Two Bridges
April 3 2022
It seems Zach 'Emily' Bridges was deemed 'ineligible' for a Derby cycling meet this week-end apparently in spite of having met all the conditions which UCI had declared necessary for him to be eligible to enter the women's event. So what seems more likely to have happened is that the UCI have noted the uproar over the Will Thomas debacle in Pennsylvania and decided they would rather prefer to avoid a similar scandal here.
That's of course how it should be. Political protest against outrageous injustices such as the integrity of women's sport being corrupted for the sake of massaging the vanities of a little but loud contingent of men who want not only to "be themselves", as women, but insist that everyone else has to collude in the delusion to the utterly absurd extent of granting them privileges, such as the privilege of being allowed to compete "as women" in a women's event; - such political protest should result in an effect where the protest can be seen to be important and relevant.
And there could hardly be a protest more relevant if it's not a protest against the war crimes of the Russian nation against Ukraine. In spite of the extent of the inane mummery, the cult-like indoctrination and the mindless chanting of mantras like 'trans women are women' everyone - including those doing the chanting - knows that this - physically, scientifically and biologically - simply isn't possible.
'Emily' Bridges is a man, with male sex organs, XY chromosomes (no, I don't *know* this for certain but it's a safe bet) who has been through male puberty. It really shouldn't matter what testosterone levels he has in his body. Women's sport was conceived with the idea of excluding men, for the very well known, simple and obvious reason that men are, as a biological grouping, invariably better at competitive sports which require strength, stamina and speed in order to excel, than women. It's just a fact of life there's no escaping from, and it derives from the physical biologically determined differences between men's and women's bodies. This is to say that this is a situation in which inclusion requires exclusion. To fairly include women in the world of sport it is necessary to create an arena for sporting events where male competitors are excluded. Nothing else makes any sense if we want women to have sporting opportunities on an equal footing with men, and no verbiose childlike unserious unscientific postmodernist tampering with the idea of "what a woman is" changes that one bit.
In a BBC reported 'Tweet' Bridges said "No-one should have to choose between being who they are and participating in the sport that they love." As plaintively reasonable as this sounds when heard superficially in passing, Bridges is not "having to choose between being who s(he) is and participating in the sport that s(he) loves." Bridges has been happily competing right up until the present time in the men's category where he belongs. Now he wants to switch to the women's category - just like that. Now why would a top sportsman who presumably would be well versed in the ins and outs of the idea of "fair play" want to do that, knowing full well the advantages he has over the true women competitors? Well I can't answer that, but I can only say that what would stop me from doing such a thing is apparently lacking in Bridges. That which would stop me contemplating such a move would be shame, the shame which comes from an awareness that other people have dignities and boundaries that should be respected, and that ignoring and transgressing those boundaries for your own little triumphs and satisfactions is shameful.
Bridges wanting to be whoever Bridges feels/thinks/believes Bridges is, is not a problem. But it is a problem and a dishonesty of olympian dimension to set up a dichotomy of eligibility/non-eligibility in a sports competition, as a condition for the right to "be who you are." This is the complaint; not so much the being prevented from competing but the "being prevented from being myself". And it's a monstrous lie. Bridges is not physically a woman whatever he/she feels his/her gender to be. He's welcome to "be him/her self" as much as he absolutely wants, but that can never mean that the rest of us have to believe that he is physically and biologically something that he is not. Who Bridges is mentally and What Bridges is physically can be entirely different things and for the sake of fairness in sport we are not required to defer to "who" Bridges is mentally, but are only required to take into account what he is physically. Because (most) sport is physical.