Our good friend, the very lovely Amanda Marcotte of Salon magazine, in a three-part skeet on Bluesky explained to us why she is so very supportive of males claiming to be female participating in women’s sports.
The end game of this was always “we have to end women’s sports to protect cis women from trans women.”
I hammer at this periodically, but the fear-mongering here isn’t just about anti-trans rhetoric, but about promoting an image of cis women as delicate flowers.
Undergirding all transphobic rhetoric around women’s sports is this idea that women’s sports aren’t “real” sports, because cis women’s bodies are incapable of true athleticism.
I am trying, and admittedly failing, to understand how this makes sense. Did Miss Marcotte miss the resurgence in the WNBA, thanks primarily to the rookies Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, and Cameron Brink? Of course, some of our good friends on the left were telling us that the resurgence is just because Miss Clark is white and heterosexual, but that ignores the fact that recent WNBA stars like Sabrina Ionescu, Breanna Stewart — both of whom play for the New York Liberty, in America’s biggest media market — and Kelsey Plum are also white, and did not generate the kind of excitement Miss Clark did. Nor does it take into account that Miss Clark challenged and then broke Pete Maravich’s career NCAA scoring record. That story was all over my feed, and it didn’t come from nowhere. Continue reading