Juno News - June 04, 2021


The End of Women's Sports


Episode Stats

Length

35 minutes

Words per Minute

169.53969

Word Count

6,065

Sentence Count

6


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true
00:00:09.800 north coming up are we witnessing the end of women's sport i talked to two authors who say
00:00:17.780 that's exactly what's happening the andrew lawton show starts right now
00:00:25.160 welcome to the andrew lawton show here on true north i am very much breaking with tradition i
00:00:33.020 think after i mentioned hockey briefly earlier in the week i said i'm never going to be talking
00:00:38.200 about sports again because i hadn't up till this point but i'm going to be talking about it again
00:00:41.860 today in quite a bit of depth but it's a topic that goes beyond sports because we have in this
00:00:48.780 a lot of other related factors not the least of which is free speech and also more fundamentally
00:00:53.960 a question of fairness and it looks specifically at one of the significant evolutions that's taken
00:00:59.340 place in competitive sports in the last several years you'll understand what that is when you
00:01:04.400 hear the title of the book unsporting how trans activism and science denial are destroying sport
00:01:10.960 it's written by linda blade with barbara kay published by our friends over at rebel news and
00:01:16.600 both linda and barbara join me here for this discussion thank you both so much for coming on
00:01:21.300 it's great to speak with you pleasure thank you now linda your background on this is quite
00:01:27.700 interesting i mean you have a strong knowledge of the fundamentals of sports from being an athlete
00:01:32.480 you've been the leadership of athletic organizations you've also yourself had a phd in kinesiology so
00:01:39.520 you understand some of the biological reality is at stake here but you've also seen so many people
00:01:45.820 that have spoken up about this issue just get absolutely decimated by activist backlash in
00:01:52.460 the media why did you want to not just comment on it but comment in such a significant way with this book
00:01:58.100 well the fact of the matter is that if uh somebody like myself if if somebody doesn't step up and start
00:02:06.360 saying something nobody will because it is such a raw topic that if an athlete says something or even
00:02:14.760 other coaches say something and especially if they're early in their career they could be utterly canceled
00:02:21.720 and ruined and you know i really don't have uh that much left to lose i've had my turn as an athlete
00:02:30.040 i am a coach i am president of athletics alberta and the province of alberta track and field
00:02:36.220 um and to me it's almost an existential threat to our sport so why wouldn't i say something i mean i
00:02:45.240 if if i don't say something soon and it keeps going this way there's not going to really be a sport to
00:02:50.760 deal with anyway so i might as well say something barbara you've written a lot in the past few years
00:02:58.060 about trans politics and trans activists what's your connection to this why did you want to jump
00:03:03.300 on board with this project well i i'm interested in in trans activism in general and i was seeing
00:03:11.420 this uh idea grow and grow that uh that uh trans women and trans men but the problem really is with
00:03:21.760 trans women feel that uh their identity as a woman uh should should be the basis for legal rights to
00:03:30.960 enjoy the same resources and uh the same admission to private women's spaces as any other woman that's
00:03:39.680 that's their stance that's their political stance and i i watched this uh acceptance of this idea growing
00:03:47.440 uh with great alarm because i one doesn't have to be know anything about anything you just have some
00:03:55.040 common sense to know where this was headed in terms of uh shelters uh prisons and of course sport
00:04:03.040 uh my daughter uh was an elite athlete in triathlon her daughter is a very fine young hockey player
00:04:12.960 and the thought of either my daughter and her day of having and she she did she was you know did get
00:04:21.680 medals and the thought of her being sidelined by a male athlete who's inherently bigger and stronger
00:04:29.760 and faster and and everything else it just kind of blew my mind and i said to myself well i know where
00:04:35.280 this is going to end uh it's going to be with sport because sport is something that is enjoyed by people
00:04:41.040 all around the world uh millions and millions and millions of people and the one thing that sport
00:04:45.280 has in common for all cultures and all so it crosses all socioeconomic guidelines and all races and
00:04:51.680 everything else is that people want to see a fair fight they want to see a fair uh a level playing field
00:04:57.920 so i said that's that's where the rubber is going to hit the road so it was shocking to me when the
00:05:03.360 rubber didn't hit the road and uh the same argument was being used with sport and it was working
00:05:09.760 and i didn't see any pushback uh i just was i found that shocking uh that this was happening in plain
00:05:17.360 sight uh it's like it's like watching you know a train wreck about to happen and not pulling the
00:05:23.600 whistle i mean i just couldn't stand it when i saw linda's starting to speak out i i was so thrilled to
00:05:31.680 see somebody who was a real stakeholder in the sport world having the guts uh to say speak the obvious
00:05:40.240 um so it was such a pleasure to be able to team up with uh linda let her she's the expert she had to
00:05:47.280 write the book um i was very eager to be of any assistance i could in terms of you know brainstorming
00:05:53.440 how it should go and chapters and format and style and all all the stuff that goes with publishing a book
00:05:59.520 um but uh so i it's a big honor for me to have been part of this collaboration one of the most notable
00:06:07.520 elements of this has been the breakneck speed at which something has gone from being an idea that
00:06:13.440 no one had ever heard of to one that in a lot of places is being treated as this unquestionable
00:06:19.600 orthodoxy that you're not allowed to challenge and just to put that in context you linda talk about
00:06:24.240 this you came across this in 2018 you were president of athletics alberta you here get to get a hold of
00:06:30.720 this document from 2016 so in and of itself less than five years old that none of your colleagues
00:06:36.880 had heard about and this was basically telling you that you had to start looking at a male athlete who
00:06:42.480 says they're female in the same way you'd look at a female athlete you know andrew it was just utterly
00:06:50.400 stunning just like any of the listeners who have never heard this before to the idea that a man or
00:06:58.240 male person could come along and just say oh no i'm gonna call myself a woman today and just think like
00:07:05.200 that's okay just open the gate let them into the female races i mean the whole point in having
00:07:13.680 women's sports is to have a distinct category for the female body i mean female bodies are completely
00:07:20.320 different than male bodies you know whether a trans athlete will win or not and people say well they
00:07:27.200 don't win a lot well it doesn't matter they're not the same body it's it's a completely different design
00:07:33.520 you know and i often say it's like putting a formula one car into stock car race they're
00:07:38.000 completely different designs even without even without an obvious advantage it would still not
00:07:44.960 be correct because you have to compete like with like and i i mean there was just no justification
00:07:52.880 andrew for this to have happened and i really believe it's our canadian politicians letting us down
00:07:59.280 by passing passing a bill bill c16 that is now being interpreted by all of the sort of middle
00:08:07.280 managers and bureaucrats across the land as if somehow we have to you know wedge all these people into
00:08:13.760 areas where they really shouldn't be and and you know calling that hate if we don't accept uh you know
00:08:24.080 somebody crossing a certain line we're still allowed to recognize biological sex according to
00:08:30.080 the canadian charter of rights and freedoms and people seem to have forgotten this so you know i
00:08:36.160 think i think it's just the pendulum swinging way too far and then making everybody too afraid to talk
00:08:42.080 about it well is a lot of this coming in your view from people pretending there aren't biological
00:08:48.720 differences or accepting there are and simply not caring well those are two different things if you
00:08:55.840 accept that there's a biological difference but you just don't care then you don't care about women's
00:08:59.840 sports so but i just just to clarify where do you think the motivation is coming from from the people
00:09:05.280 advancing this are they denying there are differences or are they just saying that those differences are
00:09:10.320 secondary to you know the need to be inclusive and all of these other things both i mean there is a
00:09:15.840 sector of people who amongst my trans friends even who say you know people who i know who are trans
00:09:22.800 who say no no no i i am a male but i'm just identifying i need to psychologically identify as a
00:09:29.520 as a woman and then there are those who just say no no no no no such thing as biological sex it's all
00:09:35.360 socially derived it's all taught after birth um it's only you know somehow assigned and magically at
00:09:43.120 birth when you come out of your mother's womb uh the fact that there happens to be a penis there it
00:09:49.840 doesn't that doesn't mean anything apparently to these people i mean the fact is that there is a
00:09:55.280 distinction there has to be a distinction that's how we perpetuate our species i don't even know what
00:10:01.120 this is about i could could i just add one thing and that is that even there are people in the official
00:10:08.560 levels of sport uh organizations and uh the former head of sports sociology uh i had an exchange with
00:10:15.600 him uh at university of toronto and he did admit he said well yes there is males do have a slight
00:10:25.920 he will admit a lot of them will admit to say something like 10 but he'll say but that's no different
00:10:32.880 from other uh disadvantages uh or advantages like economic uh resources or having an unusual wing
00:10:42.400 like if you're if if a male has a uh that swimmer phelps so it wasn't mark phelps who had the unusual
00:10:48.400 wingspan that sort of thing he says it's no different from that but but it actually is different
00:10:53.440 and and just one other point i wanted to make about people who say but they don't always win or they
00:10:58.480 don't win very often uh it's very important that people i think in sport not concentrate so much on
00:11:04.960 who's on the podium but sport is a tremendous matrix teams and and trying out for teams and getting
00:11:12.560 scholarships and who's who's uh considered in the top 10 or the top 20. i mean if you're a tennis player
00:11:18.560 it's the top 100. so if you take a male who was not even uh who's a mediocre or a terrible athlete
00:11:27.440 who wouldn't even get accepted on any team anywhere in a male competition and then instantly is even
00:11:36.480 if he's the fourth string you know even if he's the last person chosen for the women's team that's
00:11:42.160 not the issue he ends up having the fun and the pleasure and the attention and he has displaced a girl
00:11:50.640 or a woman from that team or he might even get a scholarship or some other uh advantage and benefit
00:11:58.960 uh and really make enhance his life at a girl's expense that's not acceptable so it's not only
00:12:08.000 about the podium it's about the whole spectrum of sport uh and it's about the psychological effect
00:12:14.080 on girls who see their chances slipping away and say you know i don't even think i want to try out for
00:12:19.760 soccer uh next year because you know so and so is on the other team i don't want to get hit by a
00:12:26.640 soccer ball you know 80 miles an hour that like so it's not it's not appealing to me anymore uh so
00:12:33.520 there's there's such a range of unfairnesses beyond who's on the podium just wanted to make that point
00:12:41.440 i know i think that's well taken i but i think who's on the podium matters as well there was one story
00:12:46.880 in the book that stood out i'm chuckling because of the absurdity of it but there's actually something
00:12:52.400 quite ridiculous about this a male born ncaa competitor who was 390th ranked as a male and then
00:13:01.680 won a woman's championship race so went from 390 to number one and their coach attributed it to their
00:13:08.640 strong mental power and something like that if you were to tell the average person to go back to what i
00:13:15.760 said at the beginning they would say is ridiculous but if you speak out and say that in the wrong
00:13:22.320 context you will just have everything you've ever worked for taken out from under you and you'll be
00:13:28.640 subjected to the cancel culture and and i mean this this idea of just going from 390th as a male to
00:13:34.400 first as a women and that someone's going to say well that was your mental power and not accept any
00:13:39.520 other variable as contributing to that and what does it say about the other women
00:13:42.880 what what the coach is saying is well they probably didn't try very hard because look this guy had a
00:13:48.320 great or this woman had a great mental attitude and went from 30 390th to first uh what does that
00:13:55.600 say about all the women that that that came after him uh if you had the proper mental attitude maybe you
00:14:02.400 could have been first so but it wasn't mental attitude and everybody knows it wasn't mental attitude
00:14:07.200 when you've seen in the associations linda these policies be adopted gradually and more and more
00:14:13.840 of them over the last five years is your sense that the people that are adopting these are are true
00:14:18.960 believers or is it driven by in a lot of cases fear just this is where things are going we have no
00:14:24.720 choice but to get on board it's 100 fear i know they know it's not real i know they know it's not true
00:14:33.840 but you know how many people have kind of come up to to beside me or or sort of sent a little message
00:14:40.320 saying please make sure you don't speak for us everybody's worried that their funding is going to
00:14:46.080 be tied to somebody saying something uh that that somehow some fringe person is going to be outraged or
00:14:55.440 mentally harmed by something we say meanwhile they don't seem to know or care that this this whole
00:15:03.120 ideology and what bar was just talking about this gaslighting short making all the female athletes
00:15:10.080 feel like they're inferior is mentally harming every single female athlete do they not care about that
00:15:17.360 there was a story that just came up this week of a runner from connecticut who was actually in
00:15:22.320 the book as well one of several suing she was i i forget the exact event but she was at the very
00:15:27.840 top and then displaced by uh displaced by a male identified competitor who comes in and there are
00:15:35.280 becoming more and more of these stories because i think that one of the initial responses i had heard
00:15:41.440 a couple of years ago when people were raising these criticisms is that you know every single one of these
00:15:45.840 is an outlier it's oh well you know it's one runner in connecticut it's one crossfit competitor but you get
00:15:51.680 enough of those and you start to see a bigger trend here and and these are not in in your view you say
00:15:57.200 in the book an insignificant number overall or even if it is an insignificant number that still has the
00:16:03.440 potential to have a lot of an impact it's unacceptable andrew that even one woman one female athlete should
00:16:11.680 be displaced incorrectly by somebody coming in who does not meet the categorical standards i mean if a if a person
00:16:21.120 let's say they do get to the top of the podium like cc tell for the one you're talking about going from
00:16:26.240 390th to first one person on top of the podium means every single female in that competition was
00:16:34.480 bumped down one notch so it affected every single female and her placing and her status within that event
00:16:43.920 it's just unacceptable to me to me to me it's it's like saying oh you know what's the difference if one
00:16:50.880 or two percent of athletes are doping you know so maybe they won't maybe a few of them win but they
00:16:58.080 should be included i mean the cv include this this word inclusion is like um people sort of go into a
00:17:05.840 trance when they hear it right we cannot we we must make people feel included and and there's something
00:17:13.760 about this idea that if there's point zero two percent of the population needs to be included that
00:17:20.480 means that 99.8 percent of the population uh will have to accept uh a certain level of unfairness
00:17:29.760 in sport we're talking about in sport uh and and the fact that uh however many of that percentage of
00:17:37.600 the population decide to go into sport that that in the name of inclusion they have to run the risk of
00:17:45.440 exclusion there's something very wrong with with the calculation that is being made at official levels
00:17:53.520 uh that there is no such thing as uh uh two sets of rights that are mutually exclusive so uh they're
00:18:03.920 they're concentrating so hard on on one group's set of rights uh and they're not putting into the
00:18:10.960 calculation if we give unlimited rights to this group are we harming or are we are we diminishing
00:18:20.960 uh or or running up against the rights of another group that is protected in the con you know in the
00:18:25.840 charter nobody's saying that to themselves one thing that i i've heard and and again i'm paraphrasing
00:18:33.120 from a talking point i've heard repeated numerous times in this debate is that if you've been in
00:18:38.880 transition for a long enough period of time and you've taken whatever the the required hormones
00:18:44.160 are depending on which direction your transition has taken place that after a certain point any
00:18:49.440 biological difference becomes negligible now a part of that argument has never quite sat well with me
00:18:55.680 just on on sheer logical grounds because irrespective of of hormones and and treatments bodies are born in
00:19:01.760 a certain way and and those fundamental bone structures are not changing for example but where
00:19:06.960 is that coming from and what's your response to it linda that that that argument that after a certain
00:19:11.440 point of time in transition uh any difference that you might have as a biological male over female
00:19:17.280 kind of evaporates the culpability lies at the feet of the international olympic committee
00:19:25.920 the ioc for some reason was convinced in 2015 to just say self id you can uh a male body a male athlete
00:19:38.160 can simply declare their woman live as a woman for one year make sure their hormone levels are down for
00:19:45.120 one year and they're that's good enough then that levels the playing field and they know themselves that
00:19:50.480 can't possibly be true how do you reduce bone size because of a hormone level how do you reduce the
00:19:58.560 lung capacity because of a hormone level this is just absurd and the fact that the international
00:20:05.040 olympic committee committee the very ones that care so much about doping control and dopey in fact
00:20:10.720 russia is out of you know in the bad books because they were doping and yet you know if you don't
00:20:17.280 you dope maybe you improve by like a nine percent figure something like that if you are a male athlete
00:20:25.520 even after reduction of the testosterone even more than even two or three years as the studies have shown
00:20:32.640 you're still up to 30 or 40 percent stronger than the fellow female athletes it doesn't it just doesn't
00:20:41.120 compute how can you say a nine percent advantage through doping is bad but somehow a 30 or 40 percent
00:20:49.120 advantage because you're the opposite sex is somehow okay i mean this is just absurd i don't know whether
00:20:55.440 somebody you know why they lobbied they paid them off what happened because this just doesn't make sense
00:21:01.840 and the resistance of the ioc to the voices of women calling for them to suspend that policy
00:21:08.800 until they wait and study it more uh they just they're just deaf they will not respond to us
00:21:15.680 finally last fall they responded and said well we can't do anything until after tokyo anyway but
00:21:21.600 if i had if i had given them the tip on somebody doping they would have been right on that doesn't
00:21:26.800 matter tokyo or not so i i just don't know what's going on yeah and i think you raise a really important
00:21:34.400 point there the olympics are to so many people the well the olympics of sporting event it's the gold
00:21:39.920 standard and the olympics making that decision relatively earlier on before anyone was talking
00:21:45.520 about this really in in most circles them doing that really gave cover for every other organization
00:21:52.000 to do it because now anytime it comes up at some local school board it's well if the olympics says it's
00:21:57.200 okay then it must be okay and no one has thought critically of it since that point well every other
00:22:04.480 time in in olympic history when women wanted something let's talk about the marathon uh track
00:22:10.240 and field started in 1928 in the olympic games it took until 1984 to allow women to run the marathon
00:22:18.160 they had to study it they had to consider it they had to do all these things and somehow when the when
00:22:25.760 the trans activists got into the committees at the ioc it took one year and all of a sudden oh yeah
00:22:31.680 that's fine we'll just we'll just open the door we'll smooth the path for you uh we'll study it later
00:22:36.720 i mean we'll just assume that a hormone level levels the playing field i mean they did not study
00:22:42.000 that this is the most dramatic thing you could do in olympic sports putting male bodies into female sports
00:22:48.320 and they have not subjected it to any studies and every single study there's been 13 studies
00:22:55.120 officially done on pre and post transition measuring their you know biomotor abilities
00:23:01.680 like strength and everything else and um not one study has shown that reducing the hormone levels
00:23:10.160 in a in a male body and a male athlete levels the playing field whatsoever so they have scientific
00:23:18.320 evidence that disproves their policy so they need to to suspend it and that's all we're calling for
00:23:26.080 as women please suspend the policy ioc you must suspend this policy you have to study it before you impose
00:23:33.280 this on every single female athlete in the world you did an audit of rio performance in a few events
00:23:42.320 i think you looked at the track and field events the running events and i want to pull up these numbers here
00:23:46.960 and there's a chart in the book that that summarizes this quite well that men who placed from first to
00:23:53.840 eighth in events still had an advantage over women who placed first so so even the first place uh female
00:24:02.960 stacked up against a lower ranked male that male is going to win and that's not because they're uh they're
00:24:09.840 a harder worker than the woman necessarily it's just because when you strip away all the effort the mental
00:24:14.640 acuity all of the preparation you're still left with a biological difference there yeah there's
00:24:20.720 nothing you're going to do because there are six thousand variables in the human body that are
00:24:25.440 distinct and different between men and women whether you're talking about inside the cell itself the
00:24:30.800 little tiny nano machines inside the cell or whether it's blood volume or the heart the the cardio
00:24:38.560 cardiovascular output uh muscle mass the way the fibers interact the angles of the bone like there
00:24:47.440 are just so many variables you're never going to be able to take every single one of those variables
00:24:53.360 and fix them in a male body so that somehow it aligns with female plus every single one of the however
00:25:00.400 many billions of cells would each have to be changed to from xy chromosome to xx chromosome it is
00:25:06.720 virtually literally impossible to change a male body into a female body we know this this is just biology
00:25:14.720 i mean why would you everybody knows this so we know that whatever the policy reason uh was it has to be
00:25:23.040 sociological and political one thing that that i find to be troubling about this debate is that it does
00:25:32.400 leave people who for whatever reason have a particular identity in a bit of a limbo situation
00:25:38.560 because someone who is male born identifies as female your position would exclude them from female
00:25:44.080 sports they probably have no interest in being in male sports and and wouldn't feel that that situates
00:25:49.680 i mean are we heading to a point where we need a third category because ultimately that's the only way
00:25:55.600 forward that i can see that that is somewhat of a middle ground not that anyone would accept such a thing
00:26:00.160 well if you're going to have a third category you actually have to have a four uh two more like
00:26:06.160 you have to have yes you're right because you need both both directions of transition
00:26:09.920 yeah so what i would say and the and the solution that we've come to in the book is that female
00:26:16.240 category needs to be restricted to female athletes and everybody who's anything else goes into an open
00:26:22.000 category that includes males um they can participate but if you want to have anything extra than female
00:26:29.200 you have to go into the open category and i think that allows for for for full inclusion and fairness
00:26:37.520 when you see some of the the competitors here some of them have a very activist bent to them and and
00:26:43.840 you can hear that and some i think there was one in in a crossfit tournament a couple of years ago
00:26:48.480 that almost seemed to be deliberately trying to to provoke to you know set themselves up for a lawsuit and
00:26:54.160 all that stuff but but when push comes to shove here you've talked about the fact that you believe
00:26:58.880 transgender people are deserving of dignity you very much reject this transphobia label that you
00:27:04.160 know is is attached to people uh that put forward a lot of these arguments that are rooted in fairness
00:27:10.480 i mean how do we find a way to keep people excluded or keep people from feeling excluded but also respect
00:27:17.920 this question of fairness we already have it andrew uh in my association as any other sports association
00:27:26.240 in canada we have no bullying policy um we will fully accept anybody identifying as they are socially
00:27:36.320 or you know other identities in your life or our politics religion we're not going to exclude somebody
00:27:41.440 on the basis of religion on the basis of your politics or on the basis of your identity in terms of
00:27:46.160 gender identity but we compete on the basis of biological sex so we will place somebody in
00:27:53.040 their appropriate sex biological physical sex category and then we will not bully them and that
00:27:59.520 is it's most fair and most inclusive that way and in fact how what better way to make a statement if
00:28:05.680 you are a male identifying as a female and you show up running looking like a female in a male race
00:28:12.240 that is the best way to demonstrate your uniqueness and your your your strength of character and your
00:28:19.040 willingness to participate in any kind of category just to participate in sport if you really care
00:28:25.440 about sport why would you care which category you go into if you can do it to be fair the assertion
00:28:32.080 is not that people are transitioning just to get championship titles is it i don't know that we don't
00:28:38.240 know people's intent and that's the whole problem we have different kinds of reasons for for people to
00:28:44.000 be trans i mean it's very clear that if a male who's 35 or 40 decides he wants to transition to female
00:28:50.800 and if a girl who's 13 wants to transition to man those ideologies the backgrounds to those decisions
00:28:58.000 the reason the psychological reasons for doing those things are completely different and so there
00:29:04.080 might be any number of 10 different reasons i've heard a lot of this thing like sometimes with ptsd
00:29:09.680 military men come back from the battlefield some of those are transitioning to to women so i i just
00:29:16.560 think that sometimes there's some other thing going on in your life and you just need to transition
00:29:20.800 and that's fine but that doesn't give you sort of carte blanche access to every single every single
00:29:27.360 space or whatever and if you care about sport if you really are just an athlete and then you just
00:29:31.760 happen to want to change your identity fine but then compete in the biological category where you
00:29:38.320 belong i i think there's if i could just say this idea that um everybody uh if has the right to be
00:29:50.400 accepted uh in every uh place or every organization or every institution uh even though their belief
00:30:01.440 system or their identity is is uh does not stack up with that uh institution uh to me it's very similar
00:30:10.800 to you know if you might want to be a member of the catholic church but you also uh want to have the
00:30:18.080 right to uh uh i don't know do things that that that the catholic church doesn't recognize as
00:30:26.320 so they refuse you communion or something like that uh you can you can be very angry at the
00:30:31.120 church you can say the church shouldn't be like that you can say that you know but if those are
00:30:35.680 the rules or another example that i gave in the book is look i have american relatives my mother was
00:30:41.520 american um i felt i loved uh my my my family in the united states i love the united states um and i i have
00:30:50.160 property in the united states uh but they're not going to give me citizenship for that and i you
00:30:55.360 know that doesn't mean i can vote in the united states so i can identify all i want as an american
00:31:01.520 because i i have such a great love for the country and i and and and i have my dna is is well not dna but
00:31:08.080 obviously my you know my heritage is partly american and all of that can mean a great deal to me to the
00:31:14.000 point that i identify as american but that doesn't mean i'm going to have the right to vote and and
00:31:21.120 there are limits to everybody's inclusion no matter what they identify as um or or what they wish they
00:31:30.240 were uh or want to be and i i think this idea that uh you know you want something very badly you want to
00:31:36.720 transition to another sex gender uh that's a huge thing you're doing so that maybe you have to give
00:31:44.640 up some dreams to have this bigger dream come true uh doesn't mean that you're entitled to uh take
00:31:51.600 part in every other dream of life that you have especially if some other dream uh you know impinges
00:31:59.840 on somebody else's dream so so why can't we just say i'm sorry that you're you're this this ultimate
00:32:08.080 idea that you have you're going to have both you know your gender dream and your sport dream come true
00:32:13.120 uh it can't happen sorry but it just can't happen i have two things to add to that please when we say
00:32:20.240 andrew even though you said maybe there should be a third category when we say something like that
00:32:24.240 we'd even be willing to give you your own category they they absolutely rejected the the
00:32:29.680 people who are the loudest absolutely rejected they want they need to be in the in the female
00:32:36.880 athlete category to have their gender identity affirmed so what does that mean if you tell me that
00:32:44.560 it means that you're using women's sport as social therapy and that is not what sport is there for
00:32:53.840 you can find other ways they're not interested because they absolutely need to be
00:32:59.600 seen in the women's category to affirm uh their identity socially so so it basically the conclusion
00:33:07.680 uh i don't think it's a stretch for me to say and to come to the conclusion in those cases with those
00:33:12.560 people who are insisting that it is a kind of a social kind of therapy and you know i had a second
00:33:20.240 thing to say about that sport is the last thing last place where you want to be if you have some sort
00:33:27.520 of need for like a therapy situation because sport is an area of life around where you hear the word no
00:33:35.040 all the time i heard the word no i didn't make the olympic team because i missed the standard by a little
00:33:39.200 bit no you didn't make team captain no you didn't make the cut no no no no you hear no all the time
00:33:45.840 everybody else in sport hears no why can't they accept no one thing that i i want to as we close address
00:33:53.120 here we had just this week a story in nova scotia where the halifax public library was taking a stand
00:33:59.680 after a bunch of activists mainly trans activists were saying that a book that deals with trans
00:34:05.360 issues abigail schreier's book should not be in the library you've come out uh full come out swinging
00:34:11.360 in this book unsporting are you expecting the same sort of attitude here that this book that raises
00:34:16.880 scientific arguments should not have a place in the discourse if they do try to cancel it they're
00:34:23.680 making my point because the whole point is that we're not allowed to talk about this and that the
00:34:31.520 discussion has to happen but somehow everybody's covering it up so if you if they act like that and
00:34:38.400 libraries and publishers and big big tech if they try to cover this up it literally makes my point
00:34:46.480 the book is called unsporting how trans activism and science denial are destroying sport by linda
00:34:52.960 blade with barbara k still available on amazon for now right yes well i think i have to have a second run
00:35:00.240 good we'll get it get it where you can it's the best advice i can give to people uh linda barbara
00:35:05.440 thank you so much for your time today and delving into this in as much depth as you have i really
00:35:09.360 appreciate it i got my coffee all right thank you very much andrew thank you barbara thank you both
00:35:17.920 barbara k and linda blade thank you so much once again and that does it for me for today this is
00:35:24.160 canada's most irreverent talk show the andrew lawton show here on true north we will talk to you next week
00:35:29.680 everyone thank you god bless and good day to you all thanks for listening to the andrew lawton show
00:35:34.560 support the program by donating to true north at www.tnc.news