We’re sure that Caitlyn Jenner realized that there would be backlash in response to her revealing that she is a trans woman, but this is a ridiculous: Almost 12,000 people have signed a Change.org petition imploring the International Olympic Committee to take back her 1976 gold medal. Their reasoning being:
This creates somewhat of a problem as Ms. Jenner (as talented as she is) claims that she has always believed herself to be truly female, and therefore, was in violation of committee rules regarding women competing in men’s sports and vice versa. Therefore, it is with a heavy heart that we must ask whether or not it is proper that Ms. Jenner should retain her olympic records in light of this, as we must now either claim that Bruce Jenner and Caitlyn Jenner are two entirely different people (which we know is not true), or that Bruce Jenner was, in fact, a woman participating in a men’s event.
Thankfully, the IOC thinks this is ridiculous. But seriously? To those 12,000 people we nicely say: go get yourself a damn hobby.
Team Blackness also discussed Rick Perry’s entrance into the GOP presidential clown car, Sarah Palin’s outcry that the Duggars are no different from Lena Dunham, and a 13-year-old girl who committed suicide after her father’s public shaming video.
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David in NY
That sentiment needs to be used more often.
Sherparick
I would say to all these so called good “Christian” folk a big GFYS.
The same people cut their tribal brethren on the religious right, like the Duggers, no end of slack as long as they “keep bashing the gay,” “shame the sluts,” and assert male sovereignty over a woman’s uterus.
Finally, they really are not hip on the bible.
Matthew 7:1-3King James Version (KJV)
“7 Judge not, that ye be not judged.
2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”
Andrey
The specific petition is patently ridiculous, but at some point the IOC and other sports bodies will need to find a better solution for sports that are currently gender segregated. Right now they’re contributing to reinforcing a strict gender binary, and it’s going to be increasingly clear that that’s a problem.
Shakezula
I do love it when stupid people try to sound intelligent. The use of claim as in “we must now either claim” is particularly bizarre. Must you? Must you now? Must you claim it? Do you know what claim means?
Extra points for the heavy heart.
Belafon
@Sherparick: Because they don’t believe they’re judging. They believe that are enforcing the will of God, and they’re special enough to be able to speak for God because it’s there in the Bible.
shell
Yes, I love the ” it is with a heavy heart” weaseliness. “Oh no, we don’t WANT to do this, we’re being forced by the purity of our convictions.”
Nylund
I think you could rephrase this petition as:
“Someone did something brave, but we don’t see it that way. We see it as icky. Make that person suffer.”
srv
I’m not sure if I should blame God or Satan:
SatanicPanic
It is with heavy heart that I must call these people assholes.
jl
The silver lining is that these bigots are being reduced to silly trolling that makes them look insane and ridiculous.
shell
@srv: Sweet Jesus, how did this guy become a Supreme? (Don’t tell me; I remember all too well.)
Another native son we New Jerseyan’s can be proud of.
Steve in the ATL
Based on information and belief, Jenner had a penis at the time he competed as a man, so it seems appropriate that he competed as a man at the time. It’s a trickier question when a man becomes a woman then wants to compete as a woman.
muddy
@srv: Now the Devil has possessed pigs and made them Supreme Court Justices instead.
SatanicPanic
@srv: wait, what? 5,000 years? WTF
KG
with a heavy heart, I must say: this is their hobby.
KG
@SatanicPanic: well they did say “at least 5,000 years”… like telling the bartender that you’ve been alive for “at least 21 years”
Ruckus
@SatanicPanic:
My heart isn’t heavy about calling them that. I think it’s actually pretty easy for me to do. Takes no effort at all. Assholes. See that was easy.
But I get your point.
On my FB feed someone tried that shit about his metal and her current life, and the backlash astounded me. And people I know are WTF is wrong with these assholes. So I don’t think there is near as much traction as these 12,000 think. Maybe, just maybe this is one of those tipping points that has to happen to give a little light to those that need it that there is a sizable group in this country that is totally batshit fucking crazy and wants everyone else to join them.
Gene108
I am still in shock over the Bruce Jenner sex change. I have vague memories as a kid that he was on all Wheaties boxes and other stuff because of his super awesome athletic ability; and now he’s a woman.
Find it weird.
Edit: also shocked when he turned up on a reality TV show. Somehow thought his post-Olympic life would have been more meaningful.
mtiffany
TWiB: “Keep your beave game tight.”
scav
@Andrey: That’s already been coming up with a few women runners if I remember quickly moving headlines correctly. Expressed phenotype (rather than ideas flitting about in the brain) is one firmish point, but even that’s certainly going to get tricky. Plus the issues raised by Pistorius.
Belafon
@Gene108: Maybe they can put Caitlyn on a Wheaties box.
Lizzy L
Spiteful, stupid, or both? You choose! This is all about a public person not adhering to what these folks insist are gender norms. It’s punishment. Get a life. Really.
muddy
@Belafon: Society demands she be on Special K instead. Don’t confuse people!
A Ghost To Most
If my math is correct, we are only one klandidate away from “Klownteen and Kounting”
ThresherK
Hey, if they want to take the medal back, why not go full circle and rerun the competition among the original athletes who were in Stade Olympique, Montreal, in 1976?
Nature abhors a vacuum.
benw
@shell: It is outwardly with a heavy heart, and inwardly with a secret glow of smug self-satisfied righteousness.
CONGRATULATIONS!
This is the second time today I’m being forced to defend something/someone I don’t care for at all.
These 12,000 toxic assholes (and counting, there will be more) should all be pressure flushed through a fine mesh screen after having any useful organs they might possess removed. You gotta be one special snowflake of an asshole to make a request like that.
gene108
@Belafon:
For what?
Bruce won the Decathlon, IIRC, at the Montreal, Olympics, which was apparently a big deal back then.
Caitlyn’s just using Bruce’s new found celebrity – due largely to reality T.V. – to make headlines herself.
Calouste
12,000 people, so about half a mega-church.
Calouste
@Gene108: In the era of strictly-amateur Olympics, there were not that many choices between giving up the sport and becoming a full-time celebrity, and going back to the day job. Couldn’t even get any endorsements in those days. And after he had been training more or less full-time for a decade, I can understand that he wanted to cash in.
burnspbesq
My guess is that every cell in Caitlyn Jenner’s body still has one X and one Y chromosome, and in 1976, for purposes of eligibility to compete, that made you a man. Suck it, haters.
Belafon
Let’s say they had a point. Name one Olympic event Jenner participated in as a man that a woman could have won.
Mike in NC
Morons. Bless their heavy hearts!
Belafon
@gene108: I’m just looking for further ways to tell 12,000 people to go stick it.
skyweaver
“Therefore, it is with a heavy heart….”
Yeah, not so much. Jerks.
shawn
sort of on topic, where are you guys on the man who is now a woman fighting women in the UFC? her althetic career is coming after her transition (forgive me any wrong words/pronouns I am almost certainly using) so it’s different then Jenner’s deal but in the same arena kind of. idk if this was a BJ topic when it was in the news or if bringing it up breaks some kind of forum rule
RaflW
@Ruckus:
A woman I know who is a significant regional trans activist (and in her 80s and still kicking butt on lots of issues) was saying the other evening at a Minneapolis nonprofit event that Jenner’s coming out may well be a similar turning point to Rock Hudson’s public AIDS diagnosis back in the icky Reagan era.
I tend to agree – think what I may about Kardashians and all that crap, Jenner was a major athlete-hero a la Wheaties boxes and all, and the Vanity Fair cover makes quite a contrast.
Patrick
It amazes me that these bigoted people care more about their hatred than they do for their own country. She hates Jenner so much that she wants to take a gold medal away from the US.
It reminds me of when a right-wing group here in the US was caught celebrating when Chicago didn’t get the Olympics because they thought it was a defeat for Obama.
If these bigoted people hate our country so much, then why don’t they move to Iran or Somalia, which have policies that seem to be more to their liking.
Belafon
@shawn: I don’t remember a discussion, but this article is not about Jenner’s transformation, but the reaction to it. Most of us couldn’t care less if Bruce became Caitlyn.
shawn
@RaflW: IDK, they spent a lot of respect capital with that show – i gather he wasn’t as big a part of it as the daughters were, but that whole group has not been awesome. didn’t their real dad help acquit OJ?
conversly wasn’t Rock Hudson kind of a big deal slash bad A back in the day? like very well respected and beloved?
i could be making both of those things up
Corner Stone
@Gene108: Get over yourself.
scav
Heavy hearts won’t get you past the feather of Truth and into a happy afterlife. Lunch line for Amenti forms to the right.
Corner Stone
@Sherparick:
That’s hardly appropriate with all the Duggar talk going around.
burnspbesq
@RaflW:
I think that activist is right. Every pimply-faced, straight male teenager who gets hard from looking at pictures of Caitlyn Jenner is eventually going to say to himself, “hey, trans women aren’t from Bizarro World; they’re just women who had a different journey to womanhood. So why treat them as if they’re from Bizarro World?” That’s a win for the cause of accepting people as they are. And once you get to accepting people as they are, it’s a short step to asking why we still discriminate against those people.
Mike J
@skyweaver: Cardiomegaly is no laughing matter.
FridayNext
@Gene108:
Actually, he started doing cheap tv crap very early on to capitalize on his fame. Here is one of my favorite clips from the old Battle of the Network Stars and it was recorded less than a year after he won his gold medal. The way he walks around sticking his microphone in everyone’s face and horning in on Cosell’s turf is kinda funny and a little portentous. Now, I’m not arguing the hallowed BOTNS is as base and cheap as the Kardashians, but Jenner’s dignity after winning the decathlon started seeping away almost as soon as he crossed the finish line.
ETA: Full disclosure. I pretty much go around looking for ways to put that clip into discussions. Watching Mr. Kotter race Pappy Boyington/Jim West is one of my most cherished sports memories.
shawn
just to clarify, i know Caitlyn didnt have anything to do with OJ, just saying, that is part of that solar system and I don’t know that Rock Hudson had a lot or any bad press before hand
Mike J
@shawn:
You’re thinking of the LAPD. If they hadn’t been busy trying to frame him, they might have brought in enough evidence with an acceptable chain of custody to get a conviction.
shawn
@burnspbesq: i know teenagers only need a stiff breeze to get excited but i dont see Caitlyn Jenner EVER being put up on a teenage boy’s wall and not because she was once Bruce, but because she isn’t tradtionally pretty – i said in the other thread but for comparison Helen Mirren has at least 5 years on her and looks so much better (no plastic surgery) and she’s not up many teenage boys walls either i would guess
shawn
@Mike J: yeah that whole sentence should have just been left out by me, oops :P
shawn
ok apparently Helen Mirren HAS had work done, she just doesn’t have that over done plastic surgery face
kc
The petition is really stupid, and I don’t wish Jenner ill, but I’ll be kind of glad when all the gushing over this rich Republican reality TV star dies down.
jayjaybear
And if that hobby involves intrapersonal penile prostate stimulation, so much the better.
Eric U.
what bothers me about all this is that Jenner isn’t in jail for killing someone while texting. Or maybe checking to see if she was trending on facebook or something.
Belafon
@kc: It’s not people gushing that’s keeping her in the conversation.
kc
@FridayNext:
LOL at Telly Savalas with that cigarette . . .
MaryRC
@shell: The petition is a prank, started by 4chan.
http://www.dailydot.com/lol/4chan-petition-caitlyn-jenner-olyympic-medal/
kc
@Belafon:
It is on my Twitter feed. I guess I could unfollow a slew of people, but I like most of them most of the time. :)
ETA: Granted, I looked at my FB page for the first time in a while a few nights ago, and right near the top was a wingnut Army veteran’s post frothing with rage about the amount of the attention Jenner is receiving.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Eric U.: Vehicular manslaughter, four years is the usual sentence, and it’s on video.
World’s easiest bet: probation or time served.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@MaryRC: Oh, that is too good. Gotta love how 4chan keeps delivering.
Put your outrage away, people. We got duped.
kc
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
.
I hope so, or we’ll be treated to months of argle bargle over whether she’ll serve time in a men’s or women’s prison.
kc
@MaryRC:
Looks like they fucked with at least 12,000 wingnuts, too.
scav
@MaryRC: Amenti is not going to be happy, Amenti is getting peckish and doesn’t like sorting though the lunch line, distinguishing the trolls from the real meal deals.
ETA: wonder if he’ll even bother sorting then?
Pogonip
@shawn: Coincidentally, a couple of days ago I read an interview with a lady who fought him-now-her. That lady must not have done any coed training because she was quite surprised at how strong he-now-she was. Having trained with men myself, I wasn’t surprised at all.
Origuy
I posted this in the twin of this thread, which isn’t getting many comments:
I looked up the IAAF rules determining sex. (For 2015; I didn’t go back to 1976,)
There are no rules for a woman in any stage of gender change competing in a men’s competition.
ThresherK
@skyweaver: Yeah, that’s right up there* with the eternal “This hurts me more than it does you” in the Crocodile Tears HoF.
And Joe Lieberman was my senator for a number of years, so I know it when I see it.
(*on these petitioners’ part)
kc
OT: Fun read about Ben Carson’s campaign & fighting SuperPacs.
qwerty42
@Belafon: Because they don’t believe they’re judging. They believe that are enforcing the will of God, and they’re special enough to be able to speak for God because it’s there in the Bible.
Some things the nuns taught you never forget: this is the cardinal sin of Pride.
kc
@Pogonip:
Allowing a transgender woman to compete in athletic events like this for women is grossly unfair to women who weren’t born male.
Botsplainer
@Andrey:
Jenner carries a five stroke handicap in golf. That’s actually something that matters. If she relocates to red tees, she’s got a monstrous advantage in any round she plays, to the detriment of the scores of any opponents on the green (not to mention any bets).
I’d like to be there for her first golf foursome as Caitlyn just to hear the arguments.
Pogonip
@kc: That was pretty much what the interviewee was hinting at, though she was too sportsmanlike (no pun intended) to come right out and say it.
This is all new territory in the Anglophone world. I wonder if Caitlyn even made the news in Thailand. They’ve got more ladyboys than you can shake a dick at and have had for centuries. My aunt told me the word for the third sex of ladyboys but, rarely having had occasion to discuss the subject, I have forgotten it. It was something like “kaflooey.”. Ladyboys are also an official third sex in India and I think in a few other countries as well.
cmorenc
Didn’t the IOC have to confront some questions about the bona fides of some of the Cold War Era East German women’s athletes in summer olympic events where physical strength was particularly at a premium? As in, whether they were bona fide genetically female?
MattR
@Origuy: And the stupidity of the petition is that gender segregation is generally done to protect the female athletes. None of Jenner’s 1976 decathlon results would have been good enough to win medals in any of the individual men’s races, but they topped the individual female gold medal winner in 5 of the 8 common events (there was no pole vault for women and the women race 100m hurdles while the men run 110m)