Why the Olympics Really Confused Some People
The bathroom constabulary got tied up in knots arguing about genitals... again.
Hi,
We’re approaching 300 comments about your best and worst movie experiences and if you have a moment today, I really urge you to have a read through (and add your own experience if you haven’t already).
This one from Ant Timpson really tickled me:
“We went to see the Mel Brooks film The History of the World Pt 1, and it was a packed house.
Being annoying teen boys, we were laughing and talking to ourselves during the trailers. The big burly biker dude in front of us turns around and menacingly whispers into my ear — so quietly that my friend doesn’t hear — “If you guys make one more fookin’ sound I’m going to smash you”
He turns back around, and so that’s the moment my buddy decides to say, “What did he say” at a volume I instantly knew was above rage zone.
The guy instantly stands and swivels, impressive for a large man — and punches my mate dead in the face — zoinks! — knocking him out.
I then had to sit there in dead silence in a state of pure terror while the comedy genius of Mel Brooks played on, and not laughing once.”
Co-incidentally Ant just released his new film, Bookworm, in New Zealand cinemas. It stars my friend Elijah Wood, and is the first feature film to star New Zealand cryptid the Canterbury Panther! If you and your family liked like Hunt for the Wilderpeople, you will like this.
Now — the Olympics.
This is probably the only Webworm I will send out about the Olympics, because while I appreciate the memes, insane skill, and sports I’d never heard of before —
— I find the Olympics kind of difficult to take seriously, considering the values of those running it.
Back in 2017 I found myself filming an episode of Dark Tourist. We’d originally wanted to film a story about tourists who travel to one of the most repressive places on the planet, North Korea — but settled for the next worst: Turkmenistan.
The only reason we managed to get in with cameras (without being arrested) was because their maniac leader Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov had spent $5,000,000,000 building an entire Olympic village so his country could look good hosting the Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games.
As The Guardian reported at the time:
The president of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, gave a grandiose speech pitting the movement he leads against the forces of nationalism and isolationism sweeping the globe. “We stand for peace, diversity, tolerance and respect,” he said. “These trends are a call to action for us. More than ever the world needs our Olympic values.” At the same time athletes from more than 60 of his member nations were travelling to one of the most repressive countries in the world for an event run by the IOC’s Asian affiliate.
The games were sparsely attended, but me and my film crew were allowed in — and we shot our episode. The opening ceremony remains one of the most batshit things I’ve ever seen, a truly giant stadium production which saw Turkmenistan show off its vast oil reserves through the medium of dance and fire.
I was also high as a kite on ketamine — as explained in an old Webworm.
My point is — seeing the Olympic rings on full display in Turkmenistan — knowing they imprison journalists and have an abhorrent history of various human rights violations — kind of dampened the whole thing for me. Money talks though, right?
But — like a lot of us — I keep a gentle eye on the amazing sporting prowess going on. But this year, something really dumb happened.
Somehow, just somehow, the very loud anti-trans brigade — in their desperate scrabble to get their fix of anger and hatred — seem to have driven themselves to argue that gender is complicated and sex is a spectrum.
Yes — I wanted to talk about Olympic boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting — and the horrific pile-on they received from the likes of Elon Musk and JK Rowling (and literally hundreds of thousands of others) and what that says about the state of things right now.
But then I realised I wasn’t the right person to write about it, so I got my friend Ross Palethorpe to put some words down. He’s a trauma and bereavement counsellor in New Zealand, and has followed this issue closely.
Take it away, Ross.
Thanks to those of you who pay to subscribe to Webworm. You let me pay guest writers like Ross, and you keep this whole thing ticking.
Why the Bathroom Constabulary is Arguing Passionately About Genitals… Again
by Ross Palethorpe
As we’re all aware, the Discourse about gender and sports has become increasingly unhinged in recent years.
In New Zealand, among NZ First’s raft of whisky-induced policies in the last election was one that would withdraw public funding from grassroots sports organisations that allowed trans women to play.
In the UK, Parkrun — the social running event with no winners — got picketed for not making as big a fuss of trans women taking part.
The experts in women’s sports (a field dominated by children's authors who live in black mould-infested castles and noted academics Jake Paul and Joe Rogan) will tell you it’s “basic biology” that women have vaginas and are weak, while men have penises and are strong.
Genitalia uber alles.
The debate hasn’t been edifying for a while, but it opened up new areas of the sewer this week when half the world’s washed up comedians and child support evaders simultaneously started foaming at the mouth about the Olympic boxers Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan.
No-one cared when both competed in Tokyo 2021. But since they failed unspecified “gender eligibility tests” at the 2023 International Boxing Association World Championships in what can charitably be described as murky circumstances, the conversation has shifted into another gear.
In one sense this is nothing new.
But what’s a little different in the case of Khelif and Lin to the usual synthetic panic around the existence of trans people doing anything, is that neither woman is transgender.
They’ve both lived their entire lives as women. They’ve always competed as women.
The “tests” they supposedly failed haven’t been disclosed, beyond the IBA describing them as “recognized”. As a result of this frustrating lack of a smoking gamete, the Bathroom Constabulary are now arguing passionately that genitals do not in fact a woman make, and actually it’s far more subtle and complicated than that and really, we should listen to *checks notes* convicted felon and Kremlin stooge Umar Kremlev for the final word on someone’s gender.
It’s tempting to think that this time the bigots have shown themselves up as having no idea what they’re talking about*.
While it’s always fun to reply to these cranks with a screenshot of their earlier howling about penises and a “This you?”, it’s wildly optimistic to hope that this contradiction signals the end for the big-ticket transphobes. The reason for this is that what transphobes want is not what they say they want, and their argument is not what they say it is. The purpose of the machine is what it does, not what it says it does. It says it’s about protecting women in sports. What it does is harm them.
It doesn’t matter to the tech billionaires or the Gazprom-funded boxing commissioner or the writer occasionally known as Robert Galbraith and their extremely online fans that Khelif and Lin are women. If anything, it furthers their cause. Why wait for a trans woman to excel at anything in order to destroy them, when cis women who step out of line will do just as well?
Bully enough women who don’t look feminine enough, or who excel at things that are even faintly masculine-coded by virtue of their genetics (and what is the Olympics on one level if not a celebration of the physically freakishly-gifted), and they might go away and leave the prizes to those deemed “acceptable”.
Whilst Black women and women of colour bear the brunt of this (and better writers than I have written at length about the intersection of racism and transphobia), nobody is immune. Katy Ledecky, whose speed in the pool is jaw-droppingly good, has repeatedly had claims that she’s transgender swirl around social media, because no woman could possibly be that fast.
The message on brief contact seems almost comically stupid. “Don’t be good at things or look even vaguely androgynous while you do it or you’ll be called a man” feels like something even primary-aged kids have moved on from. But when that message is repeated, amplified and brings with it very real threats at both an individual and systemic level, it has a chilling effect.
It hisses in the ear of every little girl watching women that they shouldn’t be strong, or fast, or muscular in public.
Don’t hit the pretty white woman too hard in the hitting-each-other-very-hard competition.
Don’t dominate on the tennis court.
Don’t run too fast.
You can’t step out of your lane if you’re not on the track in the first place.
-Ross Palethorpe.
*It’s important to note here that no woman, no athlete, deserves to be treated the way Khelif and Lin have in the last week. The well-meaning “but they’re not even trans” rebuttal suggests that if they were trans the criticism would be valid, and speculating about what’s in someone’s pants, DNA, or bloodstream is just as dehumanising when it’s being done in a liberal op-ed as it is when it’s done by Libs of TikTok.
-Ross (he/him) works as a trauma and bereavement counselor, and has made zero Olympic appearances in either gender category. He lives in Otago with his family and two rescue dogs.
A big thank you to David and Hayden for inviting me to write about this, and for everyone who's responded. I've really enjoyed reading everyone's thoughts (in a refreshing change to when I usually write about this stuff)
I also don't think it's a coincidence that Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting come from smaller, less powerful nations. The big name TERFs don't want to focus on Katie Ledecky because they know it would be a PR disaster and give away the whole game. It's easier to make it Us vs Them when you can also classify Them as "foreign".
Rowling's transformation from beloved author to Chief Genital Inspector has been so shocking to see. She's become the Dolores Umbridge of gender.