"Usually at this time I start packing my bags and look with loving eyes several times a day at e-tickets to warm countries. ??? And this year I have ice in my hands and that's it?♀️ winter #cold #ice #healthylifestyle #health #healthyliving #healthylife #nature #sea #beautiful #happyday #beauty #happy #winter" / Russian woman swimmer via Instagram
This is a transcript of my off-the-cuff thoughts on this subject on the Liberty and Friends show last week.
This goes back to my most basic rule of life, which is "don't be a dick".
In this case, "don't be a dick" basically means that if someone comes up to me and clearly has issues and says, "Yes, admittedly I'm six foot tall, I have a massive beard and I have broad shoulders and a narrow waist but I identify as a woman", I'm cool with that… I'm not going to pick on the person and say "you're a guy; just like deal with it."
So at that level I tend to be extremely tolerant of whatever people want to identify with as themselves. I don't know what issues they are going through in their heads.
The problem that we've got right now is people who are conflating ideas of feminism with what is now coming out from the trans movement.
I don't know how many of you are familiar with the term "terf" … it stands for "trans-exclusionary radical feminist" … people who, back in my day, used to be considered to be classical feminists who were fighting for equality in terms of all of the things that, to my mind, actually matter in terms of equality of opportunity; which is the most crucial thing as far as I'm concerned.
And now suddenly you have a situation where there have been those hard fought-for rights, but simply based on the fact that someone comes around and says "I identify as a woman and I'm now going to actually play in this space," it becomes problematic for me.
Let me just summarize it into a couple of things that, off the top of my head, come to my mind:
- if you were born a biological male, you never had to worry about where you were going to get sanitary pads from if you were going to school;
- if you were born a biological male, you never had to worry about the possibility of unwanted pregnancy coming from the fact that you had sex;
- if you were a biological male, you never had to worry about the fact that you ended up being subjected to "honour killings" (as they are called in many parts of the world);
- if you were born a biological male, you never had to worry about where you would go and try to find an abortion if you ended up with a pregnancy that you were not able to deal with;
- if you were born a biological male, you have not had to spend nearly all of existing human history fighting for the right to vote — which is what the entire suffragette movement was all about. Remember that women in most parts of the world have only been voting now for barely a hundred years, as opposed to the tens or hundreds of thousands of years that we've existed as a species.
- you never had to pretend, if you're a biological male, to be a man in order to study medicine
- if you're a biological male you never had to worry about the glass ceiling.
All of these are very real things, and if you are assuming that because of the fact that women have fought long and hard for all of those wrongs — and they're very clearly wrongs — to be redressed; and you now want to climb into that space and say that you actually have a right to play in that space just simply because that's the way you feel; but you've never had to fight for that for all of human history, I have a problem with that; because you're actually clambering into a space that you know nothing about; because there is a history in terms of women actually needing to fight for those rights for the longest period of time.
Then the other thing that I need to put across is the reason why we have gender-specific spaces is because they are crucial part of our social interaction. The entire idea of what goes on in the locker room, or the reason why, when you have people on double dates, why women will generally tend to end up going to the bathroom together, is because they are very important social constructs that actually kick in as a direct result of those spaces.
It has been important for the development of us as a species for the longest time, and when we try to drive a truck through all of those things that have developed over the period of history without considering why those constructs were actually put in place to start off with, we're asking for trouble.
So women's sports for me is, you know, really kind of the tip of the iceberg.
Look, there are some sports where women actually are better than men, and a very good example of that is long-distance swimming under very icy conditions, simply because when you look at long-distance swimming, women are more aerodynamic than men when they're in the water and because their fat layer tends to be subcutaneous around their entire body, they're actually able to maintain their temperature for longer periods.
So this is why you have Russian women in the Arctic ocean going smashing through the ice and going swimming in the dead of winter just simply because they can.
And I would not be the type of person who would end up doing that.
But coming back to the question of trans sports, I would say that if Lia Thomas wants to identify as a woman, by all means. I'm very happy to hold open the door for you and all of that kind of fun stuff.
But if you want to compete in women's sports, I have a problem with that; because the reason why we have women's sports is because of the fact that those biological differences are real; and they're still going to continue being real.
