The End of Women's Sports
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Summary
Coming up, are we witnessing the end of women's sport in Canada? I talked to two authors who say that's exactly what's happening. In this episode of The Andrew Lawton Show on True North, host Andrew Lawton sits down with authors Linda Blade and Barbara Kay to discuss their new book, "Unsporting: How Trans Activism and Science Denial are Destroying Sport."
Transcript
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welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true
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north coming up are we witnessing the end of women's sport i talked to two authors who say
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that's exactly what's happening the andrew lawton show starts right now
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welcome to the andrew lawton show here on true north i am very much breaking with tradition i
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think after i mentioned hockey briefly earlier in the week i said i'm never going to be talking
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about sports again because i hadn't up till this point but i'm going to be talking about it again
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today in quite a bit of depth but it's a topic that goes beyond sports because we have in this
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a lot of other related factors not the least of which is free speech and also more fundamentally
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a question of fairness and it looks specifically at one of the significant evolutions that's taken
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place in competitive sports in the last several years you'll understand what that is when you
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hear the title of the book unsporting how trans activism and science denial are destroying sport
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it's written by linda blade with barbara kay published by our friends over at rebel news and
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both linda and barbara join me here for this discussion thank you both so much for coming on
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it's great to speak with you pleasure thank you now linda your background on this is quite
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interesting i mean you have a strong knowledge of the fundamentals of sports from being an athlete
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you've been the leadership of athletic organizations you've also yourself had a phd in kinesiology so
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you understand some of the biological reality is at stake here but you've also seen so many people
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that have spoken up about this issue just get absolutely decimated by activist backlash in
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the media why did you want to not just comment on it but comment in such a significant way with this book
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well the fact of the matter is that if uh somebody like myself if if somebody doesn't step up and start
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saying something nobody will because it is such a raw topic that if an athlete says something or even
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other coaches say something and especially if they're early in their career they could be utterly canceled
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and ruined and you know i really don't have uh that much left to lose i've had my turn as an athlete
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i am a coach i am president of athletics alberta and the province of alberta track and field
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um and to me it's almost an existential threat to our sport so why wouldn't i say something i mean i
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if if i don't say something soon and it keeps going this way there's not going to really be a sport to
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deal with anyway so i might as well say something barbara you've written a lot in the past few years
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about trans politics and trans activists what's your connection to this why did you want to jump
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on board with this project well i i'm interested in in trans activism in general and i was seeing
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this uh idea grow and grow that uh that uh trans women and trans men but the problem really is with
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trans women feel that uh their identity as a woman uh should should be the basis for legal rights to
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enjoy the same resources and uh the same admission to private women's spaces as any other woman that's
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that's their stance that's their political stance and i i watched this uh acceptance of this idea growing
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uh with great alarm because i one doesn't have to be know anything about anything you just have some
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common sense to know where this was headed in terms of uh shelters uh prisons and of course sport
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uh my daughter uh was an elite athlete in triathlon her daughter is a very fine young hockey player
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and the thought of either my daughter and her day of having and she she did she was you know did get
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medals and the thought of her being sidelined by a male athlete who's inherently bigger and stronger
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and faster and and everything else it just kind of blew my mind and i said to myself well i know where
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this is going to end uh it's going to be with sport because sport is something that is enjoyed by people
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all around the world uh millions and millions and millions of people and the one thing that sport
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has in common for all cultures and all so it crosses all socioeconomic guidelines and all races and
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everything else is that people want to see a fair fight they want to see a fair uh a level playing field
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so i said that's that's where the rubber is going to hit the road so it was shocking to me when the
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rubber didn't hit the road and uh the same argument was being used with sport and it was working
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and i didn't see any pushback uh i just was i found that shocking uh that this was happening in plain
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sight uh it's like it's like watching you know a train wreck about to happen and not pulling the
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whistle i mean i just couldn't stand it when i saw linda's starting to speak out i i was so thrilled to
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see somebody who was a real stakeholder in the sport world having the guts uh to say speak the obvious
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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
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write the book um i was very eager to be of any assistance i could in terms of you know brainstorming
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how it should go and chapters and format and style and all all the stuff that goes with publishing a book
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um but uh so i it's a big honor for me to have been part of this collaboration one of the most notable
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elements of this has been the breakneck speed at which something has gone from being an idea that
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no one had ever heard of to one that in a lot of places is being treated as this unquestionable
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orthodoxy that you're not allowed to challenge and just to put that in context you linda talk about
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this you came across this in 2018 you were president of athletics alberta you here get to get a hold of
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this document from 2016 so in and of itself less than five years old that none of your colleagues
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had heard about and this was basically telling you that you had to start looking at a male athlete who
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says they're female in the same way you'd look at a female athlete you know andrew it was just utterly
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stunning just like any of the listeners who have never heard this before to the idea that a man or
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male person could come along and just say oh no i'm gonna call myself a woman today and just think like
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that's okay just open the gate let them into the female races i mean the whole point in having
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women's sports is to have a distinct category for the female body i mean female bodies are completely
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different than male bodies you know whether a trans athlete will win or not and people say well they
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don't win a lot well it doesn't matter they're not the same body it's it's a completely different design
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you know and i often say it's like putting a formula one car into stock car race they're
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completely different designs even without even without an obvious advantage it would still not
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be correct because you have to compete like with like and i i mean there was just no justification
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andrew for this to have happened and i really believe it's our canadian politicians letting us down
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by passing passing a bill bill c16 that is now being interpreted by all of the sort of middle
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managers and bureaucrats across the land as if somehow we have to you know wedge all these people into
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areas where they really shouldn't be and and you know calling that hate if we don't accept uh you know
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somebody crossing a certain line we're still allowed to recognize biological sex according to
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the canadian charter of rights and freedoms and people seem to have forgotten this so you know i
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think i think it's just the pendulum swinging way too far and then making everybody too afraid to talk
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about it well is a lot of this coming in your view from people pretending there aren't biological
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differences or accepting there are and simply not caring well those are two different things if you
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accept that there's a biological difference but you just don't care then you don't care about women's
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sports so but i just just to clarify where do you think the motivation is coming from from the people
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advancing this are they denying there are differences or are they just saying that those differences are
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secondary to you know the need to be inclusive and all of these other things both i mean there is a
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sector of people who amongst my trans friends even who say you know people who i know who are trans
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who say no no no i i am a male but i'm just identifying i need to psychologically identify as a
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as a woman and then there are those who just say no no no no no such thing as biological sex it's all
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socially derived it's all taught after birth um it's only you know somehow assigned and magically at
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birth when you come out of your mother's womb uh the fact that there happens to be a penis there it
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doesn't that doesn't mean anything apparently to these people i mean the fact is that there is a
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distinction there has to be a distinction that's how we perpetuate our species i don't even know what
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this is about i could could i just add one thing and that is that even there are people in the official
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levels of sport uh organizations and uh the former head of sports sociology uh i had an exchange with
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him uh at university of toronto and he did admit he said well yes there is males do have a slight
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he will admit a lot of them will admit to say something like 10 but he'll say but that's no different
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from other uh disadvantages uh or advantages like economic uh resources or having an unusual wing
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like if you're if if a male has a uh that swimmer phelps so it wasn't mark phelps who had the unusual
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wingspan that sort of thing he says it's no different from that but but it actually is different
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and and just one other point i wanted to make about people who say but they don't always win or they
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don't win very often uh it's very important that people i think in sport not concentrate so much on
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who's on the podium but sport is a tremendous matrix teams and and trying out for teams and getting
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scholarships and who's who's uh considered in the top 10 or the top 20. i mean if you're a tennis player
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it's the top 100. so if you take a male who was not even uh who's a mediocre or a terrible athlete
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who wouldn't even get accepted on any team anywhere in a male competition and then instantly is even
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if he's the fourth string you know even if he's the last person chosen for the women's team that's
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not the issue he ends up having the fun and the pleasure and the attention and he has displaced a girl
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or a woman from that team or he might even get a scholarship or some other uh advantage and benefit
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uh and really make enhance his life at a girl's expense that's not acceptable so it's not only
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about the podium it's about the whole spectrum of sport uh and it's about the psychological effect
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on girls who see their chances slipping away and say you know i don't even think i want to try out for
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soccer uh next year because you know so and so is on the other team i don't want to get hit by a
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soccer ball you know 80 miles an hour that like so it's not it's not appealing to me anymore uh so
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there's there's such a range of unfairnesses beyond who's on the podium just wanted to make that point
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i know i think that's well taken i but i think who's on the podium matters as well there was one story
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in the book that stood out i'm chuckling because of the absurdity of it but there's actually something
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quite ridiculous about this a male born ncaa competitor who was 390th ranked as a male and then
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won a woman's championship race so went from 390 to number one and their coach attributed it to their
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strong mental power and something like that if you were to tell the average person to go back to what i
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said at the beginning they would say is ridiculous but if you speak out and say that in the wrong
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context you will just have everything you've ever worked for taken out from under you and you'll be
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subjected to the cancel culture and and i mean this this idea of just going from 390th as a male to
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first as a women and that someone's going to say well that was your mental power and not accept any
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other variable as contributing to that and what does it say about the other women
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what what the coach is saying is well they probably didn't try very hard because look this guy had a
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great or this woman had a great mental attitude and went from 30 390th to first uh what does that
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say about all the women that that that came after him uh if you had the proper mental attitude maybe you
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could have been first so but it wasn't mental attitude and everybody knows it wasn't mental attitude
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when you've seen in the associations linda these policies be adopted gradually and more and more
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of them over the last five years is your sense that the people that are adopting these are are true
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believers or is it driven by in a lot of cases fear just this is where things are going we have no
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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
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but you know how many people have kind of come up to to beside me or or sort of sent a little message
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saying please make sure you don't speak for us everybody's worried that their funding is going to
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be tied to somebody saying something uh that that somehow some fringe person is going to be outraged or
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mentally harmed by something we say meanwhile they don't seem to know or care that this this whole
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ideology and what bar was just talking about this gaslighting short making all the female athletes
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feel like they're inferior is mentally harming every single female athlete do they not care about that
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there was a story that just came up this week of a runner from connecticut who was actually in
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the book as well one of several suing she was i i forget the exact event but she was at the very
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top and then displaced by uh displaced by a male identified competitor who comes in and there are
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becoming more and more of these stories because i think that one of the initial responses i had heard
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a couple of years ago when people were raising these criticisms is that you know every single one of these
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is an outlier it's oh well you know it's one runner in connecticut it's one crossfit competitor but you get
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enough of those and you start to see a bigger trend here and and these are not in in your view you say
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in the book an insignificant number overall or even if it is an insignificant number that still has the
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potential to have a lot of an impact it's unacceptable andrew that even one woman one female athlete should
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be displaced incorrectly by somebody coming in who does not meet the categorical standards i mean if a if a person
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let's say they do get to the top of the podium like cc tell for the one you're talking about going from
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390th to first one person on top of the podium means every single female in that competition was
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bumped down one notch so it affected every single female and her placing and her status within that event
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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
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or two percent of athletes are doping you know so maybe they won't maybe a few of them win but they
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should be included i mean the cv include this this word inclusion is like um people sort of go into a
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trance when they hear it right we cannot we we must make people feel included and and there's something
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about this idea that if there's point zero two percent of the population needs to be included that
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means that 99.8 percent of the population uh will have to accept uh a certain level of unfairness
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in sport we're talking about in sport uh and and the fact that uh however many of that percentage of
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the population decide to go into sport that that in the name of inclusion they have to run the risk of
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exclusion there's something very wrong with with the calculation that is being made at official levels
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uh that there is no such thing as uh uh two sets of rights that are mutually exclusive so uh they're
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they're concentrating so hard on on one group's set of rights uh and they're not putting into the
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calculation if we give unlimited rights to this group are we harming or are we are we diminishing
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uh or or running up against the rights of another group that is protected in the con you know in the
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charter nobody's saying that to themselves one thing that i i've heard and and again i'm paraphrasing
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from a talking point i've heard repeated numerous times in this debate is that if you've been in
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transition for a long enough period of time and you've taken whatever the the required hormones
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are depending on which direction your transition has taken place that after a certain point any
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biological difference becomes negligible now a part of that argument has never quite sat well with me
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just on on sheer logical grounds because irrespective of of hormones and and treatments bodies are born in
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a certain way and and those fundamental bone structures are not changing for example but where
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is that coming from and what's your response to it linda that that that argument that after a certain
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point of time in transition uh any difference that you might have as a biological male over female
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kind of evaporates the culpability lies at the feet of the international olympic committee
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the ioc for some reason was convinced in 2015 to just say self id you can uh a male body a male athlete
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can simply declare their woman live as a woman for one year make sure their hormone levels are down for
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one year and they're that's good enough then that levels the playing field and they know themselves that
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can't possibly be true how do you reduce bone size because of a hormone level how do you reduce the
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lung capacity because of a hormone level this is just absurd and the fact that the international
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olympic committee committee the very ones that care so much about doping control and dopey in fact
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russia is out of you know in the bad books because they were doping and yet you know if you don't
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you dope maybe you improve by like a nine percent figure something like that if you are a male athlete
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even after reduction of the testosterone even more than even two or three years as the studies have shown
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you're still up to 30 or 40 percent stronger than the fellow female athletes it doesn't it just doesn't
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compute how can you say a nine percent advantage through doping is bad but somehow a 30 or 40 percent
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advantage because you're the opposite sex is somehow okay i mean this is just absurd i don't know whether
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somebody you know why they lobbied they paid them off what happened because this just doesn't make sense
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and the resistance of the ioc to the voices of women calling for them to suspend that policy
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until they wait and study it more uh they just they're just deaf they will not respond to us
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finally last fall they responded and said well we can't do anything until after tokyo anyway but
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if i had if i had given them the tip on somebody doping they would have been right on that doesn't
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matter tokyo or not so i i just don't know what's going on yeah and i think you raise a really important
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point there the olympics are to so many people the well the olympics of sporting event it's the gold
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standard and the olympics making that decision relatively earlier on before anyone was talking
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about this really in in most circles them doing that really gave cover for every other organization
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to do it because now anytime it comes up at some local school board it's well if the olympics says it's
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okay then it must be okay and no one has thought critically of it since that point well every other
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time in in olympic history when women wanted something let's talk about the marathon uh track
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and field started in 1928 in the olympic games it took until 1984 to allow women to run the marathon
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they had to study it they had to consider it they had to do all these things and somehow when the when
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the trans activists got into the committees at the ioc it took one year and all of a sudden oh yeah
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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
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i mean we'll just assume that a hormone level levels the playing field i mean they did not study
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that this is the most dramatic thing you could do in olympic sports putting male bodies into female sports
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and they have not subjected it to any studies and every single study there's been 13 studies
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officially done on pre and post transition measuring their you know biomotor abilities
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like strength and everything else and um not one study has shown that reducing the hormone levels
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in a in a male body and a male athlete levels the playing field whatsoever so they have scientific
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evidence that disproves their policy so they need to to suspend it and that's all we're calling for
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as women please suspend the policy ioc you must suspend this policy you have to study it before you impose
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this on every single female athlete in the world you did an audit of rio performance in a few events
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i think you looked at the track and field events the running events and i want to pull up these numbers here
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and there's a chart in the book that that summarizes this quite well that men who placed from first to
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eighth in events still had an advantage over women who placed first so so even the first place uh female
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stacked up against a lower ranked male that male is going to win and that's not because they're uh they're
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a harder worker than the woman necessarily it's just because when you strip away all the effort the mental
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acuity all of the preparation you're still left with a biological difference there yeah there's
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nothing you're going to do because there are six thousand variables in the human body that are
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distinct and different between men and women whether you're talking about inside the cell itself the
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little tiny nano machines inside the cell or whether it's blood volume or the heart the the cardio
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cardiovascular output uh muscle mass the way the fibers interact the angles of the bone like there
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are just so many variables you're never going to be able to take every single one of those variables
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and fix them in a male body so that somehow it aligns with female plus every single one of the however
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many billions of cells would each have to be changed to from xy chromosome to xx chromosome it is
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virtually literally impossible to change a male body into a female body we know this this is just biology
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i mean why would you everybody knows this so we know that whatever the policy reason uh was it has to be
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sociological and political one thing that that i find to be troubling about this debate is that it does
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leave people who for whatever reason have a particular identity in a bit of a limbo situation
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because someone who is male born identifies as female your position would exclude them from female
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sports they probably have no interest in being in male sports and and wouldn't feel that that situates
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i mean are we heading to a point where we need a third category because ultimately that's the only way
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forward that i can see that that is somewhat of a middle ground not that anyone would accept such a thing
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well if you're going to have a third category you actually have to have a four uh two more like
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you have to have yes you're right because you need both both directions of transition
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yeah so what i would say and the and the solution that we've come to in the book is that female
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category needs to be restricted to female athletes and everybody who's anything else goes into an open
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category that includes males um they can participate but if you want to have anything extra than female
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you have to go into the open category and i think that allows for for for full inclusion and fairness
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when you see some of the the competitors here some of them have a very activist bent to them and and
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you can hear that and some i think there was one in in a crossfit tournament a couple of years ago
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that almost seemed to be deliberately trying to to provoke to you know set themselves up for a lawsuit and
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all that stuff but but when push comes to shove here you've talked about the fact that you believe
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transgender people are deserving of dignity you very much reject this transphobia label that you
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know is is attached to people uh that put forward a lot of these arguments that are rooted in fairness
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i mean how do we find a way to keep people excluded or keep people from feeling excluded but also respect
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this question of fairness we already have it andrew uh in my association as any other sports association
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in canada we have no bullying policy um we will fully accept anybody identifying as they are socially
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or you know other identities in your life or our politics religion we're not going to exclude somebody
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on the basis of religion on the basis of your politics or on the basis of your identity in terms of
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gender identity but we compete on the basis of biological sex so we will place somebody in
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their appropriate sex biological physical sex category and then we will not bully them and that
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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
0.55
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
0.99
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
0.93
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