No risk of journalism at USA Today
Feminist author responds to their fact-free trough of propaganda
Mariah Burton Nelson, a former Stanford and professional basketball player and the author of The Stronger Women Get, The More Men Love Football, is a member of the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group. She wrote the following open letter to USA Today, as that publication declined to print her comment, or indeed anything that challenges their ideological narrative.
As one of the "cisgender" (I prefer the word women) athletes who is advocating for an all-female sports category, I'm appalled at Sammy Gibbons’ characterization of our goal: “to "demonize & spread misinformation." (“Powerlifter Angel Flores, like other transgender athletes, tells her own story.”) That in itself is misinformation.
Gibbons also contends that we object to an "unfair advantage... because of hormone therapy.” That’s not what we object to at all. Most trans athletes (68 percent of all transgender people) aren’t even on hormone therapy, and hormones are not the problem; male bodies are. “Self-ID” rules, which govern many competitions from rowing to cycling to running, allow men to compete in the women’s category based on identity alone.
Our goal is to preserve an equal playing field for girls and women, where we need not sacrifice our own athletic dreams, our right to fair and safe sports, nor our privacy in the locker room to people who were born male, are still male, but identify as women. This is what the female category is for: to exclude people with male bodies (also known as men), regardless of their beliefs or identities or hormone levels.
There is no such thing as "trans." There is no such thing as "transgender." There is no such thing as "trans" or "transgender" athletes.
These are men. Just men. Men with grown out hair (that's usually all they do), men in makeup, men in skirts. Some of these men take estrogen, some get surgeries. It changes nothing, their sex is the same, and the vast majority do not and never will pass as the opposite sex (even if they did, they're still men).
They do not enter a special category of existence for refusing to accept the reality of their sexed bodies.
Hi Karen, thanks for publishing my open letter! Much appreciated.