Quillette has a published a “case study” showing how one transgender female athlete can wreak substantial damage not just on one woman, or on one sport, but on a ton of women and in five sports (basketball, rowing, volleyball, tae kwon do, and track).
I won’t belabor this, for I’ve already written a lot about the inherent athletic advantage of being male, most of which remain in place (sometimes to a lesser degree if there’s medical intervention) when a male identifies and lives as a woman. And the advantages don’t appear to abate with time, either. A related problem, besides unfair athletic advantage of transwomen in women’s sports, is injury to women by the stronger natal males (transwomen), also documented in the Quillette article whose headline is below.
It’s worth looking at this, and also at the Daily Mail article on the same athlete, if only to see the photos and videos, which tell the tale alone.
Click to read:
The venue is the KIPP Academy in Lynn, Massachusetts, and the school’s trans athlete is bearded, 6-foot-tall Lazuli Clark. There’s no mention of whether he’s had hormone therapy or surgery, but I believe this is based solely on Clark’s self-identification since doctors aren’t mentioned.
Some quotes involving the different sports:
Basketball:
Thanks in large part to The Independent Council on Women’s Sport, an American-based advocacy group, almost 9-million people have seen the infamous video clip of Clark injuring a female opponent during a February 8 high-school basketball game. Clark, a student at KIPP Academy in Lynn, MA, also reportedly hurt two other girls during that same game. Following the third injury, the coach of the opposing team, Collegiate Charter of Lowell, MA, chose to forfeit the game rather than risk losing more players.
Here’s the video; note how Clark towers over the other girls and drags one to the ground as he shoots. Enlarge the video to see it:
Trans-identified male player for Kipp Academy in MA injured 3 girls before half time causing Lowell Collegiate Charter School to forfeit.
A man hitting a woman used to be called domestic abuse. Now it's called brave.
Who watches this & actually thinks this is "compassionate,… pic.twitter.com/ZLlqYH6iAs
— Riley Gaines (@Riley_Gaines_) February 19, 2024
Three girls hurt in one game by this muscular beanpole! But, after negative publicity, KIPP Academy forfeited its last game and pulled itself out of the playoff bracket.
Volleyball:
Basketball isn’t Clark’s only sporting pursuit. By my count, Clark has opted into female categories in at least four separate sports. . .
These include volleyball, a sport in which the high-school senior was named a Commonwealth Atlantic Conference “all-star.” According to KIPP Academy Lynn statistics, Clark scored more kills during the 2023-24 volleyball season (171) than the rest of the team (131) combined. (A kill is defined as “an attack by a player that is not returnable by the receiving player on the opposing team and leads directly to a point or loss of rally.”) Clark also led the team in aces and blocked shots, and was tied for the team lead in total sets played, at 68. That makes 68 sets during which one of Clark’s female teammates was warming the bench while this biologically male athlete was racking up kills during KIPP’s 22-game schedule.
Track:
On May 30, 2023, Clark competed—as a female—in Lynn, MA’s All-City Track Championship, setting the all-time meet record (for females) in the 400-meter hurdles and shot put. Clark’s average shot-put distance of 41 feet, 2 inches was more than six feet longer than any female participant achieved at the 2023 state championship in the corresponding division. In both track categories, Clark’s female competitors were bumped down in the rankings as a result. That would include the female athletes who deserved to take first place in hurdles and shot put, but who instead had to console themselves with second.
A six-foot addition to a 35-foot shotput record clearly shows that something mre than female athletic ability is involved!
Rowing:
USRowing, which allows self-identified women, born as males, to compete as women, allowed Clark to join a private female rowing club (schools can’t afford their own rowing teams). As per USRowing’s policy transgender women, with all their male plumbing, are allowed to use the women’s locker room.
Recently, Quillette received a leaked copy of an October 12, 2022 letter sent to the United States Rowing Association (commonly known as USRowing), the sport’s national governing body, in which 15 parents of elite female Massachusetts-resident rowers detailed their concerns about Clark.
In an interview with Quillette, one of the signatories reported that Clark joined the female rowing club in 2021, after placing poorly (“near the bottom,” by this parent’s account) with the club’s corresponding male team. Clark reportedly didn’t bother to shave or otherwise maintain the outward aesthetic pretenses of female gender identification, and even continued to wear the male club’s uniform.
In one documented 2022 incident, it is alleged, Clark walked into the girls’ changing room, spotted a female rower who was topless, and made a lewd comment about her breasts (“Oooh, titties”). As a result, documents reviewed by Quillette indicate, Clark was reported by team officials to the U.S. Center for SafeSport, a congressionally mandated body dedicated to “ending sexual, physical, and emotional abuse on behalf of athletes everywhere.” After SafeSport took action in late 2022, Clark never rowed for the club again—in either gender category. (Efforts to contact Clark or adult members of Clark’s family about these allegations, as well as other events described in this article, were unsuccessful.)
It’s no surprise, then, that Clark’s prowess in rowing against natal women hasn’t been documented. The Daily Fail reports that Clark is also competing in tae kwon do.
Why is this allowed to continue—at the expense of women’s safety, women’s self-esteem, and women’s enthusiasm for sport? We already know why: it’s gender activism, which has, largely by guilt tripping and employing the mantra “trans women are women”, allowed natal men, sometimes without medical treatment, to simply say they’re women (yes, they may identify as women, but that’s irrelevant to the issue). This policy has largely been supported by the Biden administration.
Quillette gives at least two reasons more: fear on the part of the female athletes and “activist talking points”.
From the letter from the parents of female rowers:
The October 12, 2022 letter to USRowing reads, in part, as follows:
Our daughters have stayed quiet because they are afraid. We tried to speak up for them, and we were shut down. We tried to speak to leadership at all levels. [But] name-calling and the threat of mental health is being used as emotional blackmail to keep us all quiet while women are harmed and devalued…Our daughters also faced a locker room situation where they were uncomfortable…They stopped changing in the locker room and began to hide away. These young girls should never have been put through being told they had to face a male body everyday as they undressed…It was a constant thought, a constant threat to submit and a constant awareness. Yet they dared not say anything (except privately to their parents). The rowing team also required the male athlete to room with them on trips. The girls spoke to us about quitting rowing because of the intimidation of being forced to be in a hotel room alone with a male.
There’s also a pervasive fear on the part of women athletes of being called a “transphobe.”
Finally, activist talking points:
A second reason such farces are tolerated is that male athletes who invade female athletic spaces have become experts at reciting the same activist talking points that USRowing and other sports organizations have used to gaslight concerned parents. A common rhetorical strategy here is to suggest that any expression of concern for the integrity of female sports categories (or the emotional well-being of girls) serves to channel a form of conservative political extremism, which in turn nullifies the very “existence” of trans-identified individuals.
A 2023 media profile of Clark, for instance, has the high school senior lamenting (in the words of a The74 reporter) “how difficult it can be to focus on school when some policymakers are passing laws against her identity.” According to Clark,
going to school is the least of people’s concerns at this point for a lot of people. There are days where I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, I have to worry about my [Advanced Placement] U.S. history project, and yesterday another state basically made it so that I can never exist in that state.’ And it’s like, how’s anyone supposed to think about anything at all when there’s all of that going on?
I hardly need add, since I’ve said this many times before, that I don’t think transmales or transfemales should be the subject of bigotry, incivility, or unequal treatment—except when the unequal treatment involves things like rape counseling, sports, or incarceration. In all other respects, equality. I am not a transphobe, nor do I think trans people should be “erased”. But it seems to me that when the familiar mantra comes into conflict with fundamental fairness of separate women’s sports (or jails), it has to give way.
The whole issue is summed up in this cover of the British Journal of Sports Medicine from last May, which is reproduced the Quillette article. I couldn’t believe it was real, but then found it in a tweet by an author of one of that issue’s articles (there’s also an article on transgender participation in sport), and then checked the cover of the issue in our library. Yes, it’s real. If I’m not mistaken, this shows the dangers of transwomen participating in rugby. (If that huge player is really a natal women, I retract what I said!):
h/t: Mike
May I try this – and I know this is treading on thin ice, so I try to keep it straight ahead :
Male performance as female is not the same as, e.g., victimization of a number of categories of people by Islamic doctrine – part of the impetus of “Islamophobia”.
IMHO : sport is an outlet and way of confronting lots of fear types – dread / terror fear (phobos), or panic / rout fear (deimos). I only thought of that just now.
But it would seem to subvert sport, if a referee, judge, or even the spectators were to penalize any “fear” or “phobia”. Indeed, I think some women have expressed concern about competing with any clearly larger athletes, now including males, for their own health.
Proof read error:
phobos = panic/rout fear
deimos = dread/terror
theoi.com/Daimon/Deimos.html
As others have pointed out, one can tell that the groups promoting “Lazuli” as a woman know they are lying about his sex because they have to take steps to hide his obvious male advantages. Exhibit A is the image (not merely a photo) of “Lazuli” with two other members of the KIPP women’s volleyball team, in which some PR flack has photoshopped “Lazuli” into a photo of the two women, with the image of “Lazuli” shrunk down to match the heights of the two women and avoid making him appear to loom over them in the way he does in that basketball video.
Aside from the danger this guy poses in contact sports, If I recall anywhere close to correctly my high school shot put experiences in the 1960’s, a 41-foot toss in the boys’ division would barely or not even placed in a dual meet. This guy is just crappy by any male standard.
I just checked a listing of MA state records and it appears that this guy might even be putting an 8# shot versus a boys’ 12#. Details aside, let him play with the other boys.
I remember being told that examples like that provided by Lazuli Clark “just weren’t going to happen” and that thinking they might was a sign of having a weird, crazy mental phobia against trans people.
I assume these same defenders of Trans-specific Civil Rights have now all moved somewhere between “it happens but it’s so rare that pointing it out smears all the decent, ordinary trans girls who just want to be themselves/play” and “so what? —there have always been gifted, talented women athletes who have stood out in sports.”
Of course, there’s also:”Fairness to trans women means recognizing that they’re women and if that means a few privileged cis girls are bumped down a bit — or even that women’s sports is completely dominated by trans women for all time to come — it’s more than worth it.”
I don’t think it’s possible to carve out some areas where men who consider themselves women can override the objections of women made uncomfortable — such as bathrooms, changing rooms, or other designated areas — but draw a line on sports, prisons, and rape shelters, and make it work. Not just because the ideology will constantly keep expanding territory, but because telling women their discomfort is less important than validating men isn’t really right.
The next stage in the discourse from “it never happens!” to “it’s rare” to “so what?” will be “it’s good this happens, the other girls need to train harder, this will encourage and inspire them to get better.”
And the final stage: you will be ostracized, fired, fined, or imprisoned for objecting.
I suppose that the real women don’t protest because they fear – with good reason – that they will be labeled transphobic and have their future ruined.
” . . . because telling women their discomfort is less important than validating men isn’t really right.”
Spot on, Sastra.
On the fairness of trans women competing against females: in one of his street epistemology videos, Peter Boghossian was told by a student defending males competing against females exactly what you pointed out – that there are women who are much better than other women at sport, so life just isn’t fair.
I wonder if it took any self-restraint by Boghossian not to retort: Do you consider white Europeans or the Jews of Israel to be settler/colonialists? Get over it, life’s not fair. And do you consider the descendants of enslaved people in the U.S. to be disadvantaged? Oh well, get over it, life’s not fair.
ThyroidPlanet has pointed out this inconsistency in the rhetoric of the illiberal left many times.
+1
Would it matter at all if males performing as females is related to the desire inherent in that practice? I say “desire” because I think this is in Queer theory doctrine, etc., especially in the sexual dimension. “Performativity” is the idea from Judith “Life is drag” Butler.
That is, an inner sexual desire is satisfied by a seamless performance in life at large as a female. It is an inner state of desire nobody outside can access – gnosis.
But uh-oh – in order to complete the performance, the body must occasionally pass unobstructed anywhere females are. Male athletics break the performance only for the performer.
How is that everyone else’s problem, when society cannot access the inner desire of the performer? Even if males weren’t trouncing females in athletics. Further, such permissiveness opens the door to invasion of women’s spaces by males for other less religious reasons (shall we say).
Society seems to have made a mistake in recognizing gender identity and expression in its human/civil rights laws as a prohibited ground for discrimination. The problem is not that transgender individuals would lose their customary protection that everyone enjoys, regardless of whatever identity group they belong to, against arbitrary state action. Habeas corpus, free speech, Miranda rights, the whole schemer, none of that would be at risk if gender was removed from civil rights law, leaving sex and sexual orientation (as well as race, religion, disability, etc.) as prohibited grounds. Gender is simply not in the same category as sex and orientation. You can change your gender as easily, literally, as you can change your underwear. Their claim that gender is something innate is just a myth. (And even if it was innate, so is left-handedness, colour-blindness, and red hair. Only some of the myriad innate immutable human characteristics have been elevated to grounds protected from discrimination.
While we ought to treat people kindly, if gender fluidity is a reliable predictor of a narcissistic personality that causes too much drama in the workplace or alienates customers, it should be legal for an employer to discriminate against trans people and not hire them. If another employer sees trans people as an asset, he should be able to hire them preferentially. Trans is simply not a relevant ground for the state to step in and sue private organizations over it, any more than it is illegal to refuse to hire people who won’t take direction from supervisors or any other personality trait that makes them more of a liability than an asset. Once you accept that, it is straightforward to ignore pleas from men who want to compete in women’s sport.
As Sastra says, there is no reason why a rights-seeker should compromise with us over reasonable limitations on their civil rights as trans people just to protect other people like women and children…especially when they have already won the whole prize: in law, transwomen are women, everywhere that self-identification is the law. In these jurisdictions, which probably includes yours, there is no legal basis to keep men from playing women’s sport and insinuating themselves into women’s spaces.
Legislatures will have to remove references to gender identity and expression from their human/civil rights legislation.
RE: “in law, transwomen are women, everywhere that self-identification is the law. In these jurisdictions, which probably includes yours, there is no legal basis to keep men from playing women’s sport and insinuating themselves into women’s spaces.”
I wonder whether this is really true. I know that the current German government is trying to pass a self-ID law that still allows the exclusion of transidentified males from certain spaces but not because they are transidentified. Nobody knows how the bolded part of the last sentence is supposed to work. (Also, some experts of German constitutional law think that the government self-id project is unconstitutional.)
I actually have come around to a shoulder shrugging acceptance of the German self-ID bill. That’s because it basically says that the state will treat you as the sex you ID as – except in all categories in which sex matters.
It depends on the law. In Canada, the wild card is the quasi-judicial provincial Human Rights Commissions, which have not yet heard any complaints from “women” excluded from women’s sporting divisions on the illegal ground of their gender identity. The reason there have been no complaints is that the organizers of amateur leagues don’t want to risk their organizations being victimized by financially ruinous complaints out of which, given the track record of Human Rights complaints in Canada, they would almost certainly lose and have to pay damages to the aggrieved “transwoman.” There is no prospect of appeal of a Human Rights Tribunal’s decision, not in the familiar American sense of appealing a lower-court decision to an appeal court. Canada’s Supreme Court (captured as it is anyway) will not come riding to the rescue of female athletes.
So the safe course, if you are a governor of an amateur sport (or even some professional sports like power-lifting) is to double-down with self-identification, censoring all dissidents, and pray that no man breaks a woman’s neck during your time in office. Just shut your ears to the complaints of women in the meantime.
In its adjudication of a gender-related complaint, the Tribunal would look at ethical guidance from Egale Canada (a creature of the federal government’s department of sport and fitness) which demands that a registration by a woman must be accepted at face value. It is nobody’s business if she is a transwoman. She is simply a woman and that’s that.
That’s why Human Rights laws need to be amended to remove gender as a prohibited ground of discrimination. If your state or national civil/human rights laws or codes enshrine gender protection the way ours do, you are probably trapped in self-identification even if you don’t know it yet. It will be interesting to see what happens (eventually) with Riley Gaines’s suit against the NCAA and also what happens in Nassau Co., New York, whose prohibition of male athletes in women’s events runs against New York State law.
Crazy. Someone is going to be badly injured or killed.
I admit this has to happen, the whole system must be totally taken over and destroyed and then rebuilt.
People will get hurt, some may die and others crippled but it is so dug in now it’ll be the only way.
Michael, see my comment # 11 below. I disagree with you. The system does not have to be destroyed, nor do I think that anyone is likely to die (as to male athletes injuring female athletes, this has already happened).
It’s called cynicism buddy. Nothing to take too seriously from me.
I sort of agree with Peter: much of this will crumble when put to a test in court.
But Michael is right there will be some fierce holdouts. Helen Joyce says the last and most committed will be the parents who medically and surgically transed their kids. Those parents will keep believing in gendered souls and trans rights to the very end, rather than face their own complicity in damaging their own children.
It is hard and complex in my book. And I feel bad as I’ve always respected those who are trans.
I get the two different constructs of sex and gender perfectly well and due to having my own issues in life (not LGBTQ+ to be honest) that made me have issues with being accepted can honestly empathize.
I think much sanity would return quickly if enough girls and women simply refused to play along with validating the gender self-ID of the males joining female teams. Female solidarity would be powerful.
Keith, I agree (and, according to surveys, 90% of adult fermale athletes oppose the inclusion of males in women sports) – but getting collective action started is a big coordination problem. Imagine you are in the stands at some sport event. Everybody is standing, watching what happens on the field. We would all see just as well if we were all sitting on our bums. But how do you get everybody to sit down? If I just sit down, I won’t see what’s happening on the field anymore, etc.
What you need is a sufficiently large number of female athletes who stand up around the same time, state their name, and then say: I oppose this.
Like Riley Gaines and the other 8 athletes who are suing the NCAA. And the female athletes who are suing in Connecticut, etc.
Like former tennis star Martina Navratilova, or Dailey Thompson (UK, Olympic gold medal winner in decathlon), etc.
OK, so here’s a serious question:
How many of these trans athletes seriously believe that they are women versus adopting this label so that they can win at sports at which they had only minor success as males? How much sincerity is there here, really?
I suspect there is quite a bit of sincerity. We are talking about children, and the adults who lie to them! Kids are pretty gullible and prone to wishful thinking.
To answer that question, recall the classic knight/nave problems :
knights always tell the truth, naves always lie.
Now we add a real world element :
Marxists always lie.
Why Marxism? Queer theory is a Marxist theory of legitimacy, dominance(sounds relevant here!), and normalcy.
The last three properties are specified in
Saint Foucault – Towards a Gay Hagiography
David M. Halperin
Oxford U. Press
1995
typo: “knave” – I kind of thought it was an alternate spelling, but no – seems “nave” is the central part of a church.
Watching the clips from on the court, the very same question you ask came to me. Surely, they can’t “believe” believe they are women! Just look at that guy! He is nothing but a bully. A big, bad, cheating bully. I feel disdain and anger watching this world on its head nonsense.
I don’t think there is any sincerety.
It’s interesting to me that progressives have supported trans-women participating in sport like this, while at the same time complaining about toxic masculinity and male violence. This is a clear example of men directly usurping, injuring, and replacing women, and they are supported by those who would strongly oppose the same thing if these people did not “identify” as female. End result is men taking over a female-specific domain. Imagine a co-ed basketball game in which that same behaviour occurred!
If this is in the name of equity, then why do we not see a similar thing occurring in male-oriented fields; i.e., why aren’t trans-men making inroads into men’s sport or any other field?
Objectively there is no difference between one male-bodied person who identifies as female walking into a women’s locker room and disrobing and another male-bodied person who identifies as male doing the same thing. In addition, both could be attracted to females. If the goal is to protect women from this sort of exposure to male bodies and being leered at by men, why do some people support one but not the other? Are not both instances unacceptable?
If you say that I can throw a nerf ball at your head but not a steel shot put, would you accept me throwing a steel shot put at your head if I adamantly tell you that I really believe it is a nerf ball?
I told my doctor that my wife thinks she is a refrigerator. The doctor said to ignore her. I said “I can’t, when she sleeps with her mouth open the little light keeps me up.” The joke works because of the absurdity. This issue is becoming more absurd with each new story.
Thanks Darryl for the joke.
“… why aren’t trans-men making inroads into men’s sport or any other field?”
They must be working on it. It requires more ideological remoulding (brainwashing) though because Queer Theory cannot directly deliver to females the dominance they desire on an athletic basis in competition with males.
However, power is still out there to claim, and activism will earn social credits. E.g. infiltrating a male team by opposing its male-dominated hegemony would be high-value for that reason. A team will not be competitive. It will probably get lots of support though because society is expected to transform to accept the special players to show how Inclusive and Diverse the new society is.
Individual sport will be different.
How is this going to end?
Well, now the National Collegiate Atheletic Association (NCAA), the body that regulates college sports in the USA, is being sued by former female student athletes who, per NCAA rules, had to compete against transidentified males:
If, in lower courts, the NCAA prevails, the losers will petition the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) to hear the case. I think it very likely that SCOTUS will hear the case and then rule against the NCAA.
Meanwhile, if Biden wins re-election, his administration will want to go forward with its project of reinterpreting title IX legislation (from the early 1970s, a law that is about sex and college sports but does not define the term sex) so that transidentified males can participate in women’s college sports.
This will also be challenged in court, and, again, I think it very likely that the case will eventually be ruled on by the conservative Supreme Court, and that the court will decide against those who want to include transidentified males in women’s sport.
Within about 7 years from now, this whole nonsense will have been largely resolved with the conclusion that transidentified males will be excluded from women’s sports. The Democrats will be unable to muster legislative majorities to make laws that mandate the inclusion of transidentified males in women’s sports, or if they can organize such a majority, it will cost them dearly at the next election. (Why is the Biden admin’s initiative of reinterpreting title IX legislation currently on ice? Because if the admin tried to change the implementation of title IX such that colleges cannot exclude males from women’s sport, it would hand Trump’s party a potent electoral issue to campaign on.)
The best scenario for the Democrats would be for this to be decided by the courts. First off, I’m assuming most sane D’s don’t really believe that a 6′ tall male should be playing against females, but they can’t say that because of the overall left progressive group dynamic. If it goes to SCOTUS and they rule against the NCAA, then SCOTUS becomes the bad guys (and gals) and it saves the Democrats from upsetting the far-left base.
“Those meanies took away your rights!”
Having SCOTUS rule on it allows for common sense to prevail without costing votes, and perhaps even gaining them more votes.
I agree 95% with you Darryl. SCOTUS ruling against the NCAA and the Biden administration (if Biden gets re-elected) would be good for the Democractic Party (DP). It would be a replay of what happened with affirmative action (widely disliked in the electorate, but the DP elites unwilling to swear off it).
The best thing for the DP would be to throw its woke wing under the bus. It’s an electoral liability (the same way the extreme right is an electoral liability for the Republican party). But I am not holding my breath waiting for this to happen – because that would kill me.
Polls show most Americans are opposed to men in female sports. So why does our president not support Title IX based on sex? It’s hard not to be cynical.
There is big money behind gender ideology. Jon Stryker of the medical devices family (see his foundation, Arcus) gave $15M to the ACLU in 2021. One of Stryker’s growing revenue streams is from facial feminization surgery.
How many organizations, and livelihoods, are dependent on promoting this fiction?
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers
The activists have captured notion of ‘harm’.
And they have managed to be able to deflect the topic of real harm being done to women and girls. beck to themselves.
Compiling evidence like this is a great step to taking the exclusivity of harm from the hands of activists.
Keeping the issue salient like here at WEIT also great.
I think the male she’s know very well that they are cheating (it is self-evident) but are able to rationalize their behavior in those catch phrase terms.
Those terms are being slowly undermined, and it will change.
Nobody cares about trans men (ie. observed female at birth) competing with/against men.
That should be all the proof needed that this isn’t a transphobic issue at root.
See my comment above – I think the scenario still serves as activism to strengthen the cause.
Agent Provocateur.
But stupid rules invite crazy rule violations.
It’s hard to overstate how much this stinks.