Tangled Metal wrote:Still, one good thing about him/her. She's pi$$ing off a few reactionary types. Whether or not I agree with her competing as she does at least she's doing one good thing there.
Carry on complaining. She appears to meet all requirements placed on her to be allowed to compete as a woman. As long as that's the case she's got the right to compete. Plus she's still got to train and put in more effort into her sport than people here are probably doing. It's not like she cuts off her member, takes hormones / suppressants, calls herself a woman and suddenly becomes so much better than the women she competes with.
you what?
I don't think that McKinnon is only annoying reactionaries (though he certainly is annoying them - see this rather amusing spoof https://babylonbee.com/news/motorcycle- ... ing-record ). He recently posted his joy that Deborah Orr had died of breast cancer. Orr was a Guardian journalist for many years and not by any means a reactionary.
I don't think that people like Julie Bindel are best described as reactionaries either. I don't think Bindel has too much time for men though, and she correctly identified that McKinnon behaves exactly like one.
There are quite a few paedophiles who claim to now be transwomen, often while still in prison. There is no way to determine for sure whether a claim to be transgender is true, because being transgender is not of itself a meaningful statement in that it could apply to someone who has normal male anatomy and hormone levels, and has merely claimed that they possess female gender identity.
McKinnon is playing a bit of a game in that his achievements in winning the World Masters 35-39 are being shouted by him out of proportion to their significance in sporting terms, and there seems to be a mutual cycle of outrage and him revelling in the same. In other words while he obviously trains for his wins, the level is some way short of actual World Champion - he's noising up an amateur competition which is otherwise people doing it for the fun and love of the sport
As far as meeting requirements goes, that's not really here nor there. I remember when I was a child my sister, two years older, always used to physically dominate me, had larger shoes, etc. At some point puberty hit and I was both bigger and stronger than her and that would no longer happen. We are both of slightly above average height for our sex, so the difference is purely down to the effects of male vs female puberty.
Sexual dimorphism persists no matter what you do to your body after puberty - I once saw a photo of a group of transmen (FTM) and transwomen (MTF) and it was immediately visually jarring because all the male-looking people were smaller than all the female-looking people.
In competitive sporting terms it's completely absurd to imagine that the innate height/size advantage that males have over females can ever be reversed by merely reducing testosterone to a normal female level, because that doesn't change the body that was shaped by tested rather than ovaries.
What the rules say is somewhat besides the point when there are obvious and insurmountable fairness issues. Nobody wants to see third-rate super-heavyweight boxers fighting top-class flyweights, for example.