• Zagorath@aussie.zone
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    2 days ago

    There are a few different things you need to know to get this, so it’s hard to blame you.

    The first is that there is a prominent and very loud transphobic community of people who cry about “women’s sports”, where what they really mean is “trans women aren’t women and shouldn’t be allowed to be in women’s spaces”, but they couch it in notions of fairness in sport. You know it’s not legitimate concern because of how often they’ve gone after cis women who just happen to look a little too masculine for their misogynistic tastes.

    You also need to know that Donald Trump, the US president, has been closely tied to these loud transphobes.

    The third thing is that at this year’s Winter Olympics, the US teams won both the men’s and women’s ice hockey competition.

    Following that win, Donald Trump called the men’s team and invited them to meet him at the White House, after the State of the Union. He derisively joked with them:

    And we have to, I must tell you, we’re going to have to bring the women’s team, you do know that. I do believe I probably would be impeached [if the women’s team was not invited].

    We know this because one of the men recorded the call and posted the video online. Many of the men were heard laughing in response to Trump’s sexist joke. One or two of the men posted after-the-fact that the men should not have reacted like that. Whether it’s sincere or face-saving, I’ll leave up to the reader.

    So we’ve got Trump, a member of the “protect women’s sports” movement, caught vocally deriding successful women athletes. Almost like the “protect women’s sports” movement is actually just an “exclude trans women from society” movement.