The San Francisco Giants will support Pride Month on the field and on their uniforms and caps.
On Saturday against the Cubs, the Giants will feature Pride colors in the SF logo on their game caps along with a Pride patch on the right sleeves of their home uniforms — making them the first major league team to do so.
“Very proud that the San Francisco Giants are taking this step. Very proud to be part of it,” manager Gabe Kapler said Tuesday before San Francisco hosted the Los Angeles Angels. “Looking forward to the impact and the support that we can provide for the LGBTQ+ community.”
The 11 colors represented in the new Pride logo are: red (life); orange (healing); yellow (sunlight); green (nature); blue (serenity); purple (spirit); and black and brown for LGBTQ+ people of color. Light blue, pink and white represent those who are transgender.
“We are extremely proud to stand with the LGBTQ+ community as we kick off one of the best annual celebrations in San Francisco by paying honor to the countless achievements and contributions of all those who identify as LGBTQ+ and are allies of the LGBTQ+ community,” Giants President and CEO Larry Baer said in a statement.
Additionally, the Giants will host Pride Movie Night at Oracle Park on June 11-12.
In its announcement, the French Rugby Federation acknowledged that World Rugby – the global governing body for the sport – implemented a ban on trans women last year.
However, the World Rugby ban was only advisory, meaning individual countries’ governing bodies can put in place their own policies around transgender participation in sport.
In a statement, the French Rugby Federation said it is committed to the inclusion of trans people in rugby.
The group said its steering committee had voted unanimously in favour of allowing trans women to participate on women’s rugby teams following a recommendation from an equality commission.
Under new rules, trans women who have had gender-affirming surgeries and those who have received hormone treatment for at least 12 consecutive months will be allowed to play on women’s teams.
However, the rule will come with a number of conditions. Trans women must also have been legally recognised in their correct gender, and their testosterone levels must not exceed five nanomole/litre.
“Rugby is an inclusive, sharing sport, without distinction of sex, gender, origin or religion,” said FFR vice president Serge Simon.
“The FFR is against all forms of discrimination and works daily to ensure that everyone can exercise their free will in rugby without constraint.”
The news comes months after World Rugby announced a ban on trans women playing at an elite level following a months-long review process.
Humans have used symbols and iconography to communicate and identify things going back to when cave people made the first drawings on the cave walls. This use pre-dates language and the written word, but symbols have remained in use even after language became commonplace.
This use includes symbols and icons used to identify, segregate, promote intolerance and hate for groups of people. This use was especially true when it came to the persecution and systematic targeting by the Nazis under Hitler. The SS created a unique classification system to identify Jews who had to wear a yellow star formed by two triangles and criminals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and anyone deemed nonconformist, including homosexuals who wore the pink triangle. As with other groups, the Nazis forced anyone known or suspected to be engaged in homosexual behavior to don the Pink Triangle, proven or not. This behavior included bi-sexuality and those who were transgender men. Typically, this did not include lesbians and transgender women.
It is important to note that early on, we were not singled out for who we were but instead lumped in with criminals or political prisoners and made to wear a colored triangle representing that group of individuals, perhaps giving us more “cover.” Later, the Pink Triangle became one of many colored triangles used to identify individuals and were often combined to show those belonging to more than one group.
It is no wonder that Hitler would target our community given the prominent and visible gay and lesbian culture in Berlin at the time. Even though homosexuality was technically illegal before the rise of Hitler under the Paragraph 175 statute, it was rarely enforced. As was true of so many groups of people, Hitler saw us as a threat to his creation of the perfect race. Similar in many ways to what we continue to face politically and socially today, Hitler was afraid of us. As a result of that fear, he used hate and fear as his weapon and the Pink Triangle as a way to identify, shame, and target us.
Like others persecuted by the Nazis, individuals wearing the Pink Triangle were easily identifiable, making them instant targets by other prisoners and guards in the concentration camps. The Pink Triangle also made it easy to continue the persecution even after the war ended. Many who wore the Pink Triangle were transferred from concentration camps to prisons because it was illegal to be a homosexual.
What is unique about the Pink Triangle, compared to other symbols of identification, segregation, and hate, is that it was reclaimed and turned into a symbol of perseverance, strength, and unity.
Heinze Heger’s 1972 book “The Men With The Pink Triangle” brought greater awareness to the origins and use of the Pink Triangle by the Nazis. As a result, a German gay liberation group used the symbol as a memorial to those early victims and a new symbol of protest. After the Stonewall rebellion, our community took what had once been a symbol of hatred and turned it into a symbol of pride. We have also used it as a symbol of protest, as was seen during the early years of AIDS.
While it has been a small minority, it is important to note that some have criticized using a symbol that originated from hate to represent us. In 1993, senior editor Sara Hart of the gay magazine 10 Percent expressed this and received significant backlash.
As unique as it is to have reclaimed the Pink Triangle as our own, it is easy to overlook its historical significance as time goes by. I look at my lack of knowledge and understanding as a young gay man coming out in the early 1980s and how I initially just knew it to be a symbol of our community without proper context.
Yes, the Pink Triangle is now a symbol of pride, but it should also serve as a reminder of how easy it is to have all we have fought for and earned stripped away from us. As we come upon another season of Pride, we need to understand what our community’s symbols represent now, but we also need to understand their origins and what they represented before.
In her major new account of ACT UP New York, Let the Record Show, writer Sarah Schulman recalls that the infamous AIDS activist group had a special nickname for a certain paper of record: the “New York Crimes.” Though a bit goofy, the pun drew attention to the New York Times’ very serious history of institutional homophobia and, at the time, derelict coverage of the HIV epidemic that ACT UP was fighting. While the paper has improved by many measuresin the decades since, it showed a little flicker of its old self this week.
After the announcement that New York City’s Pride organizer, Heritage of Pride, had banned uniformed police and security from events from this June through at least 2025, the Times’ editorial board righteously declared the move a serious “misstep” that threated to rend the LGBTQ community asunder. The editorial lamented the hurt feelings of some cops (one of whom described the news as “devastating,” despite the fact that she can still participate as an individual, just without her uniform) and damage to Pride’s “inclusive spirit,” and worried if now wasn’t a “strange moment for the L.G.B.T.Q. community to be closing the door on some of its own and missing an opportunity to broaden its coalition.” No, the editorial board concluded—this foolish, mean-spirited ban won’t do. “Taking a pledge to protect and serve your city,” it wrote, “should not mean sacrificing the chance to be included in a community celebration of your identity.”
Whether uniformed police should be present in Pride parades and other events is a long-standing point of conflict among queers. Other cities, like Toronto, already have bans in place, while many campaigns and their attendant pushbacks are ongoing elsewhere. That Heritage of Pride (not known for being particularly progressive) made this move in New York at the behest of community members and activists (and with the guarantee of pro-police backlash) suggests that consensus may be moving in the no-cop direction.
But I am not here today to convince anyone of which side is right. I simply wish to take a moment to draw our attention to why the Times is so wrong in this editorial—about what Pride is even for.
It is not until the ninth paragraph that readers are reminded why Pride events happen in the first place. The first Pride, in June 1970, was a protest march to commemorate the riots at the Stonewall Inn the year before that were—yes, indeed!—an uprising against police violence. And these riots were not, as the ed board implies, provoked by a single “police raid”; they were the culmination of decades of state violence perpetrated by police against queers, often in places, like the Stonewall, that were the only, already-imperfect havens they had. It is a fine thing that, as the Times points out, the NYPD finally apologized for its actions in a PR stunt during the Stonewall 50th anniversary celebrations in 2019—but not nearly fine enough to erase the simple fact that Pride emerged directly and inexorably from activism, specifically against police brutality.
Times do change, and prejudiced institutions can do better. But the editorial board’s misapprehension is not just a matter of the historical origins of Pride—it’s also, and in some ways more importantly, about Pride’s purpose in the present. The editorial invokes the language of “identity” throughout. In discussing one lesbian officer, it weirdly conflates sexual identity with choice of occupation, writing that Pride is a special time when “two parts of her identity converge.” Is “cop” an identity akin to sexuality? I’m not so sure, but I do think Pride is maybe not the place for celebrating that. We gather at these events, quite explicitly, to assert and honor our LGBTQ identities and history—whatever it says on your badge or lanyard or nametag about work is really not the point (which is one reason to be wary of the corporate presence in these events, but I digress).
Later, the Times writes that “the Pride parade is also about the joy of belonging—of being part of a people knitted together by shared identity and survival.” This is a benign-enough sentiment, up until the last word. What, one wonders, does the Times imagine queer people have had to “survive”? And which of us have had to do the most surviving? If you checked with trans women of color or queer youth experiencing homelessness, you might find that the police are at the top of the list of “things to be survived,” and thus you might begin to understand better why some may view cops’ presence, however “crisp and clean” their outfits, to be less than desirable at an event we agree should offer a modicum of joy.
To be fair, the Times does include a few paragraphs allowing that police violence against queers is a thing, though it notably limits its statistics to Pride season itself—as if incidents at the actual parade (which did in fact happen at the Queer Liberation March just last year!) are all critics were concerned about. “But,” the board inevitably pivots, “barring L.G.B.T.Q. officers from marching is a politicized response and is hardly worthy of the important pursuit of justice for those persecuted by the police.” And here we have the crux of the misunderstanding: The Times editorial board believes that banning queer cops from marching in uniform is political, that tying police violence to actual police is a politicized move detached from the harm that actual victims have endured. And this is inappropriate, you see, because Pride is a “celebration,” a joyful party where “politics” are in poor taste.
I’ll allow that that’s what Pride is for some—many, even. A mere celebration. But for others, Pride is meaningless without politics. Pride is political. Pride is a space and a season in which queers have the opportunity to express and test our political commitments, some of which, yes, may divide us—which is as it should be.
The Times editorial scolds that New York’s ban is “a poke in the eye at law enforcement more than a meaningful action to address police violence or foster a dialogue about law enforcement reform.” But political action sometimes requires a bit of poking, no? (ACT UP certainly thought so.) And here we are, right now, having what looks to me like a dialogue about law enforcement reform. Hm. Not to spoil the party, but could it be that, in this particular instance, mixing politics and Pride is working precisely as it’s supposed to?
Does culture breed character, or does character breed culture? Ellen reflects the tension of this question.
Does culture breed character, or does character breed culture? Ellen reflects the tension of this question, as, arguably, do we all. The answer is not either/or but both/and. Scorned and — literally — canceled after coming out as a lesbian on her hit sitcom, “Ellen,” in April 1997, Ellen fought for years to rebuild her career. And 2003 proved to be transformative: She voiced the widely adored character of Dory in Disney’s “Finding Nemo,” released in May, and later that year, on Sept. 8, “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” had its inaugural episode.
That Ellen’s coming out served as a watershed cultural moment cannot be overestimated. “It’s easy to forget now, when we’ve come so far,” President Barack Obama said as he awarded Ellen the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, “just how much courage was required for Ellen to come out on the most public of stages … just how important it was, not just to the LGBT community but for all of us to see somebody so full of kindness and light, somebody we liked so much, somebody who could be our neighbor or our colleague or our sister, challenge our own assumptions, to remind us that we have more in common than we realize.”
Before Ellen, LGBT representation in entertainment could best be described as the “celluloid closet,” to evoke both Vito Russo’s 1981 book and, later, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s documentary of the same name. During the 1980s and ’90s, the LGBT community was synonymous with death and disease as the HIV/AIDS epidemic swept the nation and the globe. The ’90s brought sweeping federal legislation like the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which both restricted civil rights and sent the message that discriminating against the LGBT community was legal and permissible.
The context for Ellen’s coming out is essential to comprehending its significance. The year before that episode aired, in 1996, Olympian Greg Louganis’ admission that he had HIV at the time of his diving board incident was met with media sensationalism and gay panic; the year after, 1998, Matthew Shepard was tortured and murdered in Colorado.
With network TV’s national audience, Ellen had the opportunity to change how people thought about and related to gay people. She endeavored — quite successfully — to humanize the gay community through the logic of equality and, specifically, the language of sameness. Ellen, like all gay people, was just like you. As Obama remarked, she “could be our neighbor or our colleague or our sister.”
She endeavored — quite successfully — to humanize the gay community through the logic of equality and, specifically, the language of sameness.
And it cannot be over emphasized how much sameness mattered in September 2003, as then-President George W. Bush declared Iraq to be the “central front” in the “war on terror.” It was a time of “us” versus “them.” And Ellen was intent on showing how gay people — gay, god-fearing Americans like her — were very much a part of the “us.”
Likeness fosters likability. Ellen cultivated this through her “Be Kind” motto and her character, which became the living embodiment of this motto. To be welcomed into the homes of millions of Americans — especially the key daytime demographic of straight women — Ellen had to look the part.
The right kind of lesbian is the innocuous one: not too femme and not too masculine. Like Rachel Maddow, the other lesbian welcomed into millions of homes in the evening, Ellen gave the mainstream nonthreatening androgyny — but with just the right touch of lipstick.
This relatability is something that Ellen addresses in her aptly titled Netflix special, “Relatable,” in 2018. But as BuzzFeed’s Shannon Keating so smartly observes, it is this push for relatability — clearly tied to ratings — that trapped “Ellen in a prison of her own making.”
The consequential irony of humanizing the gay community for Ellen is that she could not be human — fallible and flawed — herself. As she commented in her interview with “TODAY” show host Savannah Guthrie this week, sexism influences this likability bind, as it does for all women. There is no room for error. There are few, if any, second chances — especially considering that her show is her “second chance,” of sorts. And she has spoken variously, including in “Relatable,” about how the “Be Kind” motto has ultimately boxed her in: “I cannot do anything unkind now, ever. … I have bad days, but I can’t do the things you do because I’m the ‘Be Kind’ girl.”
But an entire generation has passed since “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” premiered. And visibility as a tactic for acceptance, for any marginalized community, is no longer enough. Responsibility for social problems is often placed onto “systems,” yet the fact is that systems are made and managed by privileged people like Ellen, whose actions empower those very systems.
The visibility that Ellen, among countless others, helped usher in is no longer the endgame. And neither is respectability, as Keating observes: “[W]holesome respectability, of universality, of ‘gay people are just like you’ — has fallen out of favor these days with certain more radical groups within the LGBT community.” Autostraddle’s Heather Hogan similarly writes that “calls for civility have most often been used to silence the oppressed … kindness is not justice,” and “being nice isn’t enough.”
Hogan elaborates that “what Ellen has continued to refuse to understand, however, is that … it is not enough to simply publicly wish we could all get along. We can’t. Not because we’re mean, but because we’re arguing about the literal humanity of oppressed people who have suffered — and continue to suffer — endless, compounded violence rooted in white supremacy.”
The culture has changed.
But Ellen hasn’t.
Entering the third decade of the 21st century, ours is a culture where a character based on kindness and likeness rings hollow like T.S. Eliot’s modern man, “stuffed,” corrupt and complicit.
Our culture has moved into an era of authenticity and accountability — a movement heavily resisted by those who cry “cancel culture.” Societal resistance to change is not surprising. But what is surprising is how Ellen has acted (behind the scenes) during this time of cultural change. The past year’s allegations and revelations (which, for industry insiders and queer people with any connection to the community have heard rumors about for years) suggest Ellen’s kindness was a fiction masquerading as authenticity all along.
For example, in her recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, in which she announced the end of her show, Ellen demonstrates her unwillingness to take responsibility for her behavior, which contributed to the show’s toxic environment. The criticism “was all so stupid,” she said, adding that she “didn’t want to address it” because she “had no platform.”
This is odd, considering that Ellen not only has a following in the millions across several social media channels, she also has own own digital publishing platform, EllenTube.
Instead of acknowledging the power and access she has to take responsibility for her own actions and the actions of her deputies, she doubled down on victimization: “[A]ll I cared about was spreading kindness and compassion, and everything I stand for was being attacked. So, it destroyed me, honestly. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t. And it makes me really sad that there’s so much joy out there from negativity. It’s a culture now where there are just mean people, and it’s so foreign to me that people get joy out of that.”
President Joe Biden faces many tough challenges. Foreign adversaries are preparing to test him, rancorous political divisions confront him at home where COVID-19 has ravaged the American economy and spirit. With Washington gridlock threatening to block his most ambitious plans, opportunities for legacy achievements may prove scarce.
Still, in one critical area, Biden can earn an honored place in history: LGBTQ rights. Of all major contemporary American political figures, Biden has been the quickest to take a stand for our rights. He is the best friend LGBTQs have yet had in the White House. I do not say so lightly, I am a lifelong Republican.
From day one, Biden began rolling back the biased policies promoted by Donald Trump’s Marginalizer-in-Chief, Mike Pence. Much damage remains to be undone, especially because the media and many Democrats have gone easy on Pence and his cronies. But Joe himself got off to a fast start placing qualified LGBTQ officials in highly visible positions, including his Cabinet. Secretary of State Tony Blinken set the tone early by flying the rainbow flag at U.S. embassies and naming a special envoy for LGBTQ rights. What a welcome change to have an administration proud of, rather than wary of, its LGBTQ supporters.
Yet much more needs to be done to rid this nation of the cruel blights of LGBTQ stigma and marginalization. There can be neither equality nor equity for people who are systematically stigmatized and marginalized. The cruelty of these violations is evident in a suicide rate among LGBTQ youth five times that of youth in the general population.
A national commission studying patterns, causes, and consequences of LGBTQ stigma, marginalization, and bullying could help awaken Americans to the damage from the prejudices many of us still face. Indeed, older LGBTQs who feel comfortably protected, have a special obligation to defend gay youth who remain vulnerable.
Stigmatization is worse for minority LGBTQs who bear a double burden of bias. BGLM!–Black Gay Lives Matter! Stigma impedes HIV testing and treatment; one consequence is a shocking rate of new HIV-AIDS infections among people of color four times the rate among whites.
Even as we pursue our national struggle to end racial bias, America must recognize our equal moral obligation to expose and repudiate our ugly history of LGBTQ stigmatization and marginalization. How do we stop these evils? Most crucial, we must pass a muscular Equality Act that protects the rights and dignity of all LGBTQs wherever they live in America.
Yet to pass it soon, we must avoid “poison pills” that may doom it to failure. Protection for LGBTQ youth is urgent. Better a bill we can pass now giving us 90% of what we all need, than a failed bill promising 100% of what some wish for.
Education is essential. Students must learn about the sufferings of LGBTQ people and our contributions to humanity and to America. All should be told about LGBTQ civil rights heroes like Bayard Rustin, Harvey Milk, and Barbara Jordan, scientists and thinkers like Alan Turing, George Washington Carver, and Plato, writers like Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, and Henry James, composers like Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, and Billy Strayhorn, and artists like Michelangelo, Georgia O’Keefe, and Frida Kahlo—the full list is much longer.
Formal recognition of the sufferings and achievements of LGBTQ people is long overdue. As a starter, let’s build an Equality Museum on the Mall to celebrate LGBTQ Americans. No politician has yet ventured to suggest building one; their omission reinforces our marginalized state. President Biden could make history by stepping up.
Although Biden himself has made a strong start on LGBTQ rights, it is a serious mistake for the Democrats to take the gay vote for granted. Polls indicate Trump’s share rose from 16% in 2016 to 28% in 2020. LGBTQs followed a normal tendency to divide more evenly between the parties. In the 2020 campaign Democrats avoided reminding voters that
Trump’s number two, Mike Pence, has been America’s number one stigma super spreader. At the same time, on the QT, they reassured closet Pences among their own. They took us for granted assuming all LGBTQs are Woke Groupthinkers.
In the next election, more LGBTQs who agree with Republicans on issues like Iran, immigration, or taxes will vote GOP if the Democrats fail to raise their ante for us. More Democrats need to follow the leadership Biden is showing on LGBTQ issues.
Biden himself has a big opportunity to become America’s president for LGBTQ rights. But to grasp that opportunity, he will need aggressive initiatives to end stigmatization, celebrate our contributions, and make a crystal clear national commitment to full equality for all LGBTQ peoples.
The NCAA announced a preliminary list of 20 schools being considered to host the Division I Softball Championship, and three of them — Alabama, Arkansas and Tennessee — are in states that have recently passed laws banning transgender girls and women from competing on women’s sports teams.
The final list of 16 schools that will host games in the tournament’s regional round will be announced May 16, about a month after the NCAA released a statement backing trans athletes as more than 30 states have considered legislation to limit their participation.
“When determining where championships are held, NCAA policy directs that only locations where hosts can commit to providing an environment that is safe, healthy and free of discrimination should be selected,” the April 12 statement said. “We will continue to closely monitor these situations to determine whether NCAA championships can be conducted in ways that are welcoming and respectful of all participants.”
Many advocates took the NCAA’s statement to mean that it wouldn’t consider states that had passed legislation targeting trans people to host tournaments.
“The NCAA is making it clear that their Board of Governors supports transgender athletes, and the board should hold those states passing these harmful laws accountable,” Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, deputy executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said in a statement at the time.
But the organization’s recent list of potential hosts for an early round of the softball tournament appears to call into question whether the NCAA will be holding states accountable.
Karen Weaver, a former college field hockey coach and athletic administrator now on the faculty at Penn, called the most recent NCAA statement as “wishy washy as you can get.”
Weaver told The Associated Press that the NCAA’s statement was “carefully worded,” and that’s likely due in part to legislation in Congress known as the name, image, likeness, or NIL bill, which would allow athletes to make money on the use of their name, image or likeness.
She said it’s a “tenuous time to be taking any kind of stance that might be viewed as political,” because the NCAA is trying to “craft their future in the Congress and Senate with the NIL legislation.”
“They’re trying to not tick off any potential folks who might vote for something that benefits the NCAA the most,” Weaver told the AP.
The 20 potential regional sites for baseball will be announced next week, and that list will be pared to the 16 official hosts on May 31.
Jeff Altier, the NCAA Division I Baseball Committee chairman and the athletic director at Stetson University in Florida, told the AP last month that his committee had not received a directive to exclude any school from consideration for hosting a regional.
Altier referred other questions to the NCAA.
Seven states — Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Mississippi, South Dakota, Tennessee and West Virginia — have laws banning trans girls from competing on girls sports teams, though a federal judge blocked Idaho’s law from taking effect in August pending the outcome of a lawsuit. All of the laws ban trans girls from competing in middle and high school sports. Laws in Arkansas, Virginia and Mississippi also include college sports teams.
Gail Dent, spokeswoman for the NCAA Board of Governors, did not respond to questions about the NCAA’s willingness to pull events out of states with bans.
Shane Windmeyer, founder and executive director of Campus Pride, a national organization advocating for safer college environments for LGBTQ students, said that the NCAA’s Office of Inclusion has been an ally. He said Campus Pride and similar organizations have received grants from the NCAA to fund diversity and inclusion summits and other programming.
That’s one reason he found it “surprising the NCAA would say one thing, that they are monitoring it, and then select site locations that are in areas of the country that are doing anti-trans, anti-LGBTQ legislation.”
The NCAA has had policies in place since 2011 that allow for transgender participation in sports. Testosterone suppression treatment is required for transgender women to compete in women’s sports.
In 2016, the NCAA made good on its threat to pull championship events out of North Carolina in response to the “bathroom bill,” which required transgender people to use restrooms according to their sex at birth and not their gender identity. Greensboro lost first- and second-round games in the men’s basketball tournament in 2017; they were moved to Greenville, South Carolina. The law was repealed before the NCAA could take away more events.
“When they got involved with the bathroom bill in North Carolina, that was, in my opinion, a bold step for them,” Weaver said. “I’m not seeing that same enthusiasm right now.”
The NCAA traditionally selects baseball and softball regional sites based on a team’s performance as well as quality of facilities and financial considerations. This year, potential sites were pre-determined because each must be evaluated for its ability to meet the NCAA’s Covid-19 protocols.
Four of the top five teams in this week’s D1Baseball.com Top 25 — No. 1 Arkansas, No. 2 Vanderbilt, No. 4 Mississippi State and No. 5 Tennessee — ordinarily would be considered shoo-ins to be regional hosts. The four schools confirmed to The Associated Press that they had submitted bids to host but declined interview requests on the topic of the NCAA’s decision.
Since 2000, the home team has won 67.5 percent of baseball regionals, and there is money to be made, too. A University of Arkansas study showed baseball fans visiting the Fayetteville area spent about $2 million during a three-day regional in 2018, excluding the cost of tickets and in-stadium purchases.
For now, everyone is waiting to see the next step on site selections from the NCAA, which has referred all questions to the Board of Governors statement.
Weightlifter Laurel Hubbard is set to become the first transgender athlete to compete at an Olympics after qualifying for the rescheduled Tokyo Games due to a rule change, Inside the Games website reported on Wednesday.
Hubbard was effectively guaranteed a spot in the women’s super heavyweight category, the report from the Olympics-focused trade publication said, after the International Olympic Committee approved an amendment to the rules as the COVID-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of many qualifying competitions.
New Zealander Hubbard, 43, has not yet been named to the national women’s weightlifting team going to the Tokyo Olympic Games.
Hubbard competed in men’s weightlifting competitions before transitioning in 2013.
She has been eligible to compete in the Olympics since 2015, when the IOC issued new guidelines allowing any transgender athlete to compete as a woman provided their testosterone levels are below 10 nanomoles per litre for at least 12 months before their first competition.
Weightlifting has been at the center of the debate over the fairness of transgender athletes competing in women’s sports, and Hubbard’s presence in Tokyo is set to attract huge media attention as well as criticism from fellow lifters and coaches.
Her gold medal wins at the 2019 Pacific Games in Samoa, where she topped the podium ahead of Samoa’s Commonwealth Games champion Feagaiga Stowers, triggered outrage in the island nation.
Australia’s weightlifting federation sought to block Hubbard from competing at the 2018 Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast but organizers rejected the move.
USA Weightlifting said it had no issue with Hubbard competing in the Games.
“We respect the rules established by the International Weightlifting Federation and the International Olympic Committee for qualification and will be focusing on assisting our athletes to compete against all those who are qualified for the Tokyo Games,” spokesman Kevin Farley told Reuters.
West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R) on Wednesday signed into law a bill that prohibits transgender female athletes from playing on women’s sports teams in public middle schools, high schools and universities.
The bill cleared the state House last month in an overwhelming 78-20 vote before passing the state Senate in a closer 18-15 vote on April 8 after its scope was expanded to cover colleges.
West Virginia is one of a number of states that have enacted restrictions on transgender athletes, including Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi, according to The Associated Press.
Read the full article. Perhaps obviously, all of these bills are the work of anti-LGBT Christian hate groups.
Why is not much of a brain teaser: Jenner is rich and wants to stay rich. Actual, material solidarity with other trans people — for whom transition can cost tens of thousands of dollars they often don’t have — could possibly challenge the comfort of her status.
Caitlyn Jenner wins — and the rest of us, trans people and Californians, lose.
She wasn’t going to find a place in the heart of the nation’s trans people, the majority of whom are financially struggling, because she doesn’t really know or appreciate the typical trans experience and has never made any effort to do so.
But in a way, that is fine, because neither do the donors she’s going to spend a recall collection bilking.
The conditions are perfect for the grift. The Republican Party, reeling from a national electoral defeat and its identity as the “party of Lincoln” overshadowed by, among its other acts, its anti-mask, anti-trans, anti-science antics — and a little light treason — has an outside chance of winning the governor’s mansion of the liberal mothership.https://compass.pressekompass.net/compasses/think/could-caitlyn-jenner-earn-your-vote-for-?curl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com%2Fthink%2Fopinion%2Fcaitlyn-jenner-s-gubernatorial-run-california-loser-trans-people-state-ncna1265392&embed=embed&paywall=anonymous
Plus, backing a celebrity conservative against an embarrassed Democrat in a recall election has worked once before for the Republicans.
And here Caitlyn comes: wealthy, white, famous and loves “the queers” but is still iffy on same-sex marriage.
The conditions of the California recall are perfect for the grift.
Caitlyn Jenner is two things in one trans package: She’s both the conservative ideal of a transgender woman (if they have to allow for us to exist at all) in that she has no interest in challenging the gender binary or, really, any status quo; and she’s also the epitome of the critique of trans women supposedly upholding conservative ideas of gender roles through the pursuit of womanly aesthetics made by anti-trans campaigners who claim to be extreme left-wing feminists.
And while I hate to grant that those people are right about anything, getting a bunch of rich old bigots to pay for TV time so you can wring your hands about poor people and foreigners stealing all our benefits is pretty much the gold standard of upholding traditional white womanhood.
The real problem now is that, whatever happens, Caitlyn Jenner wins — and the rest of us, trans people and Californians, lose. She’ll get to do her act, and have it beamed directly into millions of homes across California, on the Republicans’ dime.
And so, whether she ends up as the governor of California or just gets a run on the next season of “The Masked Singer,” she will likely come out of this wealthier, moderately more famous and, if not more accepted, more tolerated by the very political machine that despises and wants to actively institute the legal necessity of discriminating against the children and young adults who haven’t yet grown into adults like her.
It’ll also, either way, be a win for the faux-populist facet of the Republican Party that will try to put anyone with an IMDb page in elected office.
And even if Newsom wins, the Republican Party will come away with just a little more social credibility on LGBT issues that it doesn’t deserve — a morsel of plausible deniability as to its true nature: I’m meeting you halfway, you stupid hippies.
But trans people don’t have to lose because of Jenner’s run. When conservatives point her out as some template of the trans experience, call that out. When your complacent liberal friends who spent their weekends protesting Trump but not Biden’s “overflow facilities” default to low-effort transphobia in defending Newsom, call that out.
And when Jenner eventually goes on “Dancing With the Stars,” maybe use that time slot to watch “Umbrella Academy,” “Pose,” “Dramaworld” or literally any other show starring a trans and nonbinary person not implicated in another person’s death.
Grifters are gonna grift, and trans people exist and are beautiful (if we want to be). But we do not have to countenance the mainstreaming of Jenner normativity.
