British Cycling bans transgender from competition in a sort of half-assed way

in sports •  3 years ago 

I am a very much opposed to male to female transgender athletes competing in women's sports. I don't have anything against transgenders, I am not afraid of them, and I think that people should be able to be whatever they want to be as long as it doesn't negatively impact the lives of others. I'm not talking about negatively affecting feelings or religious beliefs or any other sort of bias. I'm talking about genuinely negatively affecting someone else's life.

I think you have to be truly blind or part of the over-the-top woke culture to attempt to deny that men that transition to women have a distinct advantage over biological women in a wide variety of ways.

The United States is probably responsible for transgender athletes competing in women's sports in the first place and I don't know how this ever happened. The backlash has been pretty swift in the grand scheme of time though and we are seeing most people start to see sensibly and realize that allowing someone who is genetically physically stronger to compete in sports is extremely unfair. Performance enhancing drugs are not allowed but somehow biological advantages were ignored in the name of woke culture.

I think most countries wouldn't even consider allowing something like this to have ever happened in the first place, but in the USA and other woke countries all but embraced it and almost immediately saw the negative impact when they allowed these things to happen. There is a reason why it is always man-to-woman transgenders who want to do this and not the other way around: There would be a distinct disadvantage if done the other way and that is why no one as far as I know has even attempted it.


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Emily Bridges, who was born male and was actually a very successful competitive male cyclist, desired to enter the National Omnium Championships in the female category and the fact that it was even considered to allow her to do so says to me that we still have a little ways to go before sanity returns to the sporting world.

Other riders had threatened to boycott the event entirely if Bridges was allowed to compete. The attention that this garnered made world news just like New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard and USA swimmer Lia Thomas who actually were allowed to compete in their respective sports.

Emily Bridges was denied entry to the event but unfortunately not for what I consider to be the real reason that she should be barred from entry. The real reason is that just because you take some drugs to lower your testosterone levels to a certain degree, does not mean that your skeletal and muscular advantages that most women could never achieve, still exist. Instead they said this

“Emily is currently not compliant with regulations as she is still registered as a male cyclist – and therefore cannot compete as a woman until her male UCI ID expires,”

To me this suggests that they are either afraid to state the obvious or are still hanging onto notions that male-to-female athletes should be allowed to compete against women and will continue to be able to do so into the future.

Some people out there who try to defend male-to-female trans athletes attempt to weakly justify their position by saying that there hasn't been a single global transgender champion in any sport but these people fail to see the bigger picture: The reason why this hasn't happened yet is because there are still a lot of roadblocks for transgenders to compete in their chosen sex's category. If these barriers are removed, we are going to see a lot of global championships won by male-to-female transgenders.


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I suppose in one sense I wish some of them would win these global championships because this would be a self-defeating victory for the transgender athlete, as well as the movement in general. While I know a lot less about Emily Bridges, Lia Thomas was a rather good swimmer as a man but certainly not a global standard. If allowed to compete in the next Olympics, Lia would almost certainly win quite a few events and not every country in the world is going to be happy about this. Even though I am an American, as is Lia, I would not be happy about this outside of the fact that such a victory would perhaps finally lay the "there's no advantage!" argument to rest.

Look here Emily: I want you to be happy. I want everyone to be happy even if I think your life choices are weird. However, I draw the line at you or anyone else achieving happiness that comes at the expense of other people's dreams, is that fair?

While I applaud the decision made by British Cycling, I wish they had said the real reason instead of relying on a loophole about her currently existing registration as a male cyclist.

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