How the TERFs Ruined Cycling

do for some time. It's a thing I've written about before, and hopefully a thing I'll be able to write about again, and unless the cycling press just kind of gives itself over to the turf, which doesn't seem to have done, to be fair, generally, generally dicycling press, I think it's fair to say, has lacked an intersexual analysis of anything. But they've been better on this than I had expected, especially the outlets which are not run by white sis

heat dudes in Boulder, which, to be fair, is a minority. Yeah, strange, that odd? How odd? But yeah, shouting in particular to Outside for including a gear guide to the gear the cop used at the twenty sixteen RNC, which could perhaps be included as the most tone deaf article ever written. Yeah, yeah, incredibly comment and then to leave it up in twenty twenty to not like cover your tracks.

It's it's when competitors race skinny tired drop bar bikes on off road course. Yeah, I would please google preps. Okay, I'm going to send you one one cyclic cross video. It is iconic for people who are who are at home. The videos called is joey Okay, we can we can have mere reacting live.

It's called field riding in Dutch, which is about right writing have you watched the video will include a link in the note to everyone else of it. Did you watch it with the sound on?

hand ups are a big thing in cycle across. So like I've been handed dollar bills.

will hand you like drinks. I've had beer hand ups, donut spake, and one notable occasion a cookie that was not just a normal cookie, which you should fucking disclose to someone before you get to Yeah, that was a bad day. I also had a pretty rough traumatic brain injury that day. Oh no, yeah, I'd already sustained brain injury. And the cookie. I thought my blood sugar was low, so I was like, yeah, I'm going to get that cookie and it's going to be great. It was not.

It wasn't the blood sugar. It it was affected my cognition. So cyclo cross is fun and silly, and heckling is part of it, but like heckling occurs within a certain certain bounds right, Like you're not supposed to be mean, it's just supposed to be funny, like everyone's supposed to laugh. So I think in twenty twenty one everyone was rather it's funny signed as a part of it too, right.

But in twenty twenty one we saw some shit that was distinctly not funny when a group called Save Women's Sport posted up at the race and held what were, as you can probably guess by the name, transphobic science throughout the race. So a lot of people were upset by this, and by their own admission, nobody wanted them there. One woman told the protesters your shiit feminism isn't welcome here, which I think would be a great T shirt. If she's listening, please will license your T shirt from you.

And they were pretty rarely rejected by most of the community, which is great, But the bigotry they bought really wasn't a surprise to anyone who'd been paying attention to online discourse for a while, especially with respect to cycling. The harassment of trans cyclists has been escalating for years. For at least five or six years now, the governing body USA Cycling has known about this and chosen to have done

nothing to stop it. Right, So this particular focus on cycling came about in twenty eighteen when anti transcardras began to focus on the sport because of the success of a woman named Veronica Ivy. She wasn't called Veronica Ivy at the time, and she was using she had a different name then, but that's her name now, so I'm going to use that name out of respect for her choice for that to be her name. She she won a world championship in the women's thirty five to forty

four spring category. Now, like, I have no disrespect at all for masters athletes. It's great. I'm glad people are out there exercising. This is not the same as an Olympic gold medal, right, like the big I would I mean people may disagree. The biggest determinant of your ability to win a master's track cycling gold medal is the amount of free time you have to exercise and the amount of money you have to buy fast gear and get to the event. Right, wait, what what is like?

The difference between masters is it's competitions for older people. So it's so in cycling you have juniors and there are various you know, obviously the eight year olds don't compete with eighteen year olds, but up to eighteen is juniors espoirs is eighteen to twenty three. We use a French name because you know, you want to be all what is what is what? Jesus Christ? Yeah, this French name under twenty three, right, you can call it if you want it to be an angler phile. And then

from there you go into the elite competition. Elite competition is it's actually eighteen and like an eighteen year old could compete in an elite competition, so could a fifty year old, right, But it's the highest level of competition. And then you get protected age categories again once you get to thirty five, so thirty five to forty four, forty five to fifty four going ten year blocks, right, and that's for people who are only of that age.

Now it's the older you get, the less competitive it gets, just because more people will fewer people will be racing. Right, But thirty five plus masters sometimes they call it baby masters, is not. You don't have a significant decrease in your endurance performance at thirty five, so like some of these people are still very good, and that's why they call it baby masters, I guess. But like track cycling is not a big sport to begin with, right, that's going

around in circles on an indoor velodrome. Master's track cycling, it's a smaller sport. And then I know some excellent masters track cyclists who just don't care to go to worlds. Right. They've been professional cyclists, are very high level amateur cyclists, and once you reach your mid forties, some people don't care to travel and spend that money and do that competition. Right.

San Diego has a really great track scene. Some people who I know very well have recently won multiple world championships on the track, like, we have a very thriving scene, but not all of those people even care to go to La to race worlds like, let alone travel across the world. Right, So it doesn't necessarily truly mean the people who win Masters are the best athletes in the world for their age group. And certainly I wouldn't say. There are lots of things that make this competition unfair.

One of them is how much track bikes cost, how much track time costs, and how much travel costs to get to the event. But of course it didn't matter to these people, right, What mattered is that a transfoman had won, and she became the center of the culture war. And this was really at least the first one that I was aware of, a sort of instance of someone a trans person winning a very a notable event in cycling.

And maybe trans people have been competing in elite races in cycling for forty years, like Wally Cameron was the first trans woman to race in a World Cup, and Money's been racing for a while, and no one said shit, no one cared, right, But around twenty eighteen, the culture war around trans people was becoming heightened, and so people got mad about her wing the race. And since then there's been this steady increase in transphobic sentiment towards by Crass.

It's really the sort of leading voice in this has been former probke Grace at Inger Thompson. She's been joined by a few amateur women in various fields voicing their feelings about the participation of trans women. And Thompson has made a lot of statements, some of which I'll, you know, choose not to share with you. You can google them if you want, but most of them will be like she misgenderous people all the time, right, that that's what

you can find her on Twitter, misgendering people. And I think that that is kind of the giveaway that this isn't necessarily about sport, right. And I think that it's really important that people, regardless of where you stand on sport, understand that this is a wedge and it's a wage that's designed to push trans people out and away from femininity in a way, from inclusion.

tear this sort of issue open. It's been really really effective at this, and it's also been like, you know, it's something that's sort of like vaguely plausible, plausibly deniable, and it also plays on a really kind of effective branding strategy that these people had, which is that, like, you know, if people remember what feminism was like in like the twenty tens, it was almost entirely about you know, not just in the twenty tens, like you even sort

of previous to this, right, Like the notion that like women are weaker than men was something that was like like broadly considered to be sexist, Like that was not a feminist thing that was like like women are weaker

than men. And then you know, you get you're when you're getting into people complaining about like like trans women, like being on Jeopardy or like this shit that's happening in chests that we're going to talk about later, it's like okay, Like if you go back in time to before sort of trans arrangement syndrome set in, like and you told someone that in the future, this person is going to be arguing that like like like trans women have a biological advantage in Jeopardy because men are smarter

than women. They'd be like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like this person is like a neo Nazi.

biological one. And then you know, and and but because there was like a kind of cultural victory for feminist where it suddenly became really really difficult to be a mainstream person and like call yourself, like call yourself an anti feminist, Like all of these people who believe all of the same shit that like phylish Lafley did, like

have to relabel themselves feminists. And you know, and sports is the sports the thing they picked to do that because sports is the like it's the area they can pick where they can, like with some plausible deniability, start doing all of this like oh, women are inherently weaker than men and have to be protected from men like shit again.

laying claimed to feminism. I guess yeah. So in the most recent Phyclocross Nationals, trans athlete Austin Cillips finished third at the event, local John Browann gun club members had attended to step in and protect transathletes what's governing body wouldn't And it was actually a really I mean, what you saw was a lot of discourse online about Austin quote unquote blocking uh and SIS woman athlete, and then you saw like a lot of people sort of saying

that and like SIS women had been I guess, like you know that Austin's inherent biological advantage I'm using heavy scare quotes here had allowed her to come third. She got beaten by two SIS girls, right, Like this is.

anything that anyone else wouldn't have done. And at the time Turfs kind of tried to make this a big deal but were unsuccessful. And it was not really until Austin won a race in New Mexico, a big race tour of the Healer, that it became again, Like it wasn't twenty eighteen a very big deal? Right? So one of the key leaders, as I said, is Inga Thompson. Inga's a very accomplished cyclist, There's no doubt about that, right.

She's a Bicycle Hall of Fame inductee, five time national champion, three time Olympic team member, a Tour de France firm, and a podium finisher, a three time silver medallist at the U Show World Championships, but I think she's arguably more famous now for her anti trans bigotry, and she's appeared she tried to encourage cyclist to take a knee in protest at the ucis transgender inclusion Yeah, which like.

UCI events. She is also tempted to use our team as a platform for political activity, which like is a very neutral stance, but it's also it's also like it's fine, right, like, like, our cycling team isn't here to hate trans people. If you're going to use it for hating trans people, please go somewhere else like it. It doesn't you don't have to like take a hugely radical stance to be like that,

this isn't a hate platform for hate speech. Like like go away, and that they added to be clear, Miss miss Thompson is entitled to her opinion's an advocacy, but her methods and personal attacks are inconsistent with ciniska's mission to advanced opportunities for women. These methods, well documented on Miss Thompson's social media presence, include dehumanization of transgender people, spreading misinformation, demagoguery, and personal attacks on anyone who opposes

her views spellow alert that includes me. She doesn't like me it all, I don't don't be mean to trans people, don't missgender my friends. So I did think it was very funny that like this team isn't like the like I don't knowe that like the woke team for woke people. They're just trying to get along with helping women cycle and they can't do that if they're one of their board members is so consumed by hate that no no

one wants to have anything to do with it. So in the wake of this protest, the twenty twenty one Save Women's Sport protest fliletted they're unofficial with USA Cycling, published an open letter calling for the resignation of the organization's CEO and the safe sport coordinator Kelsey Rickson, who's responsible for preventing hate speech and bullying. They gather one hundred and five signatures from racists and other cyclists in support of their demands, and a day after they sent

the letter, De Martini announced he was stepping down. So he has a bit of a failure of just like there's a statement he made an interview where he said it would be different if our athletes were going to be affected. When he was talking about bands for trans athletes in interscholastic sports, he said, we don't believe they will be which look in technical and in technical sense because cyclists could be for clubs, not schools. They might

not have done. But if you think that a ban on trans kids playing at school isn't going to affect participation in trans athletes in all sports everywhere, either completely myopic or bearing your bigotry. He claimed he was quoted out of context, but it was part of a pretty big block quote. I don't see how that could be taken out of context. They did say at that time that they're against any legislation limits trans inclusion. It's worth pointing out that cycling has a body as to all

Olympic sports. It should prevent hate speech, bigotry, and bullying, right, And that's called Safe Sport set up in twenty seventeen, and that was following what happened at USA Gymnastics, right, which was widespread sexual abuse of athletes. People I'm sure will remember that Safe Sport, I feel fairly confident in saying has completely failed in preventing abuse, preventing harassment, preventing bullying.

What it has done is is perhaps given a legal shield to governing bodies, so has prevented them getting sued. But it's done nothing to prevent this kind of bullying, which is why athletes and the community have had to taken upon themselves to do that. Right, Like, if there's one thing you should expect a governing money to do

to make sure everyone feels safe at races. But people were legitimately worried about racing in areas where they knew there were a lot of not just turfs, but like groups like the Proud Boys right, who have kind of hung their hat on transphobia. I know people who didn't go to races in areas where they were worried about that.

I know people who, like you know it went out of went to an effort every day to drive a different way back to their hotel at races because they're worried about like people genuinely felt unsafe doing something that no one should feel unsafe doing, which is playing. So as I said, you know who won't make you feel unsafe?

it repeatedly misgenders in women's categories. Claimed that several races in the cycle across national championships privately contacted the organization to express concerns, but only one, Evie Edwards, competed under the SWF Team banner. SWS at the time was not a nonprofit, so it was relatively hard to find out what exactly their financial ties to various other transphobic and right wing groups were. It's registered in Minnesota as a business,

but it appears to be assault. At the time, again, it was a sole prop run by someone called best Steltzer. The both Ev Edwards and SWS used the race to aggressively fundraise for their campaign. Steltzer, for instance, at the time, was making three hundred and eighty five bucks per month on Patreon by quote creating awareness of males invading female spaces.

Page has been taken down since then. She turfed too close to the Sun. She also received donations on her venmo page, which is very funny because I don't think she realized her venmo page was public. Checked it out in the judge. Yeah, that there is no there There was no distinction made between advocacy spending and personal spending on that account, I will say, And she was taking advocacy donations and you know, making emoji purchases it on

a venmo at the time. I think maybe since has made it private, but this.

of anything, there should be a large red flag. It's an extremely nebulous concept that very ready does anything to help anyone. But much of this awareness seems to be tied to pre standard right wing anti trans talking points and not the many dozens, maybe hundreds of instances were trans and sists women happily compete alongside each other, have a nice time, do exercise, go home, and don't engage

in any bigotry. In the past, just WS has worked with far right organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council to prepare a guide to quote help parents understand the transgender issue. Again, if you're framing the existence of other people as an issue, you're not that far from flaming it as a question, are you. Yeah, I'm impressed to the self awareness avoided the transgender question, but only by you know, using the thesaurus to reframe

it as an issue. I guess the guide refers to the transgender trend quote unquote and repeatedly calls trans women men. They of course also you know Steltzer In particular, it appears anti abortion rallies, anti marriage equality rallies, things like that. Right, this is part of a wider space of painting bigotry. It's not just about support. Cyclists have taken it upon

themselves to protect trans riders. So access of solidarity, of range for blocking SWS protesters and national championships announces refusing to allegedly refusing to mention races on the team.

But also like it's it's nice to see people show up, Like, yeah, it's nice to see and like it's rare that you'll go to a race when people won't be you won't see a few people wearing that like in pro men, pro women, you know, both, like it's there are overwhelmingly people don't give a fuck. They're just happy if you're enjoying riding bikes. It's not like it's a big sport. You know. The real threat cycling is all of us getting killed by people in Tesla's playing pong like it's

not it's not trans women. But unfortunately this solidarity hasn't extended to the governing body, so two years after this initial protest right, the UCI effectively banned all trans women from participating in elite level cycling. This happened just a few weeks before the World Championships. Like, I have friends who had to cancel their flights. Yeah, it was the most bungled, fucked up pseudo science kind of half fast, Like it was just a mess. The whole thing was

a fucking mess. They had an extraordinary meeting in August, just a few weeks for the World Championships, and like people previously had to have a to have a submit blood numbers to show a testosterone level to compete, right, which is a thing lots of governing bodies have been doing for a while now. They had certified people like weeks before this, they'd be like, yeah, you're good to go for another year, and then that psyche, No you're not.

You can't compete ever again. And like this is people's jobs, right, this is their livelihood, it's how they pay rents. It's also like being an elite cyclist is hard. It is most of your life, right, Like you're you've got to sleep or you got to eat, right, You've got to train all the fucking time. You can't go out. You're going to be resting when you're not training to take all that away from someone with a click of the

fingers and bringing no consultation for them. It's incredibly cruel and the U see, I'll just read their statement because I think there's a couple of things in it we should pick apart. Obviously, you can't take woying for it being inherently transphobic. From now on, female transgender athletes who have transitioned after quote male puberty will be prohibited from participating women's events on the UCI International Calendar in all

categories in the various disciplines. Notably, they also said it's also impossible to rule out the possibility that biomechanical factors such as the shape and arrangement of the bones in their limbs, may constitute a lasting advantage for female transgender athletes. And yeah, it's yeah, there's a lot going on there, right, Like they use female where where most people would use women. The barrier they set is to rule out any possibility of an advantage, right, which is a very high barrier.

That's like a kind of guilty and to prove it innocent situation, right, Like I'd also like the arrangement of the bones in my limbs changed significantly when I was racing bikes because I broke them all the fucking time. Such such a strange category to choose. Also, the requirement that you transition before puberty. That's not the same as taking puberty blockers, right, They're requiring that they're taking homemones before puberty, like like eleven or twelve, yeah, which.

which it's not like it's completely fine. In fact, it's actually like you know, you're you're going to go through puberty anyways, right, You're like like if if you are in a human body, you were doing uncontrolled puberty, and that is less safe than doing a controlled really which is what you know, doing like doing it urty when you're a child, is yeah, but yeah, the young vice position was like, oh well we're not we're gonna do those will do puberty blockers, and then like everyone went

insane about puberty blockers. And now like even the compromise position has been sort of like you know, I mean like we're away that, and it's like okay, like you know, but then and then like and then you know, like now and then having done this right, and it's like, oh, well, now you can set up all of these rules that are like require you to have done a thing you've now made illegal. It's like this is.

Google is right there for you. But she was dismissed from a Spanish Olympic team in nineteen eighty six for failing the gender test. She's publicly shamed for being like a secret male. She loses her fiancee, she loses her funding, she loses almost everything. She fought and won a successful court battle, illustrating the fallacy of this binary gender approach.

But she's not a trans woman, to be clear, she's an intersexu woman who has androgen insensitivity syndrome, but she was able to They were using chromosome typing, right, Like like you'll often this is a thing that you'll still see turf trotting out right, something that was outdated in nineteen eighty six, that like xx or x y, that is that's not a binary that fits the entirety of the human species.

But this this is the one thing where you can just like you can say ship that it's not even like like people people make a joke it's like high school biology. It's like it's not it's just like elementary school biology. And it's not right, like like YouTube biology, isn't it That's what it is?

to try and force people into these different competitions. I just want to read a statement that Austin made and like it's very hard not to see this as them, specifically seeing Austin winning a big stage race in New Mexico and going like, right, we can't fucking have that, Like as soon as trans women win stuff, Right, it's fine if they come and then don't win, but as soon as they win stuff, And again, if she had this inherent massive biological advantage, she would have won everything

which hasn't happened. She said, I'm devastated by the UCI decision to renege on the policy and framework it previously set out for inclusion. My journey in professional racing has allowed me to see the world, build lifelong friendships, and most importantly, give my absolute or something I find deeply fulfilling.

No one should be denied the opportunity to chase that same joy that I and others have found through racing, which I think is great, and I think it's important to lift up her voice in this and other transathlete voices. In theory, there is what's called open category, which is

the men's category. The problem is that there are no open races and that this category, like, if you line up as a trans woman in the fucking open category, you're being very clearly othered, right, yeah, you're being like you're Some of them also will have women's licenses, like it's not clear what men's category they can race in. But more importantly, I think, as Chris Mosia pointed out, people will be familiar as Chris as the first trans

athlete tend Olympic trials in the US. The open category contradicts both international Olympic Committee guidelines on Fairness and Inclusion and extensive research at states trans women do not have an inherent advantage in sport. Chris is a good follow on Twitter, it's the Chris Mosia, but it contradicts even like the IOC. Again, not like on the bastions of wokeness, people who sent the Olympics for the Nazis have a

better policy see them this. And yet cycling has chosen to go above and beyond, And in large part I can't not see that as because of the attention paid to this by people who do not give a fuck

about cycling. Yeah, because they found a wedge, and because our community has generally been inclusive, Like even after this at the World Championships there were people with trans flags the course, you know, like World Championship or which trans women could not compete, advocating for inclusion right it was in Glasgow. And as a rule, the sport I think has been accepting. Like I've never cycled, not known there being trans people in cycling, and I've cycled a lot,

but this has allowed trans people to thrive. And when trans people started describing these fucking bigots decided to make this a wedge issue and that's why it's happening here, but it's also fucking happening in chess. So do you want to do you want to talk about chess?

it has a lot of weird stuff. It effectively sets up fee Day as like what I can only describe as a gender counsel, where like, if you want to like change your gender, you have to like submit it to fee Day, and then fe DA gets to decide what gender you are so great, great things happening here. And then also for some reason, Okay, so chess has had this thing for a while where chess has like there are like women's sections for stuff, and there's a

lot of some weird stuff going on here. So like there's the regular title like grand Master, there's also like a women's grandmaster thing which has different qualification, is slightly different, and this was this was set up basically because like the guys who play chess are insane, Like I've talked about this some of the Bobby Fisher episodes right, like they're like most of the most famous chess players in history are like utterly deranged Neo Nazis or like like

people who are even weirder than Neo Nazis, like like like unreconstructed like nineteen seventeen Zon artists, like people like that, like just people with with like truly truly deeply weird political ideologies that are like unbelievably right wing, and you know, and like part of part of what like happens here is that like just chess in general is like unfathomably sexist, Like it's it's really really bad, and you know, like their solution to this effectively was like to create this

like kind of parallel like women's infrastructure, which kind of works and kind of hasn't in a lot of ways. And you know, like part of what's going on is just like, okay, so a lot of girls, like young girls play chess, but there's this bottleneck that happens around when you're like thirteen or fourteen, while this is twelve to thirteen, So there's fourteen where like the number of girls playing chess just like collapses, right, And the reason that happens is because boys are fucking dog.

chess is so high. And then yeah, okay, so so this this is the sort of background, So like there are these separate like women's like tournaments and stuff like that, and so fee DA, which is the Chess Federation, released this thing where Okay, so they say a few things. One is that, okay, the the the big one is that if you, like, if you are a trans woman, you cannot play in official fee Day events or women until fee Day does something. And it's not entirely clear what that is.

two years. Well yeah, wait, wait, why what the fuck?

a great organization run by amazing people here. Yeah, but this is I don't know, it's it's incredibly deeply weird. Like the thing I keep thinking about is, I don't know, this is kind of a weird, kind of silly story in someways, but like so, like the first trans person that I was like aware of it was a trans

StarCraft two player named Scarlett, and she's great. She's awesome, Scarlet rules she actually she she she's She's one of three non Korean players ever to win a tournament in Korea, which, like I don't know how to express how difficult it is to win a StarCraft tournament in Korea. Like it would be like if a football team from like Siberia showed up to the US was somehow allowed to play in the NFL and then like won the super Bowl. Like that, That's about the level of difficulty it is

to win a StarCraft tournament in Korea. Yeah yeah, Jamaica bove say team moment, Yeah yeah, but like like yeah, so like you know, it's it's one of those sort of like really wild things. But like one of the things I remember about that was like she was always,

as best I could tell, like always allowed. Like StarCraft also had a women's division because you know, very very similar like probably even more intense sort of sex ye going yeah, yeah, being pretty toxic, you know, and like like yeah, like it was actually you know over the arc of like the like the like over a decade she's been playing, like you know, like I've seen the scene get less transphobic, but like, as much as I could tell, there was never like a thing in the

women's tournaments. They're always just like yeah, sure, hey, look a girl wants to play StarCraft like this rips and yeah yeah, yeah, well more of us like yeah, yeah, like you know, and she's also like and she's like

again really really good at the game. But like, you know, but like it like this is the thing that like historically hasn't I don't know, like like Jenny Wiley like in in games like this that are like not, well, okay, StarCraft is enormously more athletic than chess, but like yeah, like you know, like this has been a thing where people like there's if you're in one of these like incredibly sexist environments, there's like a real, like really obvious

like both trans women and women like we're all in this together thing because you get to look at like the fucking ravening hordes of like absolutely deranged psychos in like the Twitch chat and be like, oh god, they

hate both of us. Yeah yeah, which is also like I think the other thing about this is like it's unclear like who at feet day like decided this, Like this doc just like appeared, and so there's like a non zero chance this decision is being made by men, Like pretty high that this is just like a decision made by a bunch of men, because fuck them, and they've just decided that, like you know, after just like literally are giving a shit about women's dress for like

the entirety of its existence. They've finally decided to do something, and they do something is make me not be able to play women's tournaments.

But yeah, there's a long history of us trying to work out gender ship through sport, and I guess I just want to finish by like, if you don't give a shit about sport, you have to understand this is still important because like, sport's always about like who's on our team and who's not right. That's why we didn't

let black people play baseball in the fucking country. It's why they took like Olympic medals away from indigenous people for violating stupid amateurism rules because they were designed to only let people have a certain class pay. It's why Colin Kathmack doesn't have a job, right, Yeah, that's why people didn't want to go to the Nazi Olympics and went to one in Barcelona, and it was bigger. Like sports not just about being the best to exercise. It's

it's a social tool to include or exclude people. And if you care about including people, then I think you have to care about sport right now, because that is a wedge that transfers are using to exclude people. So yeah, that's that's what I have for you. I don't know, if you have money, you can give it to Molly. Molly Cameron you can. You can find her online. She will help more trans kids ride or yeah, yeah, go go ride it back. It's fun.