This past Sunday, in what now seems to be a weekly occurrence, a man competed against a field of women in an athletic event and went home with the gold. Rachel McKinnon, a biological male who identifies as a woman, raced a bunch of actual women in the UCI Masters Track Cycling World Championships. To the great surprise of nobody, the gender-confused gentleman cycled his way to first place.
McKinnon, behaving rather unladylike in victory, gloated about his achievement and blasted his critics as neanderthalic bigots. The trans cyclist, whom we should note is a college professor, also declared that his testosterone and muscle mass do not give him any sort of physical advantage at all. He said “we have no idea” why men outperform women in athletic events. The subject of male biology is, according to the esteemed educator, “complicated as f**k.” He theorized that a man’s ability to run faster than a female is probably “sociological, not biological.” I should mention again that this individual is employed by an academic institution.
McKinnon says that the question of biological advantage is irrelevant in any case. He wants to race against women and therefore should be permitted to do so. It’s as simple as that, as far as he’s concerned. That is his “human right.” It would be “oppression” to force him, a male, to compete against other males. He also claims, as LGBT folks so often do, that the oppression he has suffered as a white male college professor in 2018 is analogous to the historic plight of black Americans. You can see his point. Black people were treated like cattle and he is criticized for stealing championships from women. Tomato, tomahto. There is almost no difference between these two forms of persecution.
But it is interesting that in this “Year of the Woman,” when there is so much focus on actual or alleged mistreatment of women by men, still these gender-confused guys are allowed to intrude in women’s spaces, invade women’s locker rooms, delegitimize women’s athletic competitions, and exploit their biological advantages to snatch victories and accolades from real women. Not only are they allowed to behave this way, but the women they are pushing to the side, disregarding, exploiting, and bullying, are not permitted to utter a word of protest. We are told that women are tired of being “silenced.” But then women are told to shut up and cooperate when the hairy-legged man walks into the locker room and disrobes in front of them. Something doesn’t quite add up here.
It turns out that the Left does not treat all victim groups equally. Some victims are more important than others. There is a hierarchy of victims, in fact, and LGBT folks sit at the very top of it. Their claims of victimhood trump all other claims. Their desires and demands come before everything else. A woman’s claim to privacy and agency ends where the demands of the LGBT camp begin. She is entitled to be heard and respected only up to the point that her thoughts and feelings might be inconvenient to the aims of the gay lobby. Her womanhood is treated as something unique, special, and beautiful, right until a man slaps on a wig and changes his name to Rachel. Then, suddenly, unceremoniously, womanhood is an utterly meaningless, superficial thing that any man can appropriate for himself.
Perhaps one of these days, feminists will realize all of this and finally stand up for themselves.