Postmedia take on female transgender athletes is simplistic, shallow

As the discussion on female transgender athletes in elite sports amplifies, it’s significant to note who’s making the noise.

For example, Postmedia recently published an editorial that served as a pom-pom waving salute to World Aquatics for its recent decision to include an ‘open’ category at a World Cup swim meet set for Berlin, Oct. 6-8.

A “brave and sensible compromise” is how an unidentified opinionist described the WA decision to open its pool to all qualified swimmers in 50- and 100-metre events, assuming there’s no evidence of a dorsal fin growing between their shoulder blades.

But wait.

Athlete Ally labelled the World Aquatics ruling “dangerous and damaging,” and the non-profit organization’s director of policy and programs, Anne Lieberman, delivered a blunt caution that the WA directive “promotes further othering and alienation of transgender athletes who already face tremendous stigma and abuse. This only increases hostile gender norms and invasive testing that hurt all women athletes.”

So who are we to believe?

Well, let’s examine the bona fides of the two.

Postmedia is the largest newspaper chain in Canada, with editorial influence spreading farther than Michael Phelps’ wing span. Its flagship, the Toronto Sun, has been cruelly described as “the newspaper for people who can’t read.” (I must confess I’ve always found that slag giggle-worthy, even when I worked there in the early 1980s, because the tabloid was large parts flash and flesh, with big type at the top of the front page, big pics inside and out, and big boobs on Page 3, which featured a Sunshine Girl whose wardrobe would have been a snug fit on a Barbie Doll.)

It’s rep as a trashy tabloid was well earned, even as The Little Paper That Grew once had some serious journalism chops (think Peter Worthington and Allan Fotheringham on politics and my all-time fave sports scribe, Trent Frayne).

We don’t know the identity of the person whose fingers were at the Postmedia keyboard for its Aug. 21 editorial, but I’m guessing it wasn’t a transgender person. (We’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and accept it wasn’t someone from the cleaning crew, although it might have been a summer intern who gave the issue 30 seconds of ponder while noshing on a ham-and-rye during lunch break.)

Anne Lieberman

Meantime, there’s Lieberman, a major player at Athlete Ally, a group working “to dismantle the systems of oppression that isolate, exclude and endanger LGBTQI+ people.”

Anne has an M.A. from Columbia University in Human Rights and a B.A. in African and African American Studies and Women’s Studies from Fordham University. She’s a longtime advocate of LGBT(etc.) rights and gender equity, and a major player in South and Southeast Asia for American Jewish World Service (AJWS). There was also a Fulbright Fellowship conducting research on gender and sexuality in Muay Thai.

Sounds like Anne is too busy to take lunch breaks.

Postmedia might want to consider her as a guest columnist on female transgender athletes, though, because their take is simplistic and shallow (it ran in their Sun papers in Toronto, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Calgary and Edmonton). They expose themselves as dupes who believe the World Aquatics policy is something other than a doubling down on their decision of a year ago to ban female transgender swimmers from women’s competition.

Among the Postmedia claims: “It’s unfair to allow people who have gone through puberty as a male to compete in women’s races. There are those who argue trans athletes don’t have an advantage in women’s sports. It’s hard to take those claims seriously.”

They delivered that statement without a sliver of supporting evidence. They cite zero studies, they quote zero experts. They just rant.

Had they done some fact-digging, they’d have known that the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport last year released results from E-Alliance research on female transgender athletes that includes this among their key biomedical and sociocultural findings:

• Available evidence indicates trans women who have undergone testosterone suppression have no clear biological advantages over cis women in elite sport.
• There are troubling links between some researchers, sport organizations, and third organizations with anti-trans agenda;
• Many trans ‘inclusion’ sport policies use arbitrary bounds that are not evidence based.
• Trans women are significantly underrepresented in sports, especially in elite sports. This evidence directly counters the claim that large numbers of trans women are playing competitive sports.
• Many sport organizations circulate myths about trans women that are transphobic, harmful, and violent. For example, that trans women will overwhelm women’s sport, when trans women are in fact underrepresented in sport and especially elite sport; or that trans women are cis men in women’s clothes, a dangerous misunderstanding of trans women’s identities and experiences directly linked to trans women’s decreased safety especially in such highly gendered spaces as sport.

Or…

Joanna Harper

The Postmedia opinionist might have sought Joanna Harper for insight. She has a master’s in physics, is a visiting fellow for transgender athletic performance at Loughborough University in England, and she did the first study on transgender female athletes in 2015.

“Rather than looking at simply one or two or a few successful trans women and saying that it’s unfair, I would suggest you should look and see if trans women are overrepresented in women’s sports, and they aren’t. Trans women are hugely underrepresented in that population,” she said last year when World Aquatics initially booted trans females out of the pool.

But here’s the part of the Postmedia editorial that really got up my nose:

“Science says females have two X chromosomes and men have one X and one Y chromosome. It should be easy to decide which team you’re on.”

Easy to decide? How positively ignorant. How naive.

We don’t “decide.” That’s done for everyone at birth, when our parents look between our legs to determine what’s down there and promptly declare us to be a Jack or a Jill and raise us accordingly. It isn’t until years later that you realize something is curiously out of whack. That you’re a Jill, not a Jack. You’ve had no voice in “which team you’re on,” you just know you’re on the wrong team. You then spiral into an unspeakable struggle that can last for decades, all the while demons driving you into a dark hell. You look for an escape route, which some find in gender affirmation surgery, and you hope and pray you don’t lose too many family and friends.

It isn’t the XX, XY no-brainer Postmedia makes it out to be.

But I’ll leave the final word on female transgender athletes to Harper, the medical physicist: “The question isn’t ‘do trans women have advantages?’—but instead, ‘can trans women and women compete against one another in meaningful competition?’ Truthfully, the answer isn’t definitive yet. The science is in its infancy and we are not going to have definitive answers for probably 20 years.”

Will the last female transgender athlete to leave the arena please turn out the lights?

Once upon a lifetime, I played chess.

I wasn’t very good at it, not like those clever kids who can play, and win, multiple games simultaneously, but I once managed to register a stalemate vs. the most basic of chess computers (at the third-lowest level) in the 1970s, when I was no longer a kid.

That modest achievement failed to arrest the attention of world champion Bobby Fischer, and I took his indifference as a clear signal that I best not give up my day job, which was mostly a night job writing and editing sports copy at the Winnipeg Tribune. The pawns, the knights and the rooks would have to get along without me, and I without them.

Until this past week, I hadn’t devoted much ponder to chess since then, the exception being in the 1990s when Garry Kasparov went mano-a-machine vs. Deep Blue, an IBM computer.

Kasparov, at that time world No. 1, whupped Deep Blue in their initial six-game test (4-2), but the computer exacted revenge in the rematch (3½-2½ ). Their two exchanges generated headlines globally, even in the sports sections of some newspapers, and the brainiacs of board games had their 15 minutes of fame.

Fast forward to another century, which is to say the here and now.

Chess is once again generating headlines because the International Chess Federation (FIDE) has ruled that transgender females have “no right” to join in the checkmate fun. At least not in FIDE-sanctioned women’s competition. They can play vs. the dudes (or a computer, one supposes) but the damsels are off limits.

“In the event that the gender was changed from a male to a female the player has no right to participate in official FIDE events for women until further FIDE’s decision is made. Such decision should be based on further analysis and shall be taken by the FIDE Council at the earliest possible time, but not longer than within 2 (two) years period,” is how FIDE worded it in the updated handbook.

The Lords of Checkmate provide no explanation for their puzzling posture, leaving us to conclude that they believe biological women are too daft to match strategy with their transgender foes or men. Can you say misogyny and transphobia, kids?

But wait. FIDE vows to gather deep “research evidence” on the matter, like mulling the benefits of a Sicilian or Scandinavian Defence, but in reality they’ll give it no more thought than the breakfast menu at McDonald’s.

After all, what’s to learn? They’ve already joined the nasty and relentless anti-transgender lobby and pushed it into a new lane, from the physical to the cerebral. Instead of yelping that transgender females are bigger, faster and stronger, FIDE is now inferring that cis women are lacking a full load of hay in the loft.

How FIDE plans to prove that a great gap in grey matter exists is a mystery, but I’m guessing they’ll cobble together a group of people with egg-shaped heads and their findings will be as hair-brained as the chess ban. Little wonder US Chess along with federations in England, Germany, France and Finland have given thumbs down to the FIDE policy and will continue to welcome transgender players.

“While we do take FIDE policies into consideration, we independently establish our own policies and procedures,” US Chess Senior Director of Stategic Communication Daniel Lucas told The Messenger.

Here’s the reality of the situation:

The Lords of Checkmate want transgender females included in their game like Donald Trump wants another sheriff with a subpoena knocking on his door.

FIDE doesn’t actually believe transgender females have more smarts than cis women. That’s pure rubbish and insulting in the extreme. And they know it. But they, like so many sports groups ahead of them in the monkey see-monkey do, anti-trans queue, want trans chess players to know their proper place, just as the lords of rowing and rugby and swimming and cycling and World Athletics, etc. have already done. And like more than 20 U.S. states that have enacted laws to have them exiled.

In the anti-trans lobbyist’s perfect world, the Gender Police would gather all the female transgender athletes and ship them off to a remote locale, the way the British did with their dispensable nogoodniks in the 1700s/1800s. Or perhaps they’d rather create transgender colonies, where the sports lepers can run and jump and move their knights and rooks in anonymity.

Ridiculous? Of course. But no more illogical than the notion biological females were given partial portions when brains were passed out.

I now wonder what sports governing body will next join the anti-trans lobby, because there are people in positions of power and influence (politicians, media) who won’t be satisfied until the transgender female athlete in women’s competition is extinct.

Perhaps it will be the World Pool-Billiard Association. After all, there are striking similarities between chess and, say, 8-ball. Neither is physically demanding, since it takes only marginally more strength to push those 15 little balls around a patch of green cloth than it does to slide a Bishop diagonally across a chess board to capture the Queen. And a cue weighs what, 17-21 ounces? Why, that’s barely bigger than the swizzle stick in a FIDE board member’s cocktail glass.

But here’s where the transgender female pool sharks might find themselves at risk: 8-ball is very much a matter of mind. There’s decision-making. Tactics. Creativity. Problem-solving. Ruthless attitude. You know, the same as chess.

The Lords of 8-Ball might see that as a recipe for banishment.

Go ahead and say it won’t happen—that it will never happen—but who would have thought that FIDE, with its immense, superior man brains (61 of 72 officials’ positions are occupied by dudes), would be so dense as to be duped into doing the anti-trans lobby’s dirty work.

Talk about pawns.

Rapinoe moves America’s hateometer needle like no athlete since 1960s Ali

The raw, unbridled hatred heaped upon gay soccer icon Megan Rapinoe reminds me of another athlete and another time in the United States.

Others of my vintage will also recall when Muhammad Ali was Cassius Clay, an outrageous, rebellious braggart who made certain that white America knew he was a loud and proud Black man.

After whupping the fearsome thug Sonny Liston to secure the world heavyweight boxing title as Clay, he promptly introduced himself the next morning as Cassius X, a member of the Nation of Islam and soon to be known as Muhammad Ali.

“I believe in Allah and in peace,” Ali informed news snoops after he’d used his fists of fury to raise a collection of gnarly knots on Liston’s head. “I don’t try to move into white neighborhoods. I don’t want to marry a white woman. I was baptized when I was 12, but I didn’t know what I was doing. I’m not a Christian anymore. I know where I’m going and I know the truth and I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be what I want.”

That’s not how white America expected, or wanted, Black people to speak in 1964.

“It was unimaginable for most Black athletes to stand up that way and say, ‘I’m going to play by my rules and to criticize presidents and to criticize the war and to call all of white America a fraud,’ ” explains Ali biographer Jonathan Eig. “That was radical.”

So was telling Uncle Sam to go to hell.

Ali became America’s most notable draft dodger three years later, when he declined Uncle Sam’s invitation to travel across the world and spray bullets in Vietnam. (“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.”) He was sentenced to five years in prison, fined $10,000 and booted out of boxing for 3½ prime time years.

As much as sports scribes had been humored and entertained by Ali’s childlike charms, many of the elder statesmen on press row harrumphed mightily in consideration of his anti-war rhetoric, and his embrace of the Muslim faith was viewed as an example of the dangers of cult-like brainwashing by the Nation of Islam, otherwise known as the Black Muslims.

“I pity Clay and abhor what he represents,” wrote Jimmy Cannon. “In the years of hunger during the Depression, the Communists used famous people the way the Black Muslims are exploiting Clay. This is a sect that deforms the beautiful purpose of religion.”

Jackie Robinson

Even racial barrier-busting ballplayer Jackie Robinson struck a sour note.

“He’s hurting, I think, the morale of a lot of young Negro soldiers over in Vietnam,” Robinson said.

The most stinging indictment of Ali was delivered by David Susskind, an American television personality and producer who unleashed an incendiary, racist attack on the boxer and the Muslim faith: “They hate whites, the Muslims. They mean genocide. Elijah (Muhammad) preaches genocide. Muslims are hooligans, killers, and they intend a total segregation of the races, that’s what they want. And they want the final holocaust, they want genocide, white genocide, that’s what that man preaches. Not that he can preach anything. He has trouble saying hello. Anything that’s not Black is evil and rotten and contagious and they want to exterminate it.”

He described Ali as “a simplistic fool and pawn and semi-illiterate and a disgrace to his country, his race and what he laughingly describes as his profession. He is a convicted felon. He is out on bail. He will inevitably go to prison, as well he should.”

Clay-turned-Ali had become the biggest pain in the ass since the first case of hemorrhoids was diagnosed. He was the most hated man in America, reviled by whites, Blacks, men, women, children and probably some house pets as well.

And now we have Rapinoe, who’s moved the needle on America’s hateometer like no North American athlete since the 1960s Ali.

Sure, there have been other villains, such as Tommie Smith and John Carlos, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, ARod, Tonya Harding, Lance Armstrong, Mike Tyson, Michael Vick, Pete Rose, Johnny Manziel and Colin Kaepernick. All but Smith, Carlos and Kaepernick cheated or spent time behind bars.

Rapinoe did neither, yet she’s taken more wallops than one of Tyson’s old sparring partners.

And for what? Because she took a knee during The Star-Spangled Banner to protest social injustice. Because she refused to sing the national anthem. (I’ve got news for you: so did the aforementioned Jackie Robinson.) Because she’s passionate in her advocacy for equity and equality. Because she trumpets her LGBT(etc.) community. Because she’s engaged to a she (hoops legend Sue Bird). Because she wants women to have control of their bodies. Because modesty isn’t part of her makeup, like purple or blue hair. Because she’s been a magazine cover girl. Because she’s never been shy about sharing her opinion. Because she won and bragged about it.

Oh, and let’s not forget that faulty kick from the spot in the United States Women’s National Team’s 5-4 shootout loss to Sweden that ushered the Americans out of the FIFA Women’s World Cup the other day Down Under.

That was some seriously flawed footballing, so ghastly that former U.S. president and current presidential wannabe Donald Trump broke free from his lawyers long enough to use Rapinoe’s flub as part of his arsenal in his bid to return to the White House.

Donald Trump

“Nice shot Megan,” he posted on Truth Social. “The U.S. is going to Hell!!! MAGA.”

No doubt that cheap shot earned Trump some freebe political brownie points, but let’s keep in mind that it wasn’t Rapinoe’s penalty that scuppered the Americans. Young Sophia Smith had the game on her right boot seconds later. Alas, she kicked the ball from a spot in Australia but it landed somewhere in New Zealand.

Ah, but Smith’s gaffe=empathy; Rapinoe’s gaffe=hate.

As far as I can determine, the American’s sole bout of wrongfootedness during her stretch with the Yankee Doodle Damsels occurred in a 13-0 blowout win vs. Thailand at the 2019 World Cup. Rapinoe acted like a damn fool in an affront to sporting decency everywhere, but she wasn’t flying solo. Her associates were equally contemptible in celebrating each goal with a war-has-ended energy. It was an egregious lapse in judgment, worthy of scorn but not a lifetime of revilement.

Perhaps history will be kind to Rapinoe, as it was with Ali, who had made the journey from reviled to revered long before his death in 2016. Americans can be a very forgiving people.

I just don’t know what it is that Rapinoe needs to be forgiven for.

Let’s talk about Mud Murdoch…a pinata named Rapinoe…Rouge Football balderdash from the Republic of Tranna…golfing on cow pastures?…and sickening news in tennis…

I remember the day Bob (Mud) Murdoch was introduced as the freshly minted bench puppeteer of the Winnipeg Jets, although certain of the details are sketchy.

To the best of my recall, which admittedly is grainy, it was a lovely summer day and us news snoops had gathered at a downtown hotel for Mud’s coronation, whereupon I approached him for a re-introduction once the formal portion of the proceedings had been cleared away.

I say “re-introduction” because Mud and I had a bit of history, dating back to the early-1980s.

Mud Murdoch

He had been one of Badger Bob Johnson’s assistants with the Calgary Flames, you see, and I wrote a daily sports column for the Calgary Sun, having escaped the Republic of Tranna.

“Didn’t you and I coach the Flames one night?” Mud asked with a knowing smile.

“We did,” I answered. “I was the head coach, you were my assistant.”

It was true.

The final act of the Flames training exercises that particular year was a full-on intrasquad game, Reds vs. Whites, in Okotoks, just a hoot and a holler down the road south of Cowtown. The reasons behind my participation behind the bench escape me, but no doubt it involved the promotions department of the newspaper and the National Hockey League club. Who benefited? Certainly no one on the shinny side of the hokey promotion, and not the newspaper, since I declined to recount my night as an NHL coach in the next morning’s sports section.

Basically, it was a silly idea and we all went along with the gag.

“You were terrible,” Mud reminded me at his coronation near Portage and Main. “You were a terrible coach.”

“Terrible?” I squawked in mock horror. “Who won the game?”

“We did.”

“Case closed. I retired undefeated. Let’s see if you can do as well with the Jets.”

We both laughed, then I offered him some tongue-in-cheek counsel: “Rent don’t buy. Coaches don’t last long in this town.”

Turns out that Mud coaxed a 37-32-11 record out of the Winnipegs in his first whirl, 1989-90, and that earned him the Jack Adams Award as top bench boss in the NHL. Alas, he was dismissed following his second season (26-43-11, out of the playoffs), and the Jets lost a good man. An cerebral man. A humorous man. An engaging man. A guy with the best mustache this side of Tom Selleck.

And now that good man has left us permanently, dead last week at age 76. RIP Mud, and thanks for the giggles.

Megan Rapinoe

Well, the American media won’t have Megan Rapinoe to use for a pinata much longer, but we can be certain they’ll get in a few good whacks before the veteran forward fades into life after futbol. It wasn’t Rapinoe’s fault that the U.S. failed to locate the back of the net through 120 minutes of nil-nil soccer vs. Sweden this morning, because she didn’t step onto the pitch until the second 45 of regulation. Still, she flubbed a penalty kick in the shootout that ushered the Yankee Doodle Damsels out of the FIFA Women’s World Cup, and that will be their main talking point, also a source of great glee. Some among her print/electronic antagonists are sure to heap further scorn on Rapinoe because she was observed smiling at the bitter end while a few of her younger associates were in tears. As sure as there’s a crack in the Liberty Bell, Rapinoe will take the rap for the Americans’ misfortune.

I don’t know about you, but I prefer my futbol on TV with a British accent. I tried watching the Fox Sports feed of the U.S.-Sweden skirmish, but it just didn’t work for me. I lasted about as long as it takes to butter my toast, then it was back to the TSN feed for English accents and the calming cadence and deeper knowledge of the talking heads.

Winnipeg Blue Bombers 50, B.C. Leos 14. Say no more. I mean, doesn’t that score say it all?

Here’s Davis Sanchez of the CFL on TSN squawk squad, comparing Toronto Argos QB Chad Kelly to the legendary Doug Flutie, whose collection of Canadian Football League trinkets includes six Most Oustanding Player Awards, three Grey Cups rings, three Grey Cup game MVP awards: “(Kelly’s) that good, that talented.” Good grief.

Come to think of it, the blab boys on TSN said the same thing about their favorite lousy quarterback, Johnny Manzel, when he came up north as an NFL washout and made his exit south as a CFL washout. I believe Johnny Rotten has since washed out of every football league in existence (and some that have disappeared), and the gum-flappers on TSN finally stopped talking about him last week.

There’s been chatter drifting from the Republic of Tranna that Kelly is the leading candidate for MOP this year. Can we table that discussion until post-Labor Day?

BMO Field

This morning’s comic relief comes courtesy Damien Cox, a Toronto Star scribe who sometimes notices Rouge Football, but only if Auston Mathews and Mitch Marner have gone fishing, or whatever it is that 20something multi-millionaires do with their downtime. And so it was last week when Cox decided to rain hosannas on the Argos, fresh off their sixth successive W in six skirmishes.

Here’s a sampling of his scribblings:

“For two decades, it seemed the Toronto Argonauts were intent on dragging the rest of thd Canadian Football League down with bad teams, bad attendance, bad marketing or all of the above. Now, it appears the Argos are the CFL franchise determined to pull the rest of the three-down league up by its collective bootstraps. How’s that for a turnaround in fortunes?
“Indisputably the best in Canadian football right now.”
“In terms of on-field product, the Argos are the class of the league.”
“They are setting a standard that only the Lions seem capable of matching.”
“For now at least, an unbeaten and untied Toronto squad gets to be the flagship of the league.”
“Their latest triumph should at least start chatter about whether the Argos are capable of running the table.”

Hoo boy. Where to begin? Well, let’s start with that “flagship of the league” hooey. It takes more than six wins to become the flagship of Rouge Football. It also includes community interest and support. In their two assignments at BMO Field this crusade, the Boatmen are averaging 14,220 customers. By way of comparison, the Bombers (the actual flagship franchise) attracted more than double that (30,874) to the Football Field In Fort Garry on Thursday night, when they rag-dolled the Leos, 50-14. Calling the Boatmen the “flagship” is like calling a cocktail napkin a beach blanket.

As for the rest of Cox’s d’oh boy musings, we know the Argos won’t be “running the table” unless there’s a recount on their 20-7 drubbing vs. Calgary Stampeders on Friday, and…well, let’s just say he jumped the gun on all counts.

The Train Trestle Hole at Kildonan Park Golf Course.

Here’s something weekend hackers in Good Ol’ Hometown and environs probably didn’t know about their golf courses: They’re cow pastures. I mean, what other conclusion is there to be drawn after scanning SCOREGolf’s list of the top 59 public courses on Our Frozen Tundra? Get this: Nine provinces are represented, the sole outrider being Manitoba. Here’s the evidence:

BC: 18
Ontario: 17
Alberta: 9
N.S.: 6
Quebec: 3
P.E.I.: 3
NL: 1
N.B.: 1
Saskatchewan: 1
Manitoba: 0

That’s right, according to SCOREGolf, even the Flattest of Lands has a public 18-hole track (Waskesiu Golf Course in Prince Albert National Park at No. 22) superior to anything you’ll find in our own backyard. (I agree, it’s hard to imagine Saskatchewan having the 22nd best of anything, let alone a golf course.)

Well I call BS on the whole thing. I mean, give me Kildonan Park and its Train Trestle Hole any day. And, hey, there’s a Sals on site.

If you’re interested in teeing it up at the best of the best according to SCOREGolf, you’ll have to pack a bag and a toothbrush and head to Nova Scotia or Alberta. The top five are: Cabot Cliffs and Cabot Links in Inverness, N.S., Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge and Fairmont Banff Springs, and Cape Breton Highlands Links in Ingonish Beach, N.S.

And, finally, it pained me greatly to read about now-former Tennis Manitoba president David Scrapneck, who stepped down in disgrace after some disturbing posts surfaced on social media last week and exposed him as a raging homophobe/transphobe. According to a Winnipeg Free Press report, one post featured side-by-side pics of two groups of kids, one waving Nazi flags and the other waving Pride flags. The caption: “Same evil, different era.” That’s beyond disgusting. It sickens me. It’s an immeasurable level of hate that can be emotionally crippling to those in the LGBT(etc.) community, especially the youth, and I assume gay kids play tennis in Manitoba. Maybe they’ll quit now. I hope not. I hope they know there are good people eager to provide them with a safe space on the tennis courts in Good Ol’ Hometown and, indeed, the province. They shouldn’t be hard to find, either. At least that’s my experience. My time covering tennis for the Winnipeg Tribune throughout the 1970s was pure joy, thanks to wonderful folks like Jo and Jack Brown, Ellie O’Gorman, Judy Peake, Rick Borland, Glenn Booth, Bob Moffatt, the Campbell sisters, Jim Matthews, Betty Tuch, George Kylar, etc. The Canoe Club and Winnipeg Lawn Tennis Club were special places, and those were special people.

The demonizing of loud gay icon Megan Rapinoe

As far as I can determine, the Yankee Doodle Damsels frolicking at the futbol fest Down Under are permitted to sing but not dance.

I arrived at that conclusion because numerous members of the United States Women’s National Team have been toasted like so many campfire marshmallows for declining to warble the Star-Spangled Banner pre-match. (And here I thought it was a futbol competition, not an audition for The Voice. Who knew?)

“These morons on the women’s soccer team continue to embarrass us on the national stage,” went a bleat from American journalist and media personality Megyn Kelly. “They won’t sing the national anthem. Half of them won’t put their hands over their hearts. Even the ones who are singing are half-assing it. They clearly don’t want to be doing it. I mean, they look like they don’t even want to be there. It’s like some sort of inconvenience to be representing the U.S.A. It’s shameful. These girls are shameful. They ought to be ashamed of themselves.”

But wait.

A few among the YDDs were also observed in full guffaw and—gadzooks!—doing a jig scant seconds after a dreary, you’ve-gotta-be-kidding-me, nil-nil saw-off vs. not-so-mighty Portugal, a stalemate that thrust the Americans from the group stage and into the knockout kickabouts at the FIFA Women’s World Cup in Australia/New Zealand. Apparently, a post-match do-si-do is also frowned upon.

“I’m all for positivity, but at the same time, the cheering, the dancing, I’ve got a problem with that,” gasped USWNT legend Carli Lloyd.

Many others have joined the chorus.

“I wonder if the US team—I’m hesitant to write ‘our team’—is aware, or even cares, that it’s very difficult, if not impossible, for self-respecting Americans to waste their time on them,” is how New York Post columnist Phil Mushnick put it.

Meantime, longtime journalist Jason Whitlock of Blaze Media described the Yankee Doodle Damsels as a “group of overpaid, spoiled, and entitled women who claim they’re underpaid and underappreciated and that they represent a racist, homophobic, and sexist country. I despise them. I want them to lose.”

Then it got nasty.

Megan Rapinoe

Whitlock reserved a special level of animosity for aging-out forward Megan Rapinoe, calling her “the ultimate pimp,” a “fraud” and “toxic,” and referencing “her shallowness.” Both Mushnick and Kelly provided the accompanying vocals, the former calling Rapinoe “vulgar” and the latter informing us that she has “poisoned the entire team against the country for which they play.” (Interesting to note that Kelly neglected to produce a sliver of evidence to support her accusation, but why let the facts get in the way, right?)

Anyway, if you’ve been trying to follow along at home, you either hate the Americans or you hate the Americans. And Rapinoe serves as the lightning rod for the hostility.

In his peculiar, spiteful essay that is part misogyny, part Title IX (“one of the greatest hustles in the history of pimping”) and an uncommon amount of Rapinoe-bashing, Whitlock puts her directly on the spit seven times, with nary a mention of any other member of the national women’s soccer side. The way he has it figured, whatever misadventure befalls the Yankee Doodle Damsels, it’s all on the gay forward with the big yap and the blue, short-cropped hair.

It’s as if Whitlock awoke one morning to discover Rapinoe in his kitchen, peeing on his Corn Flakes while her accomplices loitered outside on the team bus.

But here’s what I find myself wondering: How much, if any, of the anti-Rapinoe rhetoric we read and hear is rooted in her sexuality?

I know Whitlock, Kelly and Mushnick solely through their scribblings and commentary, thus I can only speculate on state-of-belief (you know, the same way they speculate about the American’s toxicity and narcissism), and I’m not prepared to suggest one or all three of them is anti-LGBT(etc.). Perhaps it’s a subconscious thing, though, because Rapinoe hasn’t been among the starting 11 for any of the Yankee Doodle Damsels’ three skirmishes, nor has she seen much of the pitch in a substitute role Down Under. She’s barely a spoke in the U.S.A. wheel. Still, the non-singing, the dancing…hey, why not blame the loud gay girl, right?

And maybe that’s what’s really at play here. It isn’t so much that Rapinoe is gay, it’s that she’s a loud lesbian. Put a microphone under her nose and a Pride parade breaks out: “Go gays! You can’t win a championship without gays on your team!”

But why is that leftover sound bite from 2019 considered obnoxious and objectionable?

I mean, didn’t Joe Willie Namath guarantee a Super Bowl win for the New York Jets? Ditto Mark Messier and the Stanley Cup for the New York Rangers? Both men were admired for their bravado (although a great many initially snickered when Joe Willie made his boast).

Yet when the loud lesbian says you can’t win without gays, she’s met with scorn and ridicule, and it hasn’t eased in four years. Even if her message was/is accurate.

Again, I can’t measure the undercurrent of anti-gay bias in the media, but it’s my experience that homophobes walk among news snoops. It’s just that most aren’t daft enough to say it out loud. They’re usually subtle.

Megan Rapinoe has had no influence on the pitch during the current kickabout, and who among us knows what goes on behind the Americans’ changing room doors? Perhaps she’s been performing Satanic rituals at halftime, or poking pins into a Lady Liberty doll, and she has her 22 younger Yankee Doodle Damsels hoodwinked into playing along.

In reality, Kelly, Mushnick, Whitlock and others of their ilk have produced zero evidence to support the notion that Rapinoe, a part-time player, has poisoned the U.S. water supply Down Under.

If she’s guilty of anything, it’s losing the final foot race with Father Time, the same fate that awaits all athletes.

So why demonize her? Because she’s a loud gay icon.