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Too good for a woman |
Michelle Dumaresq is a very good mountain biker. For a girl. The thing is, she's only been a girl for 10 years. And that doesn't sit well with some of her contemporaries, who've had to be girls their whole lives.
In fact, it sat particularly poorly with the woman she beat at the Canadian national championships last month in Whistler. Danika Schroeter finished second, and during the medal cermony wore a t-shirt which said "100% Pure Woman Champ 2006". She's been suspended from the national team for her trouble, but this is a controversy which started when she won the first race she entered in 2001, and it isn't likely to end anytime soon.
It's possible Dumaresq is a phenom in the sport, but Schroeter and others don't buy it. And frankly, neither do I. This whole issue boils down to female inferiority. Women are inferior athletes, which is why they have their own races. Dumaresq is less inferior, and Occam's Razor tells me it's probably not because she trains harder. She won her first race ever, by over 2 and a half seconds. For fuck's sake.
I realize that a lot of people, particularly women, don't want to hear that women are inferior, but there it is. Women are inferior. It doesn't matter that the girl in Bad News Bears had a wicked fastball or that you know this chick who could totally kick my ass at basketball. The fact remains that the sole reason women have their own sports leagues is that they would get raped (metaphorically) if they competed in the real league.
There are a few women who are good enough to make it on the big stage. Danicka Patrick has been climbing the IndyCar rankings this season, and is young enough that she could someday win the championship if she doesn't get sidelined having kids. Annika Sorenstam has played in a PGA event, but it doesn't really count because they let her use the short tee to compensate for her floppy little noodle arms. Venus and Serena Williams would have no problem crossing over, but what would be the point? Nobody watches men's tennis.
When a woman competes in the "men's" league, it means she's good enough to go head-to-head with the best in the world and maybe even rank in the top 10. When a man competes in a women's league, it means he's a bully who likes to beat up on inferior opponents. But when a former man which now calls itself a woman beats up on "100% pure" women, it's evidence of two things. One: no matter what the queer lobbyists tell you, gender is more than just a state of mind. And two: sex-change technology still has a ways to go before it can produce manufactured women who are just as physically inferior as natural women.
This sort of controversy raises a lot of issues about gender that we, as a society, really don't want to think about. For example, some "women" actually have XY chromosomes. Some have XXY. As many as one in 2,000 infants are born intersexed (although the doctor usually just flips a coin and makes the necessary changes before the parents take possession). Gender, like sexual orientation, is starting to look more like a continuum than an either/or.
But still, most people like to think of gender as a binary switch. Sure, there are a few tweeners, but from a legal standpoint it's not really that big a deal to just let (or make) them choose one or the other. Thanks to antidiscrimination laws and the new equal marriage bill, gender doesn't really matter that much. Outside of sports, most of the implications of choosing to live as one gender or the other are cultural, not legal. The question, as it relates to sport, is how inferior is inferior enough to compete as a woman?
We already know that artificially increasing levels of the male hormone testosterone counts as cheating. So what about failing to artificially decrease the level of the same hormone? Since testosterone makes people better cyclists, and pro cyclists are pretty much all cheaters, it stands to reason that a male-to-female transgendered cyclist would 'accidentally' forget to take her meds leading up to a big race. It's bound to be safer than taking EPO or HGH.
