'Stunning and Brave!': Trevor Noah Swoons over Andy Kaufman in Drag on 'The Daily Show'
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'Stunning and Brave!': Trevor Noah Swoons over Andy Kaufman in Drag on 'The Daily Show'
Sports cheat celebrated, hooray
One of the more nifty recent developments on the American left is a conversational bubble around the word “woke.” What is “woke”? they ask themselves, pretending no one can answer. (This is also what they have done to the word “woman.”) Former comedian Trevor Noah has provided the perfect answer. Sports cheat and transgender activist Veronica Ivy was welcomed to The Daily Show last night so he could bullshit America about the human rights of women.
What is “woke”? The Daily Show treating Veronica Ivy seriously, instead of a fucking joke, is woke. Take a still image of his appearance and start printing an 8x10 inch glossy photo of it in every dictionary page right across from the definitions of “woke” and “wokeness.”
I am not going to do a point-by-point refutation of this garbage, since it is garbage, and there tons of people with greater academic authority than myself to cover the science of sport. (Never in my life did I ever suspect that scientists would be defending biological reality instead of giving us flying cars, but here we are.) Since I am just an historian, all I have to add to this conversation is the historical context.
To wit:
For three thousand years, women had the wrong bodies for sports. Then, Title IX established women’s sports in US education for a period of fifty years, fostering a global explosion of women’s sports. But now, women no longer exist, so we cannot have sports for them anymore. Sorry! Those sports now belong to mediocre men with “gender identities.”
The history of “Veronica Ivy” is revealing. “She” was previously “Rachel McKinnon.” For some reason entirely unrelated to this person being dismissed from a college teaching job for allegedly abusing students, or living with a man arrested for possession of child pornography, or their (surdeadname? Deadsurname?) on a dissertation justifying bullshit as a rhetorical tool — for some reason, entirely unrelated to any of those things — he was unsatisfied with “Rachel” and became “Veronica.” Maybe he just lives inside of an Archie and Jughead comic in his own mind. (Or maybe he is a change artist. They have happened in history, whereas “trans” happened in the last few seconds, historically speaking.)
Anyway. “Ivy” is definitely a sophist. His rhetorical argument should be restated thusly: natural mutations exist, I am a man who calls himself a woman, therefore I can cheat women out of their sports.
I am not being at all unfair here. That is my plain-spoken restatement of “intersex women are women, trans women are women, therefore we should be in women’s sports,” which is a fair paraphrase of what Ivy actually says in the clip that The Daily Show has posted to their Twitter account as some sort of wise words about “inclusion.”
Again, there are far better voices out there than me to explain what is so fucked up about this argument, but let me try. First, “Veronica Ivy” is not intersex. “Trans” is not intersex. “Intersex” is not an identity. It is a political label that Genderism uses to colonize a disparate group of rare congenital conditions and appropriate their medical language in order to mask immutable male biology and male sexuality. Phrases such as “assigned at birth” are in fact red flags for Genderist imperialism. Claims of intersex “identities” are some of the most notorious and obvious lies that transgender-identified men tell in order to justify their fetishes (I need only cite the disgusting example of “Jessica Yaniv” here, who actually tried to pass off this lie on the record in a human rights tribunal).
Here is a graphic listing intersex conditions. Note that in order to claim membership in this actually-marginal community, a person must first acknowledge being either male or female, because every one of these conditions is sex-based.
Throw out this half of the argument as a fabrication and queer theory loses all foundation; the bait-and-switch becomes obvious to everyone. You see, the history of “Rachel McKinnon” is that when he became the “women’s world track cycling world champion,” he was still an unaltered male. That’s right. No changes. Tell me the difference between a man cheating at sports and a man named Susan cheating at sports, using facts.
Here is a later photograph of the era. Notice how fit Reese McKinnon was? Not world-champion athletic, but still quite fit. A little soft maybe. The changes have started. The totalizing incompatibility of “inclusion” with “fairness for women” in sports cannot be unseen: a mediocre man is dominating women, even as he transforms into a schlub.
He defended this at the time by saying that it is “mutilation” and “castration” to force trans women to alter themselves in any way before competing as women. So when McKinnon smoked the real women (which makes him “feel like a real woman,” natch), he was still fit, and unaltered, and otherwise male except for his invisible, ineffable “gender identity.”
Everyone else just had to tolerate this. Who wants trouble from an obvious narcissist?
But then Reese/Rachel got himself castrated, and then lost his lover to the law, and his job to his bullshit, and moved to Canada, and “Veronica Ivy” got fat. This was to be expected and would have been considered common sense once upon a time, when most of us lived on farms and knew what happens to castrated male animals. A procedure he thought would “feminize” him greatly fattened him. Oh no! What is an aspiring transgender activist to do?
Redemption arc time! McKinnon/Ivy was recently able to recapture a piece of his former glory by finishing far behind the men, but still just ahead of all the girls, in another amateur competition. Hooray! Still a bit out of trim, Reese/Veronica experienced some difficulties on the track, though. Specifically, because the riders have their feet locked to the pedals at the start, there was a “holder foul” when the person assigned to hold his fat ass up on the bicycle was unable to carry out the assignment, because huge fatass:
He was still good enough to beat the girls, though, and that makes him feel like a real girl, which proves he really is a girl on the inside. Circular reasoning, hooray!
Finally, let me step aside from my historian role to speak from personal experience, not of Reese/Rachel/Veronica but Daily Show creator Lizz Winstead. I have met her, and at the time she was an effective activist for reproductive rights. Less than a year after I met her, however, she was one of the chief ideological enforcement agents purging critics of Genderism from reproductive rights circles. No doubt she has also done the same for the corporate culture of her creation. Comedy Central probably think they have done a good thing here. The past is not real to them. His body is not real to them. All that matters to them is the politics of the issue. Ideological blinkers have made Trevor Noah and the Daily Show unfunny. Authorized funny is never funny, and no one is laughing at the sports cheat, at least not in a way that is acceptable to the ideology.
As a political scientist, I can say with certainty that they are completely wrong about the politics. Hilariously wrong. They are in fact alienating another tranche of former viewers. “Gender critical” is not a right wing plot, it is half the Democratic base, and Genderism has handed this wedge issue to the party of the right with an invitation to divide their political allies with a series of blows to this wedge. Republicans will play ads of Lia Thomas swimming without kicking his legs on loop throughout October and it will work. Slow clap.
This gaslighting fuckery — sneaking men into women’s sports through backdoor intimidation and then trying to make it all seem acceptable through the power of popular media — has not worked on the public. It has failed, and it will not look good on anyone who took part in it. Read the room, fellas. Figure out your exit strategy.