On Monday, New Zealand transgender weightlifter Laurel Hubbard failed to advance in the 87kg category, meaning that the 43-year-old crashed out of the Olympic Games.
On the first attempt, Hubbard failed to lift 120kg. On the second, Hubbard lifted a “very shaky” 125kg. On the third and final attempt, Hubbard failed to lift 125kg.
Now, many are celebrating Hubbard’s Olympic failure, or “the end of Laurel Hubbard,” as the announcer put it. Some because they see Hubbard as a slap in the face of female athletes, and others because they see Hubbard’s loss as proof that transgender women can compete fairly with biological women. “After all,” they say, “’she’ beat Hubbard! Why are you mad?”
However, I was hoping for a different outcome. I was hoping that Laurel Hubbard — who transitioned at the age of 35 after a forgettable career as a male weightlifter — would dominate the female competition. I was hoping that Hubbard’s obvious biological advantage would result in a complete rewriting of women’s weightlifting record books.
Why? Hear me out.
The reason is not because I believe Hubbard deserves a single iota of celebration. Instead, I was “cheering” for Hubbard because an inability to beat women in a competition of strength wouldn’t change the current athletic landscape in which men and women are viewed as physical equals.
And this is a landscape we have to change.
Many women who stand to lose out are already aware of this fact. Female weightlifter Anna Vanbellinghen described the notion of competing against Hubbard as “a bad joke.”
“I understand that for sports authorities nothing is as simple as following your common sense, and that there are a lot of impracticalities when studying such a rare phenomenon, but for athletes the whole thing feels like a bad joke,” Vanbellinghem said.
Unfortunately, these women are finding themselves silenced by biological men who believe they are women in a bizarre surface-level reversal of intersectionality. And in this system, the only mainstream voices which remain are the ones confirming that such competitive absurdities are perfectly acceptable.
With this in mind, it is only a matter of time before the fluidity of gender in the context of athletics becomes the norm. For the time being, men competing with women remains somewhat of a rarity. But give it a few decades, and women’s sport will have been entirely erased by a tier of athletically second-rate men who were unsuccessful in their own field of athletics and decided to pursue victory elsewhere.
It’s crucial that those who share the delusion that transgender men are women — specifically in the field of athleticism — are forced to awake from this fantasy.
Mediocre and forgettable performances from 43-year-old men won’t cut it.
Ian Haworth is an Editor and Writer for The Daily Wire. Follow him on Twitter at @ighaworth.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
