LLast week, a 16-year-old Utah school basketball player was subjected to threats and online abuse and was forced into police protection. A member of the state’s Board of Education posted a photo on Instagram casting doubt on her gender, and these days, in the smoky tire fire of the internet, that’s all you really need to destroy someone.
“She cut her hair short because she felt comfortable,” the girl’s parents told local news. “Her clothes were a little baggy. She went to the gym a lot, so she had muscles. It breaks our hearts that we need to have this conversation with our daughter. Worst case scenario, she could take her own life.”
The Republican official, Natalie Cline, later walked back her statement and apologized for her remarks, but threw more punches. “She’s definitely bigger,” she argued. “Because our society is pushing to normalize transgenderism, it’s normal to wonder if people are who they say they are.” Still, she did confirm that the child “is actually a biological girl and always has been,” This is a good thing for her.
Another week of good fighting. Stand up for women. Protecting girls’ sports from – wait, let’s see if we get this right – 16-year-old girls. Then again, if you’re part of the growing army of people trying to limit trans people’s participation in sports, you probably won’t let minor inconveniences like logic or absurdity get in the way.
Take the recent controversy over Parkrun, a mass-participation 5-kilometer fun run that has become the latest target of aggressive anti-trans police.
Parkrun has been doggedly pursued in recent weeks by protesters and media unhappy with its policy of allowing trans women to identify as women.
It doesn’t matter, Parkrun has always insisted that it is a running event rather than a competition, there are no prizes, and there is almost no competitive equipment. If you want, you can do a park run on a mobility scooter. You can do this with a stroller. You can anesthetize yourself right down to your eyeballs. Still, to avoid vitriolic criticism, it decided to delete most of the records to avoid any ambiguity. That’s the end of it.
But of course not, because it’s not really a parkrun record, it’s not really a parkrun, and it’s not really a sport at all. The issue began to gain traction a few months ago, prompted by a report by right-wing think tank Policy Exchange, which called for Parkrun to be stripped of public funding unless it banned trans women from competing in the women’s category.
The cause was quickly picked up by helpful idiots in the media and social media. Things are written in anger. The insults continued. Noise begets noise. Last Saturday, rather amusingly, Sky News sent a reporter to a London parkrun in an attempt to stir up some righteous outrage, but received only indifferent comments such as “It was just a bit of fun” and “The debate has been The “proportion” is over.
Still, exaggerating the debate is the raison d’être of Policy Exchange, a group founded to promote conservative talking points in the corridors of power: embracing “left-wing” views on campuses, judicial oversight of government, leaving the European Court of Justice on human rights. It helped draft laws restricting the rights of climate change activists to protest but stopped short of claiming it had received funding from fossil fuel companies. Now it seems to have a sudden interest in women’s sports. Why is this so? Perhaps because of that, or perhaps because of the overall viciousness of this conversation, there’s certainly a real fear that some women feel like their space is being violated, and that trans rights are an extension of the patriarchy they’ve been subjected to for so long. struggle. The problem is that this anger is being stoked and exploited by malign actors, the media and reactionary right-wing politicians to advance causes that extend far beyond women’s sports.
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So once you take trans women out of sports, you move to sports like chess and darts. From there, it quickly became synonymous with laughing at people, talking about “men in skirts” and maybe even a cheap joke during Prime Minister’s Questions while the parents of a murdered trans teen were in the public gallery Watch on. Next you proceed to completely dismiss the concept of gender fluidity. You demonize trans women as potential abusers or rapists. You describe gender reassignment surgery as “mutilation” or “child abuse.” All of this is an attempt to push open the window and slowly move towards a sunny horizon, in which – as is already beginning to happen in parts of the country – trans people can be legislated into oblivion altogether.
The really compelling part of Parkrun’s argument is that the anti-trans movement in sport has begun to expand its focus beyond the Olympic 800m, national swimming trials, or suppressing testosterone levels into the realm of identity and belonging. A proposed ban on parkruns – due to a lack of genital screeners in the token queue – is largely unenforceable. The cruelty here is the point: the desire to forcibly deport trans women even when it might threaten their safety. The message to trans women, trans men—even anyone who might look like trans is that this is not your space and that you will not be identified by your values but by our values.
Sadly, for so many enthusiasts, the appeal of Parker’s run lies in its simple purity: a holistic, community-driven vision of sport, untainted by commercialism or top-down power, Unaffected by political or culture wars. So, of course, like the National Trust or the BBC, it needs to be tarnished, creating a contentious space, creating a more toxic, less welcoming space. Once the rage machine has eaten, it can move on: to the next target, the next domino tottering in the queue.
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