WTW82: The Boston Marathon Trans Panic w/Frankie de la Cretaz
Every year, tens of thousands of people run the Boston Marathon, and this year the Right had a bone to pick with one particular participant; we'll give you one guess what the bone was. Independent journalist Frankie de la Cretaz started asking some questions when this popped up in their algorithm, and after seeing their debunking journey in their newsletter, we had to have them on! If you enjoy our work, please consider leaving a 5-star review! You can always email questions, comments, and leads to lydia@seriouspod.com. Please pretty please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/wherethereswoke! This content is CAN credentialed, which means you can report instances of harassment, abuse, or other harm on their hotline at (617) 249-4255, or on their website at creatoraccountabilitynetwork.org.
What's so scary about the woke mob, how often you just don't see them coming.
Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed.
Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic hands down.
The woke monster is here, and it's coming for everything, everything, everything, everything, everything.
Instead of go-go boots, the seductress green M&M will now wear sneakers.
Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke.
This is episode 82. I'm Thomas Smith.
That over there is Lydia Smith.
How are you doing?
Hello.
I am pumped.
I feel like I could go run a marathon with how excited I am for today's topic.
Whoa, but look at what I'm seeing in the newspapers.
You better not, because a man is going to kill you.
That's right.
That's exactly what happened at the Boston Marathon, folks.
It's barely an exaggeration of the trans panic bullshit we're going to talk about today.
Yeah, but today it's not just going to be you and me talking.
No.
I have invited independent journalist Frankie De La Creta, who is really awesome.
They cover the intersection of sports and gender.
they'll get into it plenty when we have our interview.
But what caught my eye was a piece that they did regarding the Boston Marathon.
And apparently there was a transgender participant that the right got really upset about.
And Frankie went on an entire journey to look into the facts and who's behind all of this stuff and debunking it in the way that we like to do on
So happy to have Frankie with us.
Absolutely.
Really cool to talk to Frankie.
So yeah, why don't we just get on over to that after this break?
Before we do, we should remind folks that, hey, it's the end of the month, which is...
Our hell.
But hopefully...
Our hell is podcast heaven, shall I?
No, I don't know.
It's a little too bold of a claim.
Yeah, person's trash is another man's treasure or whatever.
Nah, I'm just trash.
I'm just playing trash for everyone.
No, we're trying to get a lot of stuff out, including Gavel Gavel.
We've got a bunch of those coming out.
We've got more WTW and...
Serious Inquiries Only coming out.
It's our usual thing for the end of the month.
It's how we do it.
It's our chunks.
It's the chunk method.
Love the chunk method.
Patented.
Nobody take that podcast chunk method.
I don't think anyone's going to take it.
No, no one take it.
They want it.
They want it.
You can't make me think they don't want it.
So check out the other shows for all that.
And of course, please support the show at patreon.com slash wherethereswoke.
You can avoid the ads.
You can keep us going.
I think today's show especially.
Shows why folks like Frankie, and hopefully like us too, we are trying to get the word out on this stuff.
We are trying to get the truth out, and it is a tough uphill battle.
So we really appreciate all your support and all the support anyone's willing to give to help get the truth out.
That's what we care about here.
All right, after this break, we'll get on with Frankie.
Today with us is Frankie.
Hi Frankie!
So happy to have you here today.
Your piece...
Caught My Eye, titled The Boston Marathon, A Case Study in an Anti-Trans Media Hysteria.
And I'm so excited to hear from you about how you debunked this entire thing, what the heck was going on.
This is definitely, like I mentioned to you, our bread and butter here on Where There's Woke.
So always happy to see other folks doing that out in the world, too.
Thanks again for coming on.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Before we dive into that story though, do you mind telling folks a bit about yourself?
Yeah, absolutely.
I am an independent journalist.
My work focuses on the intersection of sports and gender.
So, obviously, some of these bad actors have been on my radar for a while, and I have written a book.
It's called Hail Mary, the Rise and Fall of the National Women's Football League, and it is a history of the first professional women's football league in the U.S. Very cool.
Wow, that's awesome.
I know nothing about that.
I need to check this out.
Most people don't.
It's basically, I kind of describe it as a league of their own in the 70s.
That's so funny.
I was just going to say, is it a league of their own situation?
Kind of.
It's a league of their own in the 70s, but football, and it's openly gay and racially integrated.
Oh, wow.
No wonder this country said no.
Let's bring it back.
That sounds awesome.
We do need to bring that back.
So what stoked your interest in this subject?
You mentioned your beat being the intersection of sports and gender.
Just wondering what kind of got you started down that line of interest.
Yeah, I actually started as a sports writer writing mostly about...
Major League Baseball, but I found men generally boring to write about.
And I found the market kind of oversaturated.
And so I really wanted to...
Write stuff that I wanted to be reading, and I wanted to write stuff that felt like it was for me and people like me.
And so I pivoted, you know, I guess it's been about 10 years now, and started writing about women and girls in baseball, and from there really expanded into just the intersection of sports, gender, and culture.
And that does sometimes look like covering women's sports and athletes who play women's sports from a critical lens, but also I've been covering trans...
I know.
obviously failing to do that as, as all of us on this beat have,
Yeah. Gosh, we felt the same way in our small little way, you know, just like, hey, why there's like,
Listen!
One athlete that you're making a huge deal about, everybody, that seems like not a big deal.
Out of 500,000.
And then, you know, five years later, it's even worse somehow.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, and I think what is important about me writing about the intersection of sports and the anti-trans stuff is the sports bills really have been...
I call them gateway legislation because if you look at the numbers around the anti-trans legislation that's been passed over the last several years, the sports bills were the ones that gained ground and that passed quickly and they passed first because sports was the one place that I...
I think the right was able to make discrimination seem like reasonable or fair or logical.
But the problem becomes that when you make a group of people out to be a threat in one area, it becomes much easier to make them seem like a threat in other areas.
And so you see the bathroom.
And the healthcare bills and the education bills, they all passed after the sports bills had.
And so a lot of people ignored what was happening in sports, either because they were like, it's just sports, who really cares?
Or they thought it was actually a reasonable place to be discriminatory.
And the reality is that ignoring the rise of anti-trans rhetoric and attitudes and discrimination in sports has actually allowed us to be in the place that we are right now.
I think what's so tough to hear about that, too, is, you know, when trans folks get interviewed, you know, that have been participating in sports and hearing about what it means to them to be part of those teams.
And were we watching John Oliver?
And that mom responded on, you know, the mother was asked, you know, like, is your kiddo really, really good at softball?
And she was like, no, not really.
But, you know, like, she was happy.
Like she was just part of a team and felt like, you know, it was a place of belonging for kids who struggle to find a place to belong sometimes growing up and figuring out their identity.
So it's frustrating that it's, you know, this one particular area that has been so important to so many people that's just being torn apart.
Yeah, not all trans athletes are going to be good at sport.
I think that's been a misconception.
And the thing is that...
Trans women have been allowed to compete in the Olympics since 2003.
You didn't see any trans athletes until the 2020 Games.
And she got last, actually, in her division.
And I think it's interesting to me that trans athletes become an issue not when they participate, but when they win.
And they've been allowed to play as long as they weren't good and as long as they weren't seen as taking something from somebody else.
I think there's a little bit of a parallel here when you look at the history of sex segregation in sports.
Most sport was not sex segregated.
And you can trace a lot of the women's divisions and the women's leagues back to women beating the men, either winning or being on the podium.
And the following year, there's a women's division.
Really?
Yeah.
You can look at figure skating in the early 1900s.
That is how that ended up, sex segregated.
But you can even go to like...
The shooting, like rifle, rifling events at the Olympics was integrated until the 1992 Games and a woman set an Olympic record and won gold medal.
And the next year, it was just the men's division.
And that athlete was actually forced to prematurely retire from her sport because they didn't introduce a women's division until the 2000 Games, almost a decade later.
Wow.
And so I think about this a lot because I think we often think that sex segregation is the most like natural way of organizing sport.
But a lot of the way that we organize sport and the reason that it is sex segregated is because when a woman wins, she challenges.
the status quo, right?
She challenges the power dynamics and the hierarchy and the things that we believe to be true about gender.
And also men are fragile and they're embarrassed and they don't like that, right?
It's a threat to their masculinity.
And so that's where these women's divisions came in.
And I think you're seeing something similar happening here where when a trans woman is, you know, winning or is good at her sport, you're again, challenging, you know, the status
Interesting.
Chat a bit about what was all of this hullabaloo for the Boston Marathon.
What were people saying?
What was going on there?
Well, the funniest thing about this when I dove into it is there wasn't a hullabaloo, even though it was all over my social media.
And I still am not sure how many other people this was on the radar of or if I just happened to be because of what I cover.
Yeah, your algorithm.
A bunch of headlines happened in the lead-up to the Boston Marathon.
They started back in December when this woman qualified, a trans woman.
And I could never confirm that she was trans.
So, you know, right-wing media said that a trans woman had qualified for the marathon back in December.
And this one woman, her name is Jennifer Say.
She runs XXXY Athletics.
Which is an apparel company that sells transphobic, anti-trans apparel.
But they also have a fundraising arm and they pay cis women to drop out and protest when trans women are in their field.
So she started tweeting about this and offering to award people with money for dropping out.
I saw that at the time and then it didn't come up again until the weekend before the marathon.
And then I saw a bunch of headlines and things on sites like X and Blue Sky where there was all of this concern about a quote-unquote man running in the women's division of the Boston Marathon.
And it really picked up when Nikki Hiltz, who's an Olympic runner, stitched a video on TikTok of a woman saying she was going to drop out.
Her instinct was to drop out of the race when she found out a trans woman was competing.
And so once Nikki stitched that, it got you in more of a platform.
And so you started to see a lot more conversation about it.
So that was what I started to see.
Yeah, it's so silly.
What does dropping out even do?
Just run your marathon.
I don't understand.
It's so weird.
Yes.
And we're not talking about the pro division either.
Let's be clear about that.
And I think in the long run, I don't think these distinctions matter a whole ton.
But I do really think that part of the problem in the conversation about trans participation in sport is that all levels of sport have really been flattened and we use the same.
Talking points when we're talking about an Olympic athlete that we do when we're talking about a middle school soccer player.
And it's not helpful.
It's not accurate.
But in this case, it's important to say it wasn't even...
In the pro division.
However, the Boston Marathon itself for its open division has had an inclusive policy since 2018, I believe.
So she's probably not even the first trans woman to run.
People just didn't know.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Maybe people minded their own fucking business sometimes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I mean, it was interesting, too.
I decided to, like, look both.
Well, initially I was just going to write about this one woman getting to run in the marathon, but when I started clicking on things because I've been on this beat for a really long time, a thing that I've learned that you guys will not be surprised about is the public narrative about...
It seems like if you ask people, I think they would say most people believe that this should not be the case.
But for those of us who have been following it for a long time, it's literally like three activist groups who have really seen.
spearheaded this whole thing and they've just figured out how to be really, really loud about it.
So it always comes back to the same few people.
Most of the anti-trans sports bills that have been passed in the 26 or so states that have them were all written by the same conservative.
Yep.
Kristen Wagner.
Yes. And that group managed to get in with some, you know, women who had real questions and concerns and I think really radicalized them at the most opportune time in.
And so when I started to really look at what the public narrative was around this trans woman having competed, I was like, oh wait, every single headline here in some way leads back to Jennifer Say and her group.
And I thought that that was really important.
To show people, to really debunk and say, like, it looks like there's been this massive, like, media hysteria about this athlete, but really it's one small group of people that has just managed to leverage particularly conservative media outlets to their advantage.
An important piece of context, too, on Jennifer Say is that she hasn't been doing XXXY her entire career.
She used to work for Levi's pretty high up, right?
Yes, she was an executive.
She was an executive at Levi's, and she became publicly prominent because she resigned from Levi's and refused over a million dollars severance so that she could speak openly against COVID regulations in public schools.
And the other thing I think that's important about her, and this is actually true of most of the former women athletes who are against trans women and girls being included.
And I was actually surprised to learn this.
I didn't know this about Jennifer Say, but she was an elite gymnast who She is one of the producers of the Athlete A documentary,
which was on Netflix, and it was about Larry Nassar's victims.
And so she has been a massive advocate for safety for the women and girls who participate in sports, and so have.
There's another really prominent group.
Martina Navratilova is a member of the group along with former Olympic swimmer named Nancy Hogshead.
It's called the Women's Sport Policy Working Group.
Their name comes up a lot.
And the thing about Nancy Hogshead is she was a Title IX lawyer and she formed a group called Champion Women and was massive.
And so a lot of these women started wanting to protect these athletes and this now anti-trans advocacy that they do is like a warped version of that.
Well, because famously Larry Nassar posed as a woman in order to do what he did.
To get access to the, yeah, the female athletes.
Right. I mean, but this is where the anti-trans rhetoric has been really effective because this idea that you're saving or protecting women or girls and women's sports by not allowing trans women buys into the idea that trans women are quote unquote
biological men and that men are who the actual danger to women are.
And so if trans women
Or girls are in the locker room.
They claim that, you know, they're putting their cisgender teammates at risk of sexual assault or that they're so big and strong they're going to hurt them on the field.
And the issue actually in all of those arguments is men.
And trans women are not men.
But by calling them men, you make them...
I think it's just very,
very ugly that these people who say that they want to protect women and girls are actually not only endangering all women and girls, but in particular, they're endangering really the most marginalized who need the most protection.
So where were we in the story?
Yeah.
So, I mean, in the story, basically, I started to pull apart these headlines, right?
And the first one that comes up when you Google search it is a New York Post story.
The headline is, Boston Marathon's trans runner tramples women athletes.
It's time to take a stand.
Yeah.
I'm so sorry.
I just love the idea that, like, yeah, because a trans woman's going to just run over them.
She's going to trample, right?
So, I mean, that's very intentional language.
People who do not want trans women in sport, you will see they often use language that makes these athletes seem big and scary and monstrous, and that's very, very intentional.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm like, I don't know who's getting trampled.
The picture they've used also.
For this story is of a crowd.
It looks like somebody could, I guess, feasibly be being trampled underfoot in this crowd of runners.
But when you click on that, it's written by Jennifer Say.
So it's an op-ed written by the head of this anti-trans athletics group.
And then...
I decided before I even went any further, I was like, I'm going to look up this runner that they are so worried about.
Because when I looked her up to, so in order to qualify for the women's division of the Boston Marathon, you need a time of like four hours and five minutes.
First of all, this athlete's been trying for like 10 years to qualify for the Boston Marathon.
And she finally did.
And it was like with a time of like four hours and one minute.
So even her qualifying time, right?
She's like barely qualifying.
I look her up.
She, first of all, is running.
She's a master's athlete, so she's running in the 55 to 59 age division.
That's how old she is.
Come on.
She finished 632 in that division.
Wow.
And she finished 8,945 overall.
Okay, but how many tramplings did she have?
None, from what I can tell.
Ten fatalities.
That means 8,945 medals were stripped away.
Right.
So this is the woman that we are claiming is a threat, is stealing opportunity from other women.
There's a couple other headlines, and if you look at those headlines, too, they all start to lead back to the same place.
I mentioned that then comes this TikTok video, right?
And it's a woman who I found out was a Division III runner and a current marathoner.
And she's saying, you know, my first instinct is to drop out of this race.
That is so crazy.
I'm so sorry, but that is insane.
Because of this person in a 55 to 59-year-old division who might get 8,000.
I just can't do it.
I can't race.
Right.
So I'm like, what is this video from, of course?
And I go and it's a podcast appearance.
And it's a podcast called The Patchwork Podcast.
There's very vague language on the TikTok page about what this podcast might be about.
So I click on...
The link that should lead me to the podcast's page.
And what it brings me to is a subscription page for the Daily Wire Plus.
So it's part of the Daily Wire podcast network, which is a conservative media company.
You're not a subscriber to that?
You didn't just go right in?
Shockingly, that's not where I choose to spend my money.
And so the funny thing about that is that another of the headlines that...
Top headlines on Google is from the Daily Wire.
So the Daily Wire had also written about this case saying, you know, the Boston Marathon has three gender categories and men could win all of them.
That includes the non-binary category, I guess.
But the thing that really stuck out to me about the video, because again, I'm well aware of Jennifer Say and her clothing company, was the shirt that this woman, her name was Natalie Daniels, the athlete in the TikTok video.
Her shirt stuck out to me immediately because I recognized it.
And it is from Jennifer Say's apparel company.
So she's wearing an XXXY Athletics t-shirt in her podcast appearance.
So that was another clue that this is all leading back to the same place.
And then the actual video is hosted on the XXXY Athletics YouTube page.
So it all leads back.
Again, all of these headlines lead back.
To this one group.
It's so infuriating.
It's infuriating.
Well, no, I was going to say the other thing about this.
I didn't just look up the trans athletes results.
I looked up Natalie Daniels to see if she ran and how she did.
So Natalie Daniels did not drop out.
I will have you know.
She ran the Boston Marathon.
Let me guess.
Did she beat the trans runner?
Quite a bit.
She finished.
110th among all women.
Remember, the trans woman finished like 8,945th.
Yeah.
She finished 110th.
Wow.
She competed in the 18-29 division.
So not even in the same division.
Right.
But she didn't even come close to meddling, so it's not like this trans athlete, you know, quote-unquote, took a medal from her.
But she finished nearly an hour and a half ahead of the woman that she said.
An hour and a half.
An unfair competitive advantage.
She finished almost one world record marathon time ahead.
Yeah, she basically lapped her in a marathon, right?
And she's like, this woman has a competitive advantage that's unfair.
Oh my god.
I mean, I would be embarrassed if I was Natalie.
I'm like, this is embarrassing for you, babe.
This is who you think is a threat.
Forget everything else for a moment.
Imagine you are somewhere in the age range of 18 to whatever you said, and you're like, wait a minute.
This 57-year-old is going to compete?
Like, forget everything!
Unfair!
Wouldn't you be, like, the biggest asshole in the world?
Like, hey, you'll be old someday, too.
You shouldn't be mean to me.
Right.
She's threatened by this 55-year-old woman who's been trying to qualify for this race for, like, 10 years.
And finally makes it by the skin of her teeth.
So dumb.
Wow.
And so this woman then becomes the face of...
And, of course, she's white and she's blonde.
She's conventionally attractive.
And this, you know, woman becomes the face of, I am being threatened by this scary, you know, biological man, right, is how they would refer to her.
So I was going to say, too, it's so infuriating.
found this too where these entire ecosystems are created these self-referential ecosystems of bigotry where it's just like yeah and this here and they'll have like three hyperlinks and no one ever clicks on them except the three of
us and they'll go to the same exact pages that are nothing they're either bad links or they're linked to something that doesn't say what it says or they're linked to another
And they bootstrap their way into feeling like it's this broad consensus.
And I worry that it, like, works.
It does work.
Yeah, it's hard to know, but so much of it is the same four people.
Yes, yes.
Unfortunately, in the world of sports, there's some pretty high-profile athletes who, like Jennifer Say, even though her name is not super well-known, she has credibility in this space.
And then people like Martina Navratzlova or Nancy Hogshead, and for a while, the distance swimmer Diana Nyad was on the board of one of these groups and writing things.
And she has since retracted that position and is no longer on the board.
You know, I'm of two minds about this.
I think it was smart PR because her film, the film about her with Jodie Foster was coming out.
And so she really, I think, had to do some damage control.
To me, whether or not she actually personally believes it, I'm at least grateful that she publicly recanted because you don't see that happen a lot.
And I appreciated her saying I am not educated enough actually to be speaking on this.
But when...
An editor of a publication is contacted by someone like Diana Nyad or Martina Navratilova or Jennifer Say and they want to write an op-ed, which is an opinion piece, right?
That's the other thing, is that readers see these things running in these credible mainstream publications.
And even though the op-ed is the opinion pages, people don't think too hard about that, really.
They see that it's in the Washington Post or the New York Times.
I mean, the New York Post is slightly less, but even still, it's at least slightly more credible than the Daily Wire, I guess.
But people see a big name in a big paper, and they assume that there is credibility to that.
But you can almost always Google the person on these op-eds, and you can see that they have some kind of connection to one of these very few groups that are really doing this work.
I think another piece that really struck me in this is that Jennifer Say's background in marketing and branding and kind of seeing that playbook here, right?
She knows how to market something.
She knows how to brand something.
And it's very clear for this particular story that she's making really smart decisions throughout this entire thing in order to...
kind of continue to push it forward.
Not that it needs much help in this day and age, but that really stuck out to
I wish the people who are consuming this stuff could understand, like, the subliminal messaging that exists here and that they are being kind of manipulated in a way by essentially, like,
a corporate...
Yeah, it's such a grift because this is the other thing is the shirt that I recognized right on Natalie Daniels in that video is one of they make many, many shirts on this website.
And I've seen other ones of those shirts like the player for the I know you guys have done an episode on the San Jose volleyball situation.
Slessor, who is the teammate who basically sued her teammate not to have to play with her because she was trans, Brooke has been photographed in mainstream publications wearing XXXY Athletics t-shirts.
She has been awarded their, like, I don't know, changemaker or whatever the hell their award is that they pay people who are very brave and drop out of their sport.
So she's won that award and she's been photographed in mainstream publications in those t-shirts.
Jennifer also sends those shirts to anyone who is in a court case where they are either suing or fighting to not have to compete against trans kids.
And then what happens is when those court cases get media coverage, everyone standing on the front steps is wearing her t-shirts.
So it's free advertising.
Riley Gaines also wears these shirts.
She's a fan of the brand.
Noted fifth place swimmer.
I make sure to say that every time because I know she hates it.
Stole her fourth place medal that doesn't exist.
Subliminal messaging, I think, is right, and people don't know what they're looking at.
They don't realize all of these people are wearing the same brand of shirt because they're all coming from the same place.
Can we give out t-shirts?
Hey, don't be a piece of shit, is my t-shirt.
Here's my other idea.
We'll see if it's t-shirt worthy.
Can we just start having in society and on every, I don't know, stupid podcast, one person who goes, wait, really?
Yeah.
Just one person.
That's gone away.
It's gone.
Wait, really?
Let me Google whatever you just said.
Wait, really?
This is a marathon runner that's going to trample everybody?
Really?
Hold on.
Let me just check.
We don't do that.
It's gone.
Nobody does that, I guess.
Yeah, and I think that was why I wanted to look up everyone's results, too.
Because I was like, what are we actually talking about here?
We're saying a lot of stuff, but is any of it true?
I mean, even the claims people make, I don't know if you guys remember that horrific video the White House put out earlier this year about how trans women are a threat to these innocent cis girls in sport.
And they had this one girl talking about how she'd been permanently injured or deformed or whatever, playing against a trans person.
Oh, is that Peyton McNabb?
There's a girl who said she was just killed by a volleyball that was spiked by trans women.
And, like, when we covered the San Jose State thing, I went on the websites, like, while you were talking about that, hun, and I was, like, looking at stats.
Because I'm a sports person, and it drives me nuts.
How many people talking about this just know nothing about sports?
It's really infuriating.
They decide to care when they can be bigoted against trans people, but they don't actually know anything about any of the sports they're talking about ever.
And I don't know everything about every sport, but I'll often just say, oh, I don't know.
Maybe someone else should be in charge of that decision about that sport I know nothing about.
But anyway, I looked at just stats.
I was like, okay, let's see how many kills she has.
Kill is an actual thing in volleyball.
And, oh, wouldn't you know it, she's nowhere in the top anything.
You know, like, there's no way this person's spike nearly killed someone.
It's not, she's not...
Well, yeah, they tried to say 80 miles an hour.
Yeah, or some insane miles an hour.
It's just, like, silly.
Yeah, Katie Barnes at ESPN did a great job, actually, fact-checking all of the claims about the San Jose State volleyball player.
And got some great quotes from other people who actually are playing very high-level Division I volleyball, saying she's not as good.
Our spikes are harder.
What we are doing is actually far more impressive than what she is doing, and no one is complaining.
But yes, I am talking about Peyton McNabb, the volleyball player.
She was injured by a trans opponent, and no one has ever been able...
To prove that story.
And these things get really twisted.
The other case I think about a lot that has really been blown up to be one of the Wright's big cases, the Connecticut high school track case from a few years ago.
I don't know if you all are familiar with that.
I think we are, but I'm blanking.
There were two trans girls competing in high school track together.
In Connecticut at the same time, Andrea Yearwood and Terry Miller, I want to say.
And they were both Black girls.
And the families of three white cis girls sued the state of Connecticut because they claimed that their daughters would never be able to beat these two runners.
Like, the week after that suit was filed, one of the cis girls did beat one of the trans girls in the race.
But I think the part about that story, aside from yes, these girls actually have beat the trans runners, is that all three of the cis girls in that case went on to run in college.
Several of them, if not all of them, ran Division I college track, and neither of the trans girls continued to run in college.
And so there's this whole lawsuit about how...
These trans girls have an unfair advantage over these cis girls.
And a lot of this rhetoric does come when we talk about taking opportunities away.
This all ties back to our broken educational system.
There's a much bigger problem here in the U.S., both in that our Olympic pipeline is rooted in school sports, but also so is access to higher education for some people.
And so this is a different conversation to have.
But so what the argument is, is that we're not going to be able to run in college because of these trans girls.
We're going to take our opportunities, and yet neither of the trans girls ran in college and all of the cis girls in that case have.
And so nothing was taken from any of them.
And when you talk to Andrea Yearwood, she says part of the reason she didn't pursue running in college was because of the harassment that she faced.
And I don't know whether or not she would have been able to, but regardless, she was like, it wasn't even worth it to try because of how traumatic it was for me.
Oh, that's so sad.
Yeah, forgetting the fact that they think that people will just pretend to be trans to do this.
It's like their lives are hell.
Often, when anyone takes notice, when any conservative takes notice of, or anyone, I guess a lot of people, they make their lives hell.
Like anyone would volunteer for that.
It's silly.
Yeah.
I mean, I think really what the right has done very, very effectively is dehumanize trans athletes because the conversation focuses on their genitals or their hormones or their chromosomes or, you know, whatever goalposts we're looking at,
you know.
And it really removes the humanity from the actual people that we're talking about because, you know, in addition to that, like...
This really is a human rights issue at its core, and I think often we let these kind of red herring talking points distract from the fact that these are people facing real discrimination.
And, I mean, like, the UN has termed all of this human rights abuse, and the Olympic Charter literally says that sport free from discrimination is a human right.
That is really the core issue.
We focus so much on how cis people feel about having to compete against trans people that we forget to ask how trans people feel about being dehumanized and discriminated against for trying to just live their lives.
So what do we do?
Do you have any ideas?
I wish I did, you know, but I think the left really, really just like failed on all levels here.
And I don't know how you get the genie back into the bottle.
I think that not taking this more seriously, particularly in the world of women's sports, people just chose to kind of like say nothing.
And I think it was a massive mistake because it allowed the bad actors to...
Really capitalize on the space.
And their marketing, like you said, their marketing is good.
You know, men shouldn't play women's sports.
It's very simple.
People understand.
They think they understand what that means.
It's a much catchier thing to spread than the nuance that's really required.
I always say, I agree.
Men shouldn't play women's sports.
I don't know.
What's the controversy?
Trans women aren't men, so I don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
Right.
But unfortunately, the conversation has been allowed to be defined on those terms, and I don't think the left has any sort of an answer for it.
I wish I was more hopeful.
I think at the beginning of the year when all of the Trump's executive order came down and then the NCAA changed their policy, I didn't really know what to do and I didn't really...
I feel like I even had anything to write.
I was like, I've written about this for years.
There's nothing new to say.
And I really felt like I had failed.
And I know that's a ridiculous thing because one person doing this work is not, you know.
But I spoke to other journalists, too, who have been on this beat who felt similarly.
It felt like we'd really failed.
We feel like huge failures, too.
Don't worry.
What could I have done differently?
And I don't have a good answer because I think that, unfortunately...
People think that trans issues are niche because they affect so few people and they affect more people than people realize.
We're not part of the census.
We're not on a list anywhere.
You don't know how many trans people there actually are.
But I think this is something I encountered a lot trying to place these stories.
Publications were like, this is too niche.
Unless they want me to write the same story over and over again, there was no interest in actually nuanced, in-depth coverage of...
This stuff and to actually cover it correctly, you have to get quite in the weeds and most readers don't have enough of a working knowledge to be able to do that.
And so you end up not actually even being able to cover the issue the way it should be.
Most newsrooms don't have anyone that can cover this.
Sports newsrooms, you know, ESPN has Katie Barnes and that's kind of it.
Defector, I think, has at least two.
Writers as well who can cover this, but every sports newsroom should have had somebody who can cover trans policy and trans inclusion years ago, and most of them don't have a single one.
It's particularly hard feeling like things have reverted.
Things have gone even further back.
It's not just like, oh, we need to cover the new wave.
We need to debunk the new wave of lies.
It's like, oh, no, you're going back to lies.
I thought we were already past those lies.
We've downgraded.
We're back in time in lies.
And it just really feels, it's hard not to feel a little defeated, but I think the only answer is to try to keep, you know, speaking the truth out there and just hoping more people
Yeah, I think the hard part is like...
I don't know how much worse it has to get before people give a shit.
I don't know if I'm allowed to curse on this podcast.
Oh yeah, of course.
Let it rip.
Yeah, and most people don't know a trans person, right?
And so they're watching all of this happen and it feels very theoretical.
It feels very hypothetical.
It feels very far from their actual lives.
And that is another piece of how this gets to where it is.
But I don't think people should care about...
Trans people only because their rights are tied up in them.
But I do think when you start to police the idea of who is a woman and who is feminine enough, we know where that leads.
Sex testing, genital exams, any of that, it puts all women and girls in danger because suddenly now if you aren't conforming to a certain kind of feminine ideal, you now are subjected to these things as well.
And I think what...
The right has done really effectively, has pitted cis women and girls against trans women and girls.
And as soon as cis women and girls realize that their freedom is actually tied up with trans women and girls and is not at odds with it, I think that is where you'll start to see progress happen.
But they have to realize they're part of the same fight.
Yeah, and as you said, it might have to get worse before it can get better.
The only other thing that I've been really sitting with...
And you kind of spoke about too, Frankie, is that it's the dehumanization of trans folks has led to a lot of this being really successful.
So then you would hope that the opposite would be true, that like bringing the humanity back, right?
And like talking about...
Trans people as people, first and foremost, and profiling them.
But that is bits and pieces.
When we're talking about marketing, it's not nearly as marketable.
It's not nearly as quippy to share.
It's slow and plodding.
But it feels like that can be really effective.
It's obviously tough work and not enough people are doing it.
Yeah, no, you're right.
And it's something I do intentionally when I write about trans athletes.
And in sport, This gets harder because, especially at the elite or the pro level, their body is their tool and there's a focus on and an emphasis on the body in ways that other jobs don't have.
But when I write about these athletes, I try very hard not to focus on their bodies or their transition or any of those things.
And if I do...
I'm always very clear with the reader why I'm talking about that.
It's part of humanizing them and focusing on them as people, first and foremost.
But I think also there's this morbid curiosity, morbid fascination that cis people have with trans women's bodies.
And the right has focused so much.
On those bodies as sites of trauma and threat that I really try to pull the focus away from that, except when absolutely necessary to the story.
Because I do think you lose the humanity of the person when you focus so much on the pieces of them in that way.
All right.
Well, thank you so much for joining us.
Hey, where can listeners find more of your work?
Probably the easiest place to find me is my newsletter, which is where I debunked the Boston Marathon media frenzy.
It's called Out of Your League.
It's a queer sports and culture newsletter.
Probably the best place to find me because that's where I post everything that I write elsewhere as well.
