you start pulling on one thread, then you start see like 10 other threads, you're like, what are we doing? Yeah. And, um, you know, like, it's led me to this topic over and over and over again. And the thing that gives me a lot of hope is I keep

finding people such as yourself, then I'm like, how have you been sitting there? And I didn't know. I mean, obviously in Canada, I quite understand. Yeah. There's these echo, not echo, these chambers where they put us into and then if you haven't if you haven't found a way to get out of it like if you only stick to mainstream mainstream main stream in interview in linda and mainstream certainly interviewing sean you know and so you go well here we are we somehow found a way to find each other and i'm like there's a ton of Canadians so many that are that are like badass yeah and have a ton of knowledge such as yourself and i'm like oh my god this is this is pretty cool like i can't believe i I sit into the 500 episodes still finding Canadians that are completely badass and are like speaking

openly because I'm just like, where is it? Like I don't get it. Yeah, we're out there, but they had a really good way of shutting people down, of stifling the voices. It's about to break open, I think. I think the dominals are just teetering. I think there's going to be this wholesale like collapse all of a sudden. There's just going to be. I think, I think, I think, there's just going to be the ideology just cannot withstand a lie cannot stand you cannot keep lying to people and think that it's going to still you can keep shutting people up and and shutting down their conversations you can't it's going to come up and people care about their sports parents care about their hockey parents care about their gymnastics the girls I mean come on like we care about our kids

like you know at some point you have to stop treating it like oh we're we're being all hateful to this microscopic percentage of people who might have a psychological problem, as if we all have to buy in and pretend like we all have the same problem. Yeah, like the emperor has no pants. Yeah. Right. I mean, at some point you have to call a spade to spade.

Like, listen, I mean, if we didn't have biological sex, we wouldn't have food. Right? Like, I mean, I just laugh about it coming from the farm. It's like, you know, it's like, so the bull wants to be a cow? How's that going to go? Like, that's not going to go.

That's not, like, that isn't the way biology works. No. And I don't have a background in biology. No. But you don't need it. You don't need it. It's like, folks, we don't need it. Like, that's the irony of all this.

I have all this experience. I have a PhD, all this stuff. Would I have needed any of that to really just say what I said today? I guess in terms of the journey, but. Well, I just look at you and I think you're so beautifully positioned to talk from this spot, talk about this from a position of authority. Yeah. Because your life has built up to like this moment where you're like, what is going on?

You know, I've had very few times where I felt really compelled to speak. Yeah. And the time it was is when they came out and hockey Canada said, you know, kids aren't going to be allowed to take off, you know, they're under gear in a hockey dressing room or shower or anything. I'm like, that's, what coach asked for that? I can't think of a single. No coach would have.

And that's the point. Like, they finally come. to a point because their ideology is so ridiculous, you finally get to a point where you have to instantiate some sort of policy that is so bizarre and makes no sense. And then it wakes everybody up and says like, whoa, okay, how did that happen? And here we are, right? And it's, I can't, I can't find a single coach that is actually doing what the policy says. Like none of them, none of them are, None of them of them. I haven't found a single one that's like, oh, this is a good idea, not a single one. I found one that was kind of like, huh, I wonder if it was put in place because of all the different, the diversity of people that are starting to play hockey.

And maybe there's something there with. And I'm like, yeah, but like you can still, the one person can go get changed in the. In a different third. Yeah, or in the, in the bathroom. Yeah, like in the handicapped or the single stall bathroom. Correct. So it wasn't supposed, it would never, it never happened. to be an issue. They're making it an issue because they keep wanting to push this in our faces. Yes. And like I say, do they really think, really seriously, do they really think that they could keep doing this and to people in sports, especially, because we're fighters? Like, we fight. We disagree. We contest. That's the whole point. Sport your rivals and you compete.

Well, we compete with our ideas too, right? So, like, why did they think they could push this into the sports realm? And somehow everybody would just be, oh, okay, okay, I guess we'll do it. Okay. No, that's not what we're like in sports. But somebody told me something interesting, though. And they said, no, it was a gambit. If you can get people, the most obvious place in life where this was going to come to a head was sports.

if you can make the ideology work, if you can bully people to do this in sports, you've got the whole country. You've got the whole, everything else. Because sports, it's the most vulnerable for them to show their insanity. And it visually to us all makes zero sense. So if you can make, if you can bully and intimidate people

in the sport world to accept this, then you've won. They're not going to win. At least not on my watch. Like, I won't let that. I mean, I'm going to just keep saying what I'm saying. I'm probably going to write another book, but we're going to keep saying what we say. Well, and what we're going to do here on the podcast is we're going to have you back on.

Like, I mean, you don't have to worry about that. Now that we found you, I'm like, well, this is way too easy to have a wealth and knowledge sitting this close to the studio, you know? Yeah. Well, I'm happy to be on. I mean, it's, listen, thank you for the interview because I feel like there's very few people who are like you, Sean, who are willing to just let people talk and speak and say what they say. Because, you know, and everything else we're supposed to be careful about what word you use. You're looking over your shoulder or you're humming and hoeing.

Like, it's crazy. So it's a, it's a delight to be able to sit with you and just have a conversation like two normal Canadians. And there we are. You know, if I was 10 years ago thinking a normal conversation would be saying that a man is a man and a woman is a woman, I don't think I could have fathomed at it. But I do run into people all the time that could see this coming. Yeah. You know, like I think is it as early as 2003 in your book? Yes.

Well, the first 2003 was when the Olympics, well, basically, 1999, the Olympic Committee decided to stop doing the sex testing. so you can do the sex verification test, which is simple. It's just like take your pen, like a cue tip, take a, like a cheek swab, put it in a test tube. You've got some cells in there to see right away, like male or female. Yeah. Would have been so easy to keep doing that. They decided, oh, no, it's socially going to make some people feel awkward. Yeah, I would make them feel awkward if they're lying about their sex.

Yeah. And then, so they basically then stopped. That's a great chapter because you go through how they tried to, like, all the different things. all the different things to, so in the Olympics folks, they've been trying to make sure that women are women for a very long time, to the point of like walking them through all naked. Yeah, there was like a, there was like the naked parade. Can you imagine being, you know, like, no wonder that got shut down.

Yeah, well, that got shut down after the first time. Sean, could you sit and watch all the naked women walk through all these athletes and make sure they're women? And it's like, sure, I guess, right? Like, you can just imagine. That happened in 1960s. But you know the truth is that the, the activists will use that moment to say that's why it was inhuman to do your sex verification on women.

Like it's so disingenuous. We had a way during the time I was competing. I had a number of those done. Like it was no big deal. That was easier to do the sex verification cheek swab with a Q-tip than going in and having a nurse watch you pee pee because Russian women would bring in pig bladders full of somebody else's urine to drop into the pea cup. And so now because of that cheating, they had to bring in a person who had to literally be in the stall with you watching you pee. Have you ever tried to pee?

Okay, you're already, you're already dehydrated because you've been competing for all day long in a hot sun. Now you have no, like no fluid in your body. And now you're trying to pee and there's somebody squatting down watching to make sure it's coming out of your body. Like, that is worse, way worse than having a cheek swab. So don't tell me sex verification was dehumanizing women, and then you make your athletes still do the P test. Like it just, the whole thing is disingenuous. So for them to stop the sex verification test. And then by 2003, they said, oh, no, we'll let guys come in as long as they were castrated.

And I'd lived as a woman for three years and blah, blah, blah. And then by 2015, oh, that's way too hard. We'll just let them reduce their testosterone to levels higher than women. And I'm like, it's just, the whole thing has been a huge gaslighting, 30 years of gaslighting women, basically, with 20 years at least. So, and come on, like, they have been the most cowardly corrupt group of people ever, the International Olympic Committee. Joe Rogan just thinks they're gross anyway. Like, like, the Olympics, like at least in MMA fights and stuff, you pay the athletes. The Olympics, the Olympics never have to pay their athletes, never have to.

have to acknowledge anything. Like, they just take the billion dollars and walk away to the next Olympic Games. Like, it's corrupt. It's, they are just, like, they act like they don't have to account to anybody. There's something going to happen that it's either going to be restructured again. Like, I think we're heading into a time, whether it's in Canada, internationally. People have had it. Like, we need to start doing something different.

There's going to be a pivot point somewhere. because what they're doing right now is not acceptable. It's not. So, you know, there's a lot that needs to change in the Olympic movement. But what they've done to women in terms of the categorical thing is beyond. It's beyond. I don't know. Well, I appreciate you coming in doing this and making the drive.

I'm going to hold you for a couple extra minutes because we're going to flip over to substack. So I know for the people watching on all the different apps, if you want to catch the the rest or the bonus 10 minutes, hop over to Substack, but I appreciate you making the drive here and doing this. This has been, you know, when I earmarked this day,

I was like, I hadn't really listened to you that much. And even in the Monk debates, I feel like you're pretty reserved. I was. I want it to be respectful, but man, like, yeah, let me loose.

Yeah, let and Linda loose, you know. Like, here we go, you know. But I appreciate you making the drive and doing this. Thank you.