WTW82: The Boston Marathon Trans Panic w/Frankie de la Cretaz

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:42 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Where There's Woke. This is episode 82. I'm Thomas Smith. That over there is Lydia Smith. How you doing? Whoa, but look at what I'm seeing in the newspapers. You better not, because a man is gonna kill you. That's right. Right. It's barely an exaggeration of the trans panic bullshit we're going to talk about today. No, it's perfect. Absolutely. Really cool to talk to Frankie. So yeah, why don't we just get on over to that after this break? Before we do, we should remind folks that, hey, it is the end of the month, which is our hell, but hopefully our hell is podcast heaven, shall it?

0:00:48 Lydia: Hello. I am pumped. I feel like I could go run a marathon with how excited I am for today's topic. Yep. That's exactly what happened at the Boston Marathon, folks. Yeah, but today it's not just gonna be you and me talking. I have invited independent journalist Frankie de la Creta, who is really awesome. They cover the intersection of sports and gender. They'll get into it plenty when we have our interview. But what caught my eye was a piece that they did regarding the Boston Marathon. And apparently there was a transgender participant that the right got really upset about. And Frankie went on an entire journey to look into the facts and who's behind all of this stuff and debunking it in the way that we like to do on this show so it felt like a perfect match so happy to have Frankie with us yeah yeah

0:02:20 Thomas: No, I don't know. It's a little too bold of a claim. Yeah. No, I'm just trash. There's, i'M just playing trash for everyone. No. Uh, we're trying to get a lot of stuff out, including gavel gavel. We've got a bunch of those coming out. Uh. We got more, uh, WTW and Serious Inquiries Only coming out it's, It's our usual thing for the end of the month. It's how we do it. It's the chunk method. Love the chunk methods. Patented. Nobody take that podcasting chunk method? No, no one take it. They want it. They want you. Can't make me think they don't want it, so check out the other shows for all that, and of course, please support the show at patreon.com/seriouspod. You can avoid the ads. You can keep us going. I think today's show especially shows why folks like Frankie and, you know, hopefully like us, too, we are trying to get the word out on this stuff. We are trying To Get the Truth Out, and it is a tough uphill battle. So we really appreciate all your support and all the support anyone's willing to give to help get the truth out. That's what we care about here. So, all right, after this break, we'll get on with Frankie. Yankee.

0:02:21 Lydia: Person's trash is another man's treasure whatever whatever. So much. It's our chunks. Yeah. I don't think anyone's going to take it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

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0:03:36 Lydia: Today with us is Frankie. Hi, Frankie. So happy to have you here today. Your piece caught my eye, titled The Boston Marathon, A Case Study in an Anti-Trans Media Hysteria. And I'm so excited to hear from you about how you debunked this entire thing. What the heck was going on? This is definitely, like I mentioned to you, our bread and butter here on Where There's Woke. So always happy to see other folks doing that out in the world, too. Thanks Thanks again for coming on.

0:03:57 Frankie: Yeah, thanks for having me.

0:04:08 Lydia: Before we dive into that story, though, do you mind telling folks a bit about yourself?

0:04:13 Frankie: Yeah, absolutely. I am an independent journalist. My work focuses on the intersection of sports and gender, so obviously some of these bad actors have been on my radar for a while, and I have written a book. It's called Hail Mary, the Rise and Fall of the National Women's Football League, and it is a history of the first professional women's football league in the U.S. Yes. Most people don't. It's basically it's an I kind of describe it as a league of their own in the 70s. Kind of. It's a league of their own in the seventies, but football and it's openly gay and racially integrated.

0:04:24 Lydia: You're busy.

0:04:24 Thomas: So not much going on. Yeah. Wow. That's awesome. I know nothing about that. I need to check this out. That is so funny. I was just going to say, is it a league of their own situation? I am already in. Okay. Oh, wow.

0:04:31 Lydia: Yeah. Very cool.

0:05:00 Thomas: No wonder this country said no. That sounds awesome. We do need to bring that back. So what stoked your interest in this subject? You mentioned you're being the intersection of sports and gender. Just wondering what kind of got you started down that line of interest. Fair, fair. Yeah, yeah. Gosh, we felt the same way in our small little way. You know, just like, hey, why?

0:05:00 Lydia: Ooh, let's bring it back. Yeah.

0:05:18 Frankie: Yeah, I actually started as a sports writer writing mostly about Major League Baseball, but I found men generally boring to write about. I found them and I found the market kind of oversaturated. And so I really wanted to write stuff that I wanted to be reading. And I wanted to writing stuff that felt like it was for me and people like me. And So I pivoted, you know, I guess it's been about 10 years now, and started writing about women and girls in baseball. And from there, really expanded into just the intersection of sports gender and culture and that does sometimes look like covering women's sports and athletes who play women's sport from a critical lens but also I've been covering trans athletes and trans inclusion for years and I've seen the train leaving the station and I have seen the direction we've been heading in for a long time and I will say I feel like a lot of my work over the last few years has been an attempt to stop or like raise some alarms about a lot this and really obviously obviously failing to do that as all of us on this beat have. But yeah.

0:06:36 Lydia: Listen.

0:06:36 Thomas: There's like, you know, one athlete that you're making a huge deal about everybody. That seems like not a big deal in the scheme of things. And then, you Know, five years later, it's even worse somehow.

0:06:41 Lydia: Out of 500 ,000. Yeah.

0:06:46 Frankie: Yeah. And I think what is important about me writing about the intersection of sports and the anti -trans stuff is the sports bills really have been, I call them gateway legislation, because if you look at the numbers around the anti trans legislation that's been passed over the last several years, it started, the sports bills were the ones that gained ground and that passed quickly and they passed first because sports was the one place that I think the right was able to make discrimination seem like reasonable or fair or logical. But the problem becomes that when you make a group of people out to be a threat in one area, it becomes much easier to make them seem like a threat in other areas. And so you see the bathroom bills and the healthcare bills and the education bills, they all passed after the sports bills had. And so a lot of people ignored what was happening in sports, either because they were like, it's just sports, who really cares? Or they thought it was actually a reasonable place to be discriminatory. And the reality is that ignoring the rise of anti -trans trans rhetoric and attitudes and discrimination in sports has actually allowed us to be in the place that we are right now.

0:07:12 Lydia: Yeah mm -hm. I think it what's so tough to hear about that too is you know when trans folks get interviewed you know that have been participating in sports and hearing about what it means to them to be part of those teams. Teams and were we watching John Oliver and that mom the mom responded on uh you know the mother was asked you know like is your kiddo really really good at softball and she was like no not really

0:07:23 Thomas: Yeah, you're right. Yeah. Yeah. Good segment on it.

0:08:30 Lydia: But you know it's like she was happy like she Was just part of a team and felt like you know It was a place of belonging for kids who struggle to find a place to belong sometimes times growing up and and figuring out their identity so it's it's frustrating that it's you know this one particular area that that has been so important to so many people that's just being torn apart oh yeah

0:08:55 Frankie: Not all trans athletes are going to be good at sport. I think that's been a misconception. And the thing is that trans women have been allowed to compete in the Olympics since 2003. You didn't see any trans athletes until the 2020 games. And she got last actually in her division. And I think it's interesting to me that trans athletes become an issue, not when they participate, but when they win. And they've been allowed to play as long as they weren't good. And as long as они не были seen как что -то от кого -то. And I guess there's a little bit of a parallel here. When you look at the history of sex segregation in sports, most sport was not sex segregated. And you can trace a lot of the women's divisions and the women leagues back to women beating the men, either winning or being on the podium. And the following year, there's a women's division. Yeah, you can look at figure skating in the early 1900s. That is how that ended up sex segregated. But you can even go to like the shooting, like rifle, rifling events at the Olympics was integrated until the 1992 92 games and a woman sat an Olympic record and won gold medal. And the next year, it was just the men's division. And that athlete was actually forced to prematurely retire from her sport because they didn't introduce a women's division until the 2000 games almost a decade later.

0:09:45 Thomas: Really? Oh, wow. Wow. No hullabaloo. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:09:57 Lydia: Wow wow interesting so let's chat a bit about what was all of this

0:10:17 Frankie: And so I think about this a lot, because I think we often think that sex segregation is the most like natural way of organizing sport. But a lot of the way that we organize sport and the reason that it is sex segregated is because when a woman wins, she challenges the status quo, right? She challenges the power dynamics and the hierarchy and the things that we believe to be true about gender. And also men are fragile and they're embarrassed and they don't like that, right. It's a threat to their masculinity. And so that's where these women's divisions came in. And I think you're You're seeing something similar happening here where when a trans woman is, you know, winning or is good at her sport, you're again challenging, you know, the status quo. Well, the funniest thing about this when I dove into it is like there wasn't a hullabaloo, even though it was all over. It was allover my social media. And I still am not sure how many other people this was on the radar of, or if I just happened to be because of what I covered, like in circles where, where this was being talked about.

0:11:08 Lydia: Um hullabaloo for the Boston Marathon. What were people saying? What was going on there? Yeah, your algorithm. Yeah. Yeah, oh

0:11:33 Frankie: But essentially, a bunch of headlines happened in the lead up to the Boston Marathon. They started back in December when this woman qualified, a trans woman, and I could never confirm that she was trans. So, you know, right wing media said that a trans women had qualified for the marathon back in December and this one woman her name is uh Jennifer Say she runs XXXY Athletics which is a an apparel company that sells transphobic anti like trans apparel but they also have like a fundraising arm and they they pay cis women to drop out and protest um when trans women women are in their field. So she started tweeting about this and offering to like award people with money for dropping out. And I saw that at the time, and then it didn't come up again until the weekend before the marathon. And then I saw a bunch of headlines and things on sites like X and Blue Sky, where there was all of this concern about a quote unquote man running in the women's division of the Boston Marathon. And it really picked up when Nikki Hiltz, who's an Olympic runner, stitched a video on TikTok of a woman saying she was going to drop out. Her instinct was to dropout of the race when she found out a trans woman

0:12:06 Thomas: Oh, God. Oh my God.

0:13:04 Frankie: Was competing. And so once Nikki stitched that, it got you in more of a platform. And you started to see a lot more conversation about it. So that was, you know, what I started to see.

0:13:16 Thomas: It's a marathon. Yeah it's so silly. What does dropping out even do? Just run your marathon. I don't understand. It is so weird. Yeah, yeah. Maybe people minded their own fucking business sometimes. No.

0:13:24 Frankie: And, you know, we're not talking about the pro division either. Like, let's let's be clear about that. And I think in the long run, I don't think these distinctions matter like a whole ton. But I do really think that part of the problem in the conversation about trans participation in sport is that all levels of sport have really been flattened. And we use the same talking points when we're talking about an Olympic athlete that we do when we're talking about like a middle school soccer player. And that's it's not helpful. It's not accurate. But in this case, you know, it's important to say it wasn't even in the the pro division. However, the Boston Marathon itself for its open division has had an inclusive policy since 2018, I believe. So she's probably not even the first trans woman to run. People just didn't know. You know what I mean?

0:14:10 Lydia: Yeah yeah yeah

0:14:17 Frankie: And I mean, it was interesting, too. I I decided to like, look both. Well, initially, I was just going to write about this one woman getting to run and in the marathon. But when I started clicking on things, because I've been on this beat for a really long time, a thing that I've learned that you guys will not be surprised about is the public narrative about trans women and girls in women's sports seems overwhelmingly negative, right? It seems like if you ask people, I think they would say most people believe that this should not be the case. But for those of us who have been following it for a long time, it's literally like three activist groups who have really spearheaded this whole thing, and they've just figured out how to be really, really loud about it. And so it always comes back to the same few people. Most of the anti -trans sports bills that have been passed in the 26 or so states that have them were all written by the same conservative Christian group, the Alliance Defending Freedom. Yes.

0:15:19 Frankie: And that group managed to get in with some women who had real questions and concerns and I think really radicalized them at the most opportune time in the sports world. And it's been very effective for their cause. And so when I started to really look at what the public narrative was around this trans woman having competed, I was like, Like, oh, wait, every single headline here in some way leads back to Jennifer Say and her group. And I thought that that was really important to show people to really debunk and say, like, it looks like there's been this massive, like media hysteria about this athlete. But really, it's one small group of people that has just managed to leverage particularly conservative media outlets to their advantage.

0:15:17 Lydia: Kristen Wagner yep mm -hmm yeah and an important like piece of context too on Jennifer Say is that You know, she hasn't been doing XXXY her entire career. She used to work for Levi's like pretty high up. Right. In marketing. Yeah. Yeah, mm

0:16:24 Frankie: Yes, she was an executive. She was an Executive at Levi's and she became publicly prominent because she resigned from Levi's and refused like over a million dollars severance so that she could speak openly against COVID regulations in public schools. And the other thing I think that's important about her and this is actually true of most of the former women athletes who are against trans women and girls being included and I was actually surprised to learn this I didn't know this about Jennifer Say but she was an elite gymnast who was very vocal about the abuses in the sport including the sexual abuses and she is one of of the producers of the Athlete A documentary, which was on Netflix, and it was about Larry Nassar's victims. And so she has been a massive advocate for safety for the women and girls who participate in sports, and so have, there's another really prominent group. Martina Navratilova is a member of the group, along with former Olympic swimmer named Nancy Hogshead. It's It's called the Women's Sport Policy Working Group. Their name comes up a lot. And the thing about Nancy Hogshead is she was a Title IX lawyer and she formed a group called Champion Women and was a massive force in trying to root out sexual abuse and sexual harassment in women's sports. And so a lot of these women started wanting to protect these athletes. And this now anti -trans advocacy that they do is like a warped version of that. Right.

0:16:45 Thomas: Well because famously larry nassar posed as a woman in order to do what he did yeah yeah absolutely

0:18:23 Lydia: To get access to the yeah, the female athletes. Yeah mm hmm yeah mm

0:18:26 Frankie: I mean, but this is where the anti - trans rhetoric has been really effective because this idea that you're saving or protecting women or girls and women's sports by not not allowing trans women buys into the idea that trans women are quote unquote biological men and that men are who the actual danger to women are. And so if trans women or girls are in a locker room, they claim that, you know, they're putting their cisgender teammates at risk of sexual assault or that they're so big and strong, they are going to hurt them on the field. And the issue actually in all of those arguments is men and trans women and not men, but by calling the men, you make them out to be a danger. And I think the most infuriating part of all of that to me is that trans women and girls are actually the most marginalized and therefore the most at risk. They're much more likely to be assaulted in a bathroom than they are to assault somebody in a bathroom. And so I think it's just very, very ugly that these people who say that they want to protect women and girl are actually not only endangering all women and girls, but in particular, they're endangering really the most marginalized who need the most protection.

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0:19:42 Thomas: So where were we in the in the

0:19:44 Frankie: Yeah. So, I mean, in the story, basically I started to pull apart these headlines, right? And the first one that comes up when you Google search it is a New York Post story. The headline is Boston Marathon's trans runner tramples women athletes. It's time to take a stand. Yeah, so I,

0:19:55 Thomas: Story yeah I'm sorry I just love the idea that like yeah because the trans woman's gonna just run over him it's gonna yeah

0:20:14 Frankie: She's gonna trample, right so I mean that's very intentional language people who do not want trans women in sport you will see they often use language that makes these athletes seem big and scary and monstrous and that's a very very intentional yeah I'm like I don't know who's getting trampled the picture they've used also for this story is of a crowd it looks like somebody you know could I guess feasibly be being trampled underfoot in this crowd of runners but when you click on that it's written by Jennifer Say. So it's an op -ed written by the head of this anti -trans athletics group. And then I decided, before I even went any further, I was like, I'm going to look up this runner that they are so worried about. Because when I looked her up to, so in order to qualify for the women's division of the Boston Marathon, you need a time of like four hours and five minutes. First of all, this athlete's been trying for like 10 years to qualify for the Boston the marathon. And she finally did. And it was like with a time of like four hours and one minute. So even her qualifying time, right? She's like barely qualifying. So I look her up. She first of all is running. She's a master's athlete. So she's running in the 55 to 59 age division. That's that's how old she is.

0:20:19 Thomas: Yeah yeah Okay. Come on.

0:21:31 Frankie: She finished 632 in that division, and she finished 8,945th overall among all women.

0:21:44 Thomas: Okay, but how many tramplings did she have?

0:21:45 Lydia: That

0:21:47 Frankie: None from what I can tell.

0:21:48 Lydia: Means 8 ,945 medals were stripped away from that is

0:21:50 Thomas: Ten fatalities. Yeah. Oh, God. Because of this person in a 55 to 59 -year -old division who might get 8 ,000. I just can't do it. I can't race. You're not a subscriber to that? You didn't just didn't just go right in.

0:21:54 Frankie: So, right. So this is the woman that we are claiming is a a threat is stealing opportunity from other women. There's a couple other headlines. And if you look at those headlines, too, they all start to lead back to the same place. I mentioned, you know, that then comes this TikTok video, right? And it's a woman who I found out was a division three runner and a current marathoner. And she's saying, you Know, my first instinct is to drop out of this race. And so, right,

0:22:32 Lydia: So crazy I'm so sorry but that is insane

0:22:42 Frankie: So I'm like, what is this video from, of course, and I go and it's a podcast appearance. And it's called the Patchwork Podcast. There's very vague language on the TikTok page about what this podcast might be about. So I click on the link that should lead me to the podcast's page. And what it brings me to is a subscription page for the Daily Wire Plus. So it's part of of the Daily Wire podcast network, which is a conservative media company. You know, shockingly, that's not where I choose to spend my money. And so the funny thing about that is that another of the headlines, the top headlines on Google is from the Daily wire.

0:23:29 Frankie: So the Daily Wire had also written about this case saying, you know, the Boston Marathon has three gender categories and and men could win all of them. That includes the non -binary category, I guess. But the thing that really stuck out to me about the video, because again, I'm well aware of Jennifer Say and her clothing company, was the shirt that this woman, her name was Natalie Daniels, the athlete in the TikTok video. Her shirt stuck out for me immediately because I recognized it. And it is from Jennifer Say's apparel company. So she's wearing an XXXY Athletics t -shirt in her podcast appearance.

0:24:05 Frankie: So that was another clue. This is all leading back to the same place. And then the actual video is hosted on the XXXY Athletics YouTube page. So it all leads back, again, all of these headlines lead back to this one group.

0:24:22 Thomas: It's so infuriating. Oh, sorry. Good.

0:24:22 Frankie: And it's infuriating. Well, no, I was going to say the other thing about this. I didn't just look up the trans athletes results. I looked looked up Natalie Daniels to see if she ran and how she did. So Natalie Daniel's did not drop out, I will have you know. She ran the Boston Marathon.

0:24:39 Thomas: Let me guess. Did she beat the trance runner's time by quite a bit?

0:24:44 Frankie: She finished 110th among all women. Remember, the trans woman finished like 8 ,945th. She finish 110th. She competed in the 18-29 division. So not even in the same division. But she didn't even come close to meddling. So it's not like this trans athlete you know quote unquote took a medal from her but she finished nearly an hour and a half ahead of the woman that she said had an unfair competitive advantage

0:25:13 Thomas: An hour and a half. She finished almost one world record marathon time ahead of. Oh, my God, God, just

0:25:21 Frankie: Yeah she basically lapped her in a marathon right and she's like this woman has a competitive advantage that's unfair I mean I would be embarrassed if I was natalie I just I'm like like, this is embarrassing for you, babe. Like, this is who you think is a threat. Like Natalie, you're right.

0:25:42 Thomas: Forget everything else for a moment. Imagine you are somewhere in the age range of 18 to whatever you said. And you're like, wait a minute, this 57 year old is going to compete. Like, forget everything. Unfair. Wouldn't you be like the biggest asshole in the world? Like, hey, you'll be old someday, too. You shouldn't be mean to me.

0:26:01 Frankie: She's threatened by this, this 55 year old woman who's been trying to qualify for this race for like 10 years and barely did.

0:26:08 Thomas: Come on. So dumb.

0:26:08 Lydia: And finally, finally makes it by the skin of her teeth. Yeah. Wow.

0:26:13 Frankie: And so this woman then becomes the face of, and of course she's white and she's blonde and she is. And she's conventionally attractive. And this, you know, a woman becomes the face of I am being threatened by this scary, you know, biological man, right, is how they would refer to her.

0:26:33 Thomas: So I was going to say, too, it's so infuriating. We found this too, where these entire ecosystems are created, these self -referential ecosystems of bigotry, where it's just like, yeah, and this here, and they'll have like three hyperlinks and no one ever clicks on them except the three of us. And they'll go to the same exact pages that are nothing. They're either bad links or they're linked to something that doesn't say what it says, or they are linked to another thing that's in the same media sphere, you know, the same company, the shame, whatever.

0:27:05 Thomas: And they bootstrap their way into feeling like it's this broad consensus. And I worry that it, like, works because it's, yeah, it's hard to know. But so much of it is the same four people.

0:27:12 Frankie: It does work. Yes, yes. And unfortunately, in the world of sports, there's some pretty high profile athletes who, you Know, like Jennifer say, even though her name is not super well known, she has credibility in this space. And then, you KNOW, people like like Martina Navratilova or Nancy Hogshead, and for a while, the distance swimmer Diana Nyad was on the board of, you know, one of these groups and writing things. And she has since retracted that position and is no longer on theboard.

0:27:42 Thomas: Ah, boo. That's nice, at least.

0:27:50 Frankie: You know, I'm of two minds about this. I think it was smart PR because her film, the film about her with Jodie Foster was coming out. And so she really, I think, had to do some damage control. To me, whether or not she actually personally believes it. I'm at least grateful that she publicly recanted because you don't see that happen a lot. And I appreciated her saying, I am not educated enough actually to be speaking on this. But when an editor of a publication is contacted by someone like Diana Nyad or Martina Navratilova or Jennifer Say, and they want to write an op-ed, which is an opinion piece, right? But people don't, that's the other thing, is that readers see these things running in these credible mainstream publications. And even though the op-ed is the opinion pages, people don'T think too hard about that, really. They see that it's in, you know, the Washington Post or the New York Times, or I mean, the New York Post is slightly less, but you know even still, it's at least slightly more credible than the Daily Wire, I guess. But people see a big name in a big paper, and they assume that there is credibility to that, but you can almost always Google the person on these op -eds and you can see that they have some kind of connection to one of these very few groups that are really doing this work.

0:27:55 Thomas: Oh, gotcha. Gotcha. Mm hmm. Yeah.

0:29:14 Lydia: I think another piece that really struck me in this is that Jennifer Say's background in marketing and branding and like kind of seeing that playbook here right she knows how to market something she knows how to brand something and like it's very clear for this particular story that she's making really smart decisions throughout this entire thing in order to kind of continue to push it forward not that it needs much help in this day and age but that really stuck out to me and it felt almost like I wish the people who are consuming this stuff could understand like the subliminal messaging that exists here and that they are being kind of manipulated in a way by essentially like a corporate interest sort of mindset.

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0:29:55 Frankie: Yes. Yeah. It's such a grift because this is the other thing is the shirt that I recognized right on Natalie Daniels in that video is one of, they make many, many, many shirts on this website. And I've seen other ones of those shirts, like the player for the, I know you guys have done an episode on the San Jose State volleyball situation, Brooke Slusser, who is the teammate who basically sued her teammate not to have to play with her because she was trans. Brooke has been photographed in mainstream publications wearing XXXY Athletics t-shirts. She has been awarded their, I don't know, change maker or whatever the hell their award is that they pay people who are very brave and drop out of their sport. So she's won that award and she's been photographed in mainstream publications in those t-shirts. Jennifer also sends those shirts to anyone who is in a court case where they are either suing or fighting to not have to compete against trans kids or trans athlete. And then what happens is when those court cases get media coverage, everyone standing on the front steps is wearing her t-shirts. So it's free advertising. Riley Gaines, you know, also wears these shirts. She's a fan of the brand. Noted fifth place swimmer. I make sure to say that every time because I know she hates it.

0:30:06 Lydia: Mm -hmm. Yeah. Yeah, mm -hmm, yeah, yeah.

0:30:22 Thomas: Mm hmm, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Stole her fourth place medal that doesn't exist can we give out t -shirts hey don't be a piece of shit is my t -shirt I here's my other idea we'll see if it's t - shirt worthy can we just start having in society and on every I don't know stupid podcast one person who goes wait really oh

0:31:27 Frankie: You know, subliminal messaging, I think, is right. And people don't know what they're looking at. They don't realize all of these people are wearing the same brand of shirt because they're all coming from the same place yeah and

0:31:57 Thomas: Just one person that's gone away it's gone wait really well let me google whatever you just said wait really this is a marathon runner that's gonna trample everybody today really let me hold on let me let me just check we don't do that it's gone nobody does that I guess yeah the

0:32:12 Frankie: I think that was why I wanted to look up everyone's results too because I was like what are we actually talking about here we're saying a lot of stuff but is any of it true I mean even the claims people make I don't know if you guys remember that horrific video the white house put out earlier this year um about how trans women and you know are a threat to you know these innocent cis girls in sport and they had this one girl talking about how you know she'd been like permanently injured or deformed or whatever playing against a trans person no journalist has ever been able to

0:32:46 Thomas: Is the volleyball one there's a girl who said she was just killed by a volleyball that was spiked by a trans women and like we when we when мы covered the san jose state thing I went on the websites like while you're talking about that hun I was like looking at stats because I'm a sportsperson. And it drives me nuts how many people talking about this just know nothing about sports. It's really infuriating. They decide to care when they can be bigoted against trans people, but they don't actually know anything about any of the sports they're talking about ever. And I don't know everything about every sport, but I'll often just say, oh, I don't know. Maybe someone else should be in charge of that decision about that sport I know nothing about. But anyway, I looked at just stats. I was like, okay, let's see how many kills she has. Because, you know, a kill is an actual thing in volleyball. And oh, wouldn't you know it, she's nowhere in the top anything you know like there's no way this person's spike nearly killed someone it's not she's not yeah or some insane miles an hour it's just like silly yeah I

0:32:47 Lydia: Oh, is that Peyton McNabb? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:33:20 Lydia: Oh, yeah. They tried to say 80 miles an hour. Oh, I love Katie Barnes. Mm-hmm.

0:33:42 Frankie: Confirm yes yeah katie barnes at espn did a great job actually fact checking all of the claims about the San Jose State volleyball player and got some great quotes from other people who actually are playing like very high level division one you know volleyball saying like she's not as good as like our spikes are harder like what we are doing is actually far more impressive than what she is doing and no one is complaining but yes I am talking about Peyton McNabb the volleyball player who claims she was injured by a trans opponent. And there's no, no one has ever been able to prove that story. And these things get really twisted. The other case, I think about a lot that has really been blown up to be one of the rights, big cases, the Connecticut high school track case from a few years ago. I don't know if you all are familiar with that, but there

0:34:10 Thomas: Think we are but I'm blanking right now

0:34:42 Frankie: Were were two trans girls competing in high school track together, um, in Connecticut at the same time, Andrea Yearwood and Terry Miller, I want to say. And they were both black girls and the families of three white cis girls sued the state of Connecticut because they claimed that their daughters would never be able to beat these two runners. Like the week after that suit was filed, one of the cis girls did beat one of the trans girls in the race but I think the part about that story aside from yes these girls actually have beat the trans runners is that all three of the sis girls in that case went on to run in college several of them if not all of them ran division one college track and neither of the trans girl's continued to run college and so there's this whole lawsuit about how these trans girls have an unfair advantage over these cis girls And a lot of this rhetoric does come, right, when we talk about taking opportunities away, what, you know, this all ties back to our broken educational system. Like, there's a much bigger problem here in the US, both in that our Olympic pipeline is rooted in school sports, but also so is access to higher education

0:35:56 Frankie: For some people. And so this is a different conversation to have but so what the argument is is that we're not going to be able to run in college because of these trans girls they're going to take opportunities and yet neither of the trans girls ran in college and all of the cis girls in that case have and so nothing was taken from any of them and when you talk to Andrea Yearwood she says like part of the reason she didn't pursue running in college was because of the harassment that she faced and like I don't know whether or not she would have been able to but regardless She was like, it wasn't even worth it to try because of like how traumatic it was for me. Yeah.

0:36:22 Thomas: Yeah yeah forgetting the fact that they think that people will just pretend to be trans to do this it's like their lives are hell often when anyone takes takes notice, when a conservative takes notice of, or anyone, I guess, a lot of people, they make their lives hell. Like anyone would volunteer for that. It's silly. Yeah.

0:36:22 Lydia: Oh, geez. Oh, that's so sad. Right.

0:36:50 Frankie: Yeah, I mean, I think really what the right has done very, very effectively is dehumanize trans athletes, because the conversation focuses on their genitals or their hormones or their chromosomes or, you know, whatever goalposts we're looking at, you you know, and it really removes the humanity from the actual people that we're talking about, because, you know in addition to that, like this really is a human rights issue at its core, and I think often we let these kind of red herring talking points distract from the fact that these are people facing real discrimination, and I mean like the UN has termed all of this human rights abuse. And the Olympic Charter literally says that sport free from discrimination is a human right. So that is really the core issue. We focus so much on how cis people feel about having to compete against trans people that we forget to ask how trans people feel about being dehumanized and discriminated against for trying to just like live their lives.

0:37:07 Lydia: Mm -mm. So what do we do? Do you have any ideas?

0:38:02 Frankie: I wish I did, you know, but I think the left really, really just like failed on all levels here. And I don't know how you get the genie back into the bottle. I think that not taking this more seriously, particularly in the world of women's sports, people just chose to kind of like say nothing. And I think it was a massive mistake because it allowed the bad actors to to really capitalize on this space and their marketing like you said their marketing is good you know their men shouldn't play women's sports it's very simple people understand they think they understand what that means it's a much catchier thing to spread than the nuance that's really required right

0:38:50 Lydia: Is yeah yeah

0:38:50 Thomas: I always say, I agree. Men shouldn't play women's sports. I don't know. What's the controversy? Yeah. Trans women aren't men, so I don'T know what the fuck you're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. God, yeah.

0:38:59 Frankie: Right but unfortunately the conversation has been allowed to be defined on those terms and I don't think the left has any sort of an answer for it. And I wish I was more hopeful. I think at the beginning of the year when all of the, you know, when Trump's executive order came down and then the NCAA changed their policy, I didn't really know what to do and I didn't really feel like I even had anything to write. I was like, I've written about this for years. There's like nothing new to say. And I really felt like I had failed. And I know that's a ridiculous thing because one person doing this work is not, you But I spoke to other journalists, too, who have been on this beat who felt similarly. It felt like we'd really, like, failed, you know? Like, what could I have done differently? And I don't have a good answer because I think that, unfortunately, people think that trans issues are niche because they affect so few people and they affect more people than people realize, right? Right? Like we're not part of the census. We're not on a list anywhere.

0:39:38 Thomas: Oh yeah. We feel like huge failures too. Don't worry. We absolutely feel like huge failures it's

0:40:03 Frankie: You don't know how many trans people there actually are. But I think this is something I encountered a lot trying to place these stories is that publications were like, this is too niche. Unless they want me to write the same story over and over again. Like there was no interest in actually like nuanced in -depth coverage of this stuff. And to actually cover it correctly, you have to get quite in the weeds. And most readers don't have enough of a working knowledge to be able to do that. And so you end up not actually even being able to cover the issue the way it should be. Most newsrooms don't Have anyone that can cover this sports newsrooms, you know, ESPN has Katie Barnes, and that's kind of it defector, I think has at least two writers as well, who can cover this. But you know, every sports newsroom should have had somebody who can cover trans policy and trans inclusion years ago, and most of them don't have a single one.

0:40:58 Thomas: Particularly hard feeling like things have reverted you know things have gone even further back it's not just like oh we need to cover the new wave we need a debunk the new wave of lies it's like oh no you're going back to lies we already were I thought we already passed those lies we're but we've downgraded we're back in time in lies and it just really feels it's hard not to feel a little defeated but I think the only answer is to try to keep you know speaking the truth out there and just hoping more people will care doing our best to get people to care about it. Yeah, yeah. Yep, yep. All right, well, thank you so much for joining us. Hey, where can listeners find more of your work? Excellent. Well, thank You so much.

0:41:26 Frankie: Yeah, I think the hard part is like, I don't know how much worse it has to get before people give a shit. I don' t know if I'm allowed to curse on this podcast. Yeah. And most most people don't know a trans person, right? And so they're watching all of this happen. And it feels very very theoretical. It feels very hypothetical. It feels very like far from their actual lives. And that is another piece of how this gets to where it is. But I don't think people should care about trans people only because like their rights are tied up in them. But I do think when you start to police the idea of who is a woman and who is feminine enough, we know where that leads. You know, sex testing, genital exams, any of that. It It puts all women and girls in danger because suddenly now if you aren't conforming to a certain kind of feminine ideal, you now are subjected to these things as well. And I think what the right has done really effectively is pitted cis women and girls against trans women and girls, and as soon as cis women and girls realize that their freedom is actually tied up with trans women and girls and is not at odds with it, I think that is where you'll start to see progress happen. But they have to realize they're part of the same fight.

0:41:34 Lydia: Yeah of course let it rip yeah and as you said like it might have to get worse before it can get better the only other thing that you know I've like been really sitting with and you kind of spoke about too, Frankie, is that it's the dehumanization of trans folks has led to a lot of this being really successful. So then you would hope that the opposite would be true, that like bringing the humanity back, right? And like talking about trans people as people first and foremost and profiling them. But like that is like bits and pieces. It's not, you know, when we're talking about marketing, right, it's not nearly as marketable. It's not nearly as like quippy to share. It's, you know, it's slow and like plodding, but it feels like that can be really effective. It is obviously tough work and not enough people are doing it.

0:43:29 Frankie: Yeah, no, you're right. And like, it's something I do intentionally when I write about trans athletes. And in sport, this gets harder because especially at the elite or the pro level, like their body is their tool. And there's a focus on and an emphasis on the body in ways that other jobs, you know, don't have. But when I write about these athletes, I try very hard not to focus on their bodies or their transition or any of those things. And if I do talk about that, I'm always very clear with the reader why I'm talking about that. It's part of like, yeah, humanizing them and focusing on them as people first and foremost. But I think also there's this sort of like morbid curiosity, morbid fascination that cis people have with trans women's bodies and the right has focused um so much on those bodies um as a you know and they're as sites of trauma and like threat that I really try to pull the focus away from that except when absolutely necessary um to the story because I do think you lose you lose the humanity of the person um when you focus so much on you know the pieces of them in that way probably

0:44:49 Frankie: The easiest place to find me is my newsletter which is where I debunked the Boston Marathon media frenzy it's called out of your league it's a queer sports and culture newsletter probably the best place to me because that's where I post everything that I write elsewhere as well thank you