Today, Monday, August 2, 2021, a big strong man bombed out of the superheavyweight class of the Women’s division of the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. Read that sentence again: We are living in a post-truth society. The best that can be done with it is to finely hone your cynicism, question everything you are told, and learn to appreciate dark humor.
Gavin Hubbard is 6’1” at 285 pounds. He was most assuredly born a physical male and competed somewhat successfully in the Men’s Division of Olympic weightlifting up until 2001. Psychological issues caused him to reevaluate his gender identity, previously based on his physical sex, and he was reportedly “surgically re-assigned” in 2012 to reflect his commitment to his new gender identification as “Laurel.”
All of this is entirely his own personal business and has nothing to do with the rest of humanity. If a guy wants to castrate himself and have cosmetic surgery, he should have the freedom to do so.
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But being born a male – having developed in utero under male levels of testosterone exposure – makes you forever and always different from having been born a female, whose congenital development took place without testosterone at those levels. It doesn’t matter if you decide to get rid of this pesky equipment at the age of 34 because your entire body, and especially your neuromuscular system, has already enjoyed the benefits of masculine development for 34 years, plus seven months of testosterone exposure before birth.
The system was primed before birth, and the system finished turning itself into a physical male during puberty. His psychological environment was adequately male-stable to allow him to compete in Olympic lifting until he was 23, with a 135kg snatch, a 170 clean & jerk, and a 305 total in essentially the same weight class he bombed out of today (in competitive lifting, “bombing out” means you failed to successfully complete one of the lifts). His best total after “transitioning” was 285 in 2019, not that far off the PR set 21 years earlier.
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And yet the politicians at the International Olympic Committee, in concert with their superiors at NBC Sports, decided in 2015 that a testosterone level of 288 ng/dl was just fine if a guy wants to compete against the gals. You know lots of men walking around below 288 right now. Merely reducing serum testosterone to a level that is still perhaps 10 times as high as female “normal” does not make you a female, and that this idiocy is being accepted as “truth” in a big splashy celebratory way makes a sane person rather irritated. Having what we all know to be true blatantly portrayed as false is an interesting part of the PSYOP currently at play. If you can be made to believe that a big strong man belongs in the Women’s Division, then you can be made to believe anything.
So Hubbard’s personal business can remain his personal business – until it affects the athletic careers of female athletes in the Women’s Division of every sport in the world. Politics has superseded reason, and once this is okay, a downward spiral starts. You’ve seen this before.
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