Playing A Transsexual In A Bad Movie Doesn't Make You An Expert On Our Sporting Lives

One of the things I and many trans persons get sick of is people who don't live our trans lives making loud and wrong commentary about them that is detrimental to our humanity as trans people and our international human rights cause.

The latest person to fall into that trap of flapping their loud and wrong gums about our lives is actress Michelle Rodriguez.  She's already catching flak from our community concerning an upcoming movie in which she plays a doublecrossed male assassin that gets kidnapped and given SRS against his will in a movie originally called Tomboy but has now been renamed (re)Assignment.

Still not going to deflect from the fact this looming transphobic trope filled disaster of a movie will be desecrating multiplexes soon, and Trans World will still be calling out the problems in it.

I'll deal with that transphobic trainwreck of a movie in another post.  What I need to do right now is address the WTF tweet that Rodriguez sent calling for a transgender category in the Olympic Games that was aimed at South African 800m runner Caster Semenya, who goes for gold later tonight.

The first problem with this tweet is it's conflating the issues of transgender participation in sports with the issue of hyperandrogenism, and is spreading misinformation to do so.

Let me state for the record Ms. Rodriguez since you obviously aren't aware of this fact, but the IOC since 2004 has allowed trans people to compete in the Olympic Games after consulting with medical experts from around the world familiar with transgender medical issues and transgender inclusion in world sport.    

The International Olympic Committee was obviously satisfied enough about what they  heard from the IOC Medical Commission concerning transgender sporting participation in the Games to issue the Stockholm Consensus that many international sporting federations use as their guidelines for transgender sporting participation in the sporting competitions they oversee.

The International Olympic Committee also in November 2015 refined those procedures and policies in the wake of the IOC Meeting On Sex Reassignment and Hyperandrogenism.

The NCAA also allows transgender athletes to participate in collegiate sports, and those rules are mirrored by 34 state high school sporting associations and counting.

Let me also point out for you as well Ms. Rodriguez and any other peeps believing the fallacy, that trans women after a year on estrogen and testosterone suppression hormone protocols lose whatever strength and endurance advantage stemming from going through a masculine puberty.

I played varsity tennis in high school and still play from time to time, and I noticed I lost speed on my serve as a result of being on hormones since 1994,

The fallacy that because I or any trans feminine athlete went through a masculine puberty I could go out and for example join the women's professional tennis tour and dominate it is ludicrous at best and would be demolished the nanosecond I stood on a tennis court with Serena Williams on the other side of it and had to face her 120 mph serve she would blast past me with boring regularity.

And with trans feminine kids transitioning at earlier ages, they will be going through FEMALE puberty, not a masculine one.  It's also a disservice and an insult to cisgender female athletes everywhere to falsely claim that a trans feminine athlete would simply take over their sport just because we transitioned.

I'm also disappointed Ms. Rodriguez as a fan of your acting career, a fellow woman of color and BTLG community member that you resorted to attacking Caster Semenya as your vehicle to slam trans Olympic participation.  

I'm tired of seeing the racist attacks on Semenya from white women mad that Semenya has run the fifth fastest time ever in the 800m, and alarmed about the perceived threat in their minds that she presents to their hold on a track event they have recently dominated.

The fact that Semenya was 18 and from South Africa when she ran that 1:55:49 time at the 2009 world championships, and would only get better with time and training has really 'scurred' them into action to stop her since they feared they couldn't beat her on the track.

The ongoing attacks since 2009 on Semenya's femininity and gender presentation also plays into the racist 'unwoman' trope that has plagued African descended women across the African Diaspora since slavery, and has been exacerbated by the fact she is in a same sex relationship..

Looks like Mariya Savinova, the Russian woman who won the gold in London in 2012 had to allegedly get her better athletic performance through chemistry to beat Semenya.

But back to talking about trans people and their Olympic Games participation.

The IOC has made it clear in 2004 and again in 2015 that I or any trans person who puts in the work in their chosen sport, meets the criteria from their international sporting body and their national Olympic Committee to qualify for their national Olympic team in their chosen sport will be allowed to participate in the Olympic Games.

I want to see trans women do more in the Olympics than just be part of the opening ceremonies, I want to see a trans women one day standing on a medal platform and competing and winning in their chosen sports.  The trans kids growing up today also need to see that happen in a future winter or summer games and I hope they do in the rest of my remaining time on Planet Earth.

Ms. Rodriguez, being a cisgender person playing a transsexual in a bad transsexual trope filled movie doesn't make you an expert on our sporting lives.

Being a trans person or trans ally that is cognizant of the issues that impact our lives, and has either the lived experience or has done the research to intelligently talk about it does.

Olympic Gender Drama-Erik Schinegger

With us a month away from the start of what are sure to be the controversial Sochi Olympic Games, here's another one of my posts about Olympic and world class athletes that were embroiled in gender identity or gender related drama either during or in the runup to an Olympic Games.

We're going to jump into the wayback machine and go back to the June 19, 1948 birth in Agsdorf, Austria of Erik Schinegger.   Erik was raised as a girl named Erika who became a world championship downhill ski racer.

In Portillo, Chile in 1966, 18 year old Erika Schinegger won the title over France's decorated Olympic and world championship skier Marielle Goitschel.

In 1967 because of Marielle Goitschel's and Nancy Greene's of Canada's dominant World Cup season she fell to sixth in the overall standings and relinquished the downhill title to Goitschel.

But going into the 1968 runup to Grenoble, Schinegger was considered a favorite for three Alpine skiing medals on the women's side.  But because of concerns that the Eastern Bloc nations were using disguised genetic males to compete for medals in women's international athletic competition, invasive gender testing was inaugurated starting with the 1966 European track championships and expanded to the Olympics in 1968.   

Grenoble would be the first Winter Games that female competitors would have to submit to such testing, and now 19 year old Erika submitted to it along with the other Austrian skiing hopefuls as part of the formality for competing in the Olympic Games.  

Doctors found only male hormones in the saliva of Schinegger, and submitted her to more rigorous scientific and psychiatric testing that led to a shocking discovery for the soon to be 20 year old who had been raised as a girl but was questioning her sexuality at the time.

Schinegger was told by IOC doctors she couldn't compete in the Games because she was chromosomally male and intersex.  After digesting and accepting the news Schinegger changed his name to Erik, went on a hormone regimen, started living his life as male and underwent a corrective surgery that revealed he had an internal penis and testicles.

"The discovery was a tremendous shock for me, my parents and everyone who knew me," Schinegger was quoted as saying. "What came afterward was an indescribable torture."


Erik set his sights on competing for Austria in the 1972 Games in Sapporo, Japan.  He trained hard for it and found himself beating many of the leading male Austrian skiers of the time but was denied a spot on the Austrian National Ski Team assembling to compete in Sapporo.   

Schinegger subsequently retired from international skiing, got married twice and fathered a daughter in addition to running an inn and a children's ski school in the Carinthia region of Austria..   Schinegger also penned an autobiography entitled  Victory Over Myself and during a documentary that was filmed about his life handed his 1966 World Championship gold medal to Marielle Goitschel. 

Openly MRKH Contestant In Miss USA 2013

We won't have a girl like us competing in the Miss USA 2013 pageant next month because Kylan Wenzel unfortunately didn't win the Miss California USA pageant.

I'll still have somebody else to root for besides the women of color and my Lone Star state representative when I watch the pageant on June 16 and see who  Miss USA 2012 Nana Meriwether crowns as her successor. 
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My friends in the intersex community are excited to learn that Miss Michigan USA Jaclyn Shultz is one of the 51 women vying for the Miss USA crown.

Jaclyn has a condition that affects one in 4500 newborn girls called Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome.   MRKH affects the reproductive system and causes the vagina and uterus to be underdeveloped or absent    Women with MRKH syndrome have a female chromosome pattern (46,XX), functioning ovaries, conventionally developed external female external genitalia and breast and pubic hair development.

In Jaclyn's case, as she mentions in her Miss USA profile, "Jaclyn is the proud spokeswoman for A Beautiful You MRKH Foundation. Since she was born without a uterus, this non-profit is close to her heart."

She has been working to spread awareness about MRKH and provide support to girls and women across the globe who are diagnosed with it. 

As Claudia Actorino said in the opening sentence of her post about Jaclyn, 'intersex bodies are beautiful.'

I wish Jaclyn the best of luck in the upcoming Miss USA 2013 pageant and continued success in her ongoing mission of spreading awareness about MRKH.


H/T  Claudia Actorino- 
 

More Than Just XX Or XY Chromosomes

One of the things that makes me laugh my butt off whenever I see it in a comments section I decide to peruse to gauge the ignorance in is when the scientifically illiterate trans bigots start braying that 'XX chromosomes equals female' and 'XY equals male'.

I'm hearing trans bigots spew that far too often in their attacks on Fallon Fox (and other trans women) and I'm sick of it.

FYI trans bigots.  As we transpeople are a living testament to, Mother Nature doesn't like nice neat gender binaries.   She likes to throw you curve balls, which is why I like to constantly remind people who spout that ignorant jibber-jabber that transpeople are part of the diverse mosaic of human life.

It's why we transwomen can come out of the womb with a masculine body and a female mind and gender ID.  The reverse is true for our trans brothers who have the masculine mind and gender ID but the body stayed female.

But back to the chromosome issue I wanted to shed some light on. 

There's XO, Turner Syndrome in which a female has only one X chromosome. A female bodied person can also be XY due to Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS).  Men can have an extra X chromosome due to Klinefelter's syndrome, which means they have an XXY.   

There are also some of you alleged cismasculine he-man transwoman haters who are walking around this planet with XX chromosomes.  There's also XXX, XYY, XXXX, XXYY....

Are your heads spinning yet?   Oh yeah, the only way you are going to find out what somebody's chromosomal makeup is damned sure not by looking at their outward gender presentation or the genitalia between their legs and making loud and wrong assumptions about it.   It requires you to do lab testing to find out for certain. 

Human beings are far more complex than the gender binary allows.  The existence of humans in all their biodiverse configurations is making that crystal clear as the mounting scientific research continues to point out. 

There Nigeria Goes Again-Sports Gender Whining About Equatorial Guinea

The soccer entitlement of Nigeria knows no boundaries.

Seems like I wrote about this story two years ago when Equatorial Guinea hosted the Africa Women's Cup tournament and eventually won the title in what was considered a major upset.

The mighty Nigerian Super Falcons women's squad was mortal during this 2008 edition of the tournament as the five time champions whined, complained and griped their way to a bronze medal finish despite scoring only three goals in the entire AWC tournament.

Most of the Nigerian gender bitching and complaining was focused on the Equatorial Guinea home team.   Nigerians threw 'that's a man' shade at its team captain Anonma Genoveva, who was the MVP of the 2008 AWC tournament with seven goals and the Simpore sisters.

The Nigerian Gender Bashing Noise Machine reached deafening levels after Equatorial Guinea upset Nigeria in the semis 1-0 and later went on to beat South Africa 2-1 to complete their dream of taking their first AWC title on home soil . 

After all the gender lip flapping the Nigerian Football Federation did during the 2008 AWC and later to the Confederation of Africa Football, the continental governing body for African soccer, the Nigerian Football Federation looked like hypocrites later.

In 2009 word leaked out they had a talented then 16 year old teen striker named Bessy Ekaete they invited to Super Falcon camp who was discovered during her medical exam to be  intersex.  A Nigerian superfan started an effort to fund Ekaete's SRS so that she could be eligible to potentially play for the Super Falcons.  


Fast forward the story to now, and this time the African Women's Championship soccer tournament was being hosted in South Africa from October 31-November 14.

The stakes were higher for this AWC  because it was a qualifier to determine which two nations would represent the African continent in the upcoming 2011 FIFA Women's World Cup in Germany.    

You would think that all would be right in the soccer world for the Super Falcons after capturing their sixth AWC title, avenging their 2008 loss by beating defending champ Equatorial Guinea 4-2 and punching their Women's World Cup ticket at the same time.


But do you think the Super Falcons were happy about how their sporting business trip to South Africa transpired?   Nope.   

The Nigerian sore winners filed complaints with the CAF, the governing body of African continental soccer over guess what?

The same tired assertion they made in 2008 that Equatorial Guinea was playing 'men' in the recently concluded tournament they just won for the sixth time in seven tries.


And who is the Equatorial Guinea player getting the Nigerian gender third degree this time?   Salimata Simpore.

The Confederation of Africa Football confirmed she's the player the Nigerians are gender questioning, and the complaint has been forwarded to the CAF medical committee for further review.

As I said in 2008, I don't see any Nollywood quality looking women on the Super Falcons either, so they really need to chill with this.    Or is big bad Nigeria, the most populous nation on the continent that 'scurred' of the emergence of little old Equatorial Guinea as a potential African soccer powerhouse?  

If it weren't for two Equatorial Guinea own goals in the final, the result might have been a little different.

I could be talking about Equatorial Guinea being the back to back AWC champs and the Nigerian Gender Bashing Noise Machine would probably be at Fox News levels by now.     
   

Ghana and Cameroon also made the same complaints during the recent AWC tournament.   Not surprisingly they were playing in the same Group B with Equatorial Guinea and finished second and third in the group play stage.  Equatorial Guinea knocked off the Black Queens 3-1 and played Cameroon to a 2-2 draw. 


Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon had the same 2-0-1 record in group play and both advanced to the knockout round, but Equatorial Guinea did so as Group B champion thanks to goal differential.

Cameroon eventually was blown out in the semis by Nigeria 5-1 and lost the bronze medal match to the homestanding Banyana Banyana 2-0.  The South Africans lost to Equatorial Guinea 3-1 in the other semifinal game. 


But it's only the sore winner Nigerians who have lodged an official complaint to CAF.

Equatorial Guinea's football federation of course is vigorously defending their players.  They asserted that there is a "campaign of defamation" against their team, motivated by an "inferiority complex."

Ouch.  Equatorial Guinea is also strongly motivated to defend their squad because they qualified for the FIFA Women's World Cup which will be contested next June and July.

The CAF said there is no timeline for the investigation, so stay tuned to this latest episode of Nigerian gender whining.    .