Dana Goldberg (17:05)
Thank you so much, Alison. We are going to Aaron Reed at Aaron in the Morning in the latest episode of their podcast, which is fantastic, by the way. It's called A Touch More All Star athletes Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird, a lovely couple by the Way denounced the International Olympic Committee's new rule requiring sex testing for athletes competing in the women's category. The anti trans policy is going to subject athletes competing in the women's division, the only women's, not men's, by the way, to invasive sex testing to determine whether they have an SRY gene. Why this is where the International Lipman Committee chose to draw the gender line is arguably arbitrary. No major medical organization endorses this litmus test as a reliable marker of athletic skill or biological sex. Even the scientist who discovered the SRY gene has slammed this practice in sports, saying science does not support this overly simplistic approach. Rather, it's an arbitrary line in the sand used to cram unscientific ideas about gender and sex into man made binary boundaries. Nonetheless, if women test positive, okay, if a woman tests positive for the gene, she could be forced to compete in the male category. This has had dire consequences the last few times it's been deployed against women's athletes. From 1992 to 1999, cisgender women were forced into testing and found out on the world stage that they had intersex conditions that they didn't even know about. The spectacle led to ostracization, disqualification, and at least one suicide before such testing was abolished. There's a reason this was abolished. And I quote, what we're doing is subjecting everybody, all women, all people who are identifying as women, to this really invasive testing that only to me just says like, oh, so we're just trying to whittle it down to a certain type of woman. This is for Megan Rapinoe. Now, Rapinoe, as we know, is one of the high profile athletes in the country, one of the highest. A soccer player with three Olympic competitions under her belt and a decorated career in the US Women's National Team, the uswnt. If you hear that again, Bird. Sue Bird, meanwhile, is among the most successful athletes in history. The retired WNBA legend spent her 20 season professional career at a point guard for the Seattle Storm and is a record breaking Olympian in her own right. The athletic power couple has been engaged, as I said, since 2020. Together, they've long been outspoken advocates for the LGBTQ community. Rapinoe connected the anti trans vitriol in sports to the right wing's broader attacks on queer and trans people. Calling the push for sex testing hateful, she said they sort of like lost the battle of gay marriage. So it's just like we're just gonna have this whole campaign for all these years to just hate trans people. Which a small percentage of the population, countless women, cisgender and transgender alike, have faced harassment and persecution because of the anti trans athlete witch hunt. And I quote, it's just a total acquiescence to the Trump administration. This is from Rapino. She said, it's just horrible. I'm just sickened by it. Now the IOC rule is part of a broader pattern. In the United States, sports bands have served as a Trojan horse for more sweeping anti trans policies. The DOJ's recent lawsuit over women's sports, for example, also demands that transgender students be banned from bathrooms and locker rooms. Another quote, can we please stop obsessing over trans people and I don't know, maybe focus on our time, energy and resources into real problem women's sports face. This is from Sue Bird. This is when she chimed in. She rejected the idea that sex testing, as the IOC claims, and I quote, protects women, instead calling it fear mongering, political ploy meant to generate support from conservative voters. She says that's all this is. Again, this is from Bird. If you crack this door open, it gets blown open. You're now policing women's bodies across the board. And she's not wrong. She's not wrong.