Not sure if you heard about this, but over the weekend, cyclist Austin Killips won the 137-mile-long Belgian Waffle Ride in North Carolina in the women's category. Killips finished five minutes ahead of her closest competitor.
"So why is this news?" you might be asking yourself. Well, what I didn't mention above is that Austin Killips is a biological male. Killips is a trans woman who has been competing in women's cycling events since 2022 and racking up quite a few wins in that time.
Controversial trans cyclist Austin Killips wins North Carolina race by 5 minutes https://t.co/Jf7oO1vx9n
— New York Post (@nypost) June 12, 2023
The Daily Mail reports that in a race in December of 2022, Killips appeared to be trying to push a fellow cyclist — an actual woman cyclist, I should note — off the course:
In a competition from December 2022, Killips was seen seemingly trying to push female cyclist Hannah Arensman off the race course during the UCI Cyclocross National Championships.
Video posted to Twitter sees Killips attempting to shove 24-year-old Arensman into the boundary fence. It led to some people online calling for her to be disqualified from the race entirely.
Arensman said: 'I fully expect that in cycling, as a full-body contact sport, you’re going to get hit at some point.
'But when you have someone born a man run into you, over 6ft tall, it’s quite different. I tried to keep racing, not to let it get into my head at all. That one instance caught on video felt unnecessary, though.
Arensman and Paige Onweller, who came in second place in the Belgian Waffle Ride, seem reluctant to categorically denounce what Killips is doing, which is cheating. But new polling suggests that more and more Americans aren't willing to give cheaters like Killips and Lia Thomas a pass:
New Gallup: 69% of Americans now say trans athletes should only be able to play on teams "that match their birth gender."
— David Weigel (@daveweigel) June 12, 2023
7-point shift toward that position since 2021. Among Dems, too, from 41% holding that position in 2021 to a 48% today.
https://t.co/PqUZTl6GEe
*typo there, should be "a 48% plurality." Dems went from +14 for "teams that match identity" to +1 for "teams that match their birth gender."
— David Weigel (@daveweigel) June 12, 2023
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A larger majority of Americans now (69%) than in 2021 (62%) say transgender athletes should only be allowed to compete on sports teams that conform with their birth gender. Likewise, fewer endorse transgender athletes being able to play on teams that match their current gender identity, 26%, down from 34%.
If you spend a lot of time on Twitter, you could easily assume that the radical trans activists are winning. They're the loudest, after all. So numbers like these are encouraging and might even give us cause to be at least cautiously optimistic.
And it's important for as many people as possible to recognize that trans women in women's sports (let's face it, we're not really seeing a whole lot of trans men trying to get into men's sports) isn't only wrong because it's inherently unfair, but also because it's dangerous. Women athletes have gotten seriously hurt at the hands of trans women athletes.
100% of biological men should not participate in women's sports. https://t.co/GV7XyPQPja
— Dr. Roger Marshall (@RogerMarshallMD) June 12, 2023
Amen.
And hopefully more and more women athletes will take their cues from women like Riley Gaines and speak out more forcefully against the travesty that is trans women competing in women's sports. The only way this can really change is if real women stand up for themselves.
If most women don't speak out, they deserve to have women's sports destroyed.
— Pradheep J. Shanker (@Neoavatara) June 12, 2023
We can only fight the good fight. https://t.co/cRih0b7aJb
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