It's a great time to be a pathetic loser: defector.com/its-a-great-…
— Defector (@defector.com) May 28, 2025 at 11:59 AM
Tom Ley, at Defector: [gift link]
Donald Trump released yet another deranged statement on Tuesday, demanding that a transgender high school student be barred from participating in the California state track and field championships, which are scheduled to be held this weekend in Clovis, Calif. The inane thoughts that make their way from Trump’s obviously diminished mind onto his Playskool social media platform should not demand the attention of any right-thinking Americans, and yet in this case the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) snapped to attention, rewriting its qualification rules in an attempt to appease those behind what’s become a national hate campaign directed at a 16-year-old high school student.
The student Trump was referring to in his post is named AB Hernandez. She is set to compete in the high jump, triple jump, and long jump at the state championships, and she has spent the past few months being harassed by a local group of bigots. This group is led by Sonja Shaw and Jessica Tapia, both members of the Save Girls Sports association. Shaw is currently running for California superintendent of public instruction, and Tapia was recently fired from her teaching position at Hernandez’s high school for refusing to respect trans and nonbinary students’ pronouns. At a qualification meet earlier this month, Tapia and Shaw led a group that spent hours heckling and harassing Hernandez as she competed.
Cerise Castle of Capital & Main has done a fantastic job covering this story, which has all the familiar beats: Hernandez has been on the track team for three years and never drew any attention until now; she finished first in triple jump, eighth in high jump, and third in long jump at the qualification meet; she has shown nothing but grace and maturity in the face of intense bigotry. “There’s nothing I can do about people’s actions, just focus on my own,” Hernandez told Castle. “I’m still a child, you’re an adult, and for you to act like a child shows how you are as a person.”…
Here we are once again confronted by a central truth about the people who lead these anti-trans campaigns in sports, which is that although they are first and foremost hateful bigots, they are also huge fucking losers. Sports serves many valuable purposes: Creating a place where someone like Hernandez can find community, camaraderie, and comfort in her body is a big one, but so is teaching kids and young adults how to deal with failure. The freaks who make it their mission to antagonize Hernandez and other trans athletes always claim to be acting out of a duty to fairness. Anyone who has ever played or seriously engaged with sports knows, however, that “fairness” is often the first word out of the mouth of a loser. There is always, always something “unfair” for the loser to latch onto and turn into an excuse. Walk around any youth sports competition and you’ll hear plenty of them: That team has a kid who is too big and strong; the rich kids from one county over have access to better equipment; my kid would have won if he hadn’t rolled his ankle last week.
Sports will always, eventually, take something from you, and then it will leave enough space for you to convince yourself that your loss was unjust. What you get out of the experience often comes down to what you do with the impulse to fill that space. Years of cultural conditioning has taught athletes that it is best to ignore that impulse, to accept failure on its own terms and derive whatever lessons you can from it. But now we are faced with a growing chorus of hateful losers who want to reverse all of that conditioning, and in the process turn sports into something small and stupid. The lesson these people want to give to their children is that if circumstance places their athletic failure near the success of someone who belongs to a specifically marginalized group, they are free to huff and puff and stomp their feet until the President of the United States himself intervenes to validate their tantrum. The quicker these people get shoved into a locker, the better.
Mad Cow Disease for Chatbots (Open Thread)
Professor Bigfoot
“It ain’t right that n-word’s got a nicer car than me!” (out come the nightriders)
Old School
Baud
@Old School:
You don’t expect the Secretary of Education to understand how numbers work, do you?
Old School
Dorothy A. Winsor
Cripes. What’s it to these people who participates? They should try minding their own business.
Gretchen
I haven’t been able to find the story – I think it happened somewhere in the NorthEast. A trans girl came in first in a track meet, and Trump went off about it. The girl who came in second said that she had made her personal best in that race, and was really excited about it, and Trump grousing about her coming in second ruined what was a big moment for her. She had no hard feelings about the other kid coming in first, and was very happy with her performance until the bigoted adults weighed in.
Jeffg166
I’m not athletic. I am graceful enough to not trip over my own feet most of the time. In high school PE I avoided as much participation as I could.
There was one day in the basketball cycle of the year all the really lousy disinterested kids were put on two teams to play each other. It was hysterical. We were having a blast. No one care what the hell was happening.
The gym teacher notice and put one of the “star” player from the basketball team into our game to take all the fun out of it. It did.
One thing I learned was all the jocks with actual talent for this stuff were the biggest cheaters. They cared so very much about “winning”. They would lie and cheat as much as they could. I thought then and still do that they are pathetic.
Gretchen
@Old School: the funny thing about that is that Riley Gaines tied for 5th in that swim meet with a transgender athlete. If that other swimmer hadn’t been able to compete, Gaines would have come in….5th.
Matt McIrvin
@Jeffg166: “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying”.
mapanghimagsik
@Old School: she was pretty great in MASH
JanieM
@Gretchen: Maybe you’re remembering this story.
JiveTurkin
Special place in hell for people who harass a high school kid because of who she is.
eclare
@Jeffg166:
I took high school gym in summer school because for half the class we went bowling. I am definitely not an athlete.
Steve LaBonne
@JiveTurkin: And I wish we could send the lot of them there right now.
Matt McIrvin
@mapanghimagsik: Probably cast because she bore an amazing resemblance to Sally Kellerman, who played Houlihan in the movie, but she turned what had originally been this shallow joke character into someone with real complexity.
gratuitous
Would the complainers promise to go away if we gave them a participation trophy? But only if they can name five professional female athletes.
Josie
My youngest son was an athlete and competed in a number of ways in high school. Parents were a big problem in sports competition–finding ways to bully or convince the coach to play their kid, demeaning opponent kids during games, yelling terrible things at referees. You name it, I saw it. I often wished they would just shut up and sit down. I’ll bet their sons often wished the same.
Archon
My cousin and I constantly debate this issue because he thinks Democrats need to give up on the trans issue, especially when it comes to athletics. My argument is even if it makes short-term sense politically we can’t give an inch to these fascists.
UncleEbeneezer
Sounds almost like the Participation Trophy that conservatives are always mad about.
Josie
@Archon:
I agree. We need to follow Governor Walz’s advice and tell them to just mind their own business.
peter
@Josie: One of my first paying jobs when I was a HS student was as a Little League umpire. Man, that was an eye-opener. So many asshole parents. Most of the kids were embarrassed by their parents, though some had absorbed the lesson that if you didn’t get the call you wanted, whining and complaining was an option. After all, the adults were doing it…
HinTN
@Archon:
“Never give a inch”
– Henry Stamper (Sometimes a Great Notion)
Phylllis
@Jeffg166: I was tall, strong, and athletic, but didn’t fit their idea of a girl athlete (this was high school in the mid-70’s, so Title IX was in play). Was regularly told to ‘stop showing off’. Many coaches/PE teachers are fascist assholes.
UncleEbeneezer
A couple of our players played qualifying matches against fairly equal players in the individual State tournament for tennis. Then they had to play the top seeds and got their asses soundly beaten. It really annoyed me when they started looking for all kinds of excuses and some even pretty much stopped trying. As I told them: “Those guys/girls are at a different level because they probably play all year round, take private lessons and don’t skip tennis practice to go skiing. You can get to that level but you gotta put in the same work that they do.”
Steve LaBonne
@Archon: Throwing people under the bus is a great way to lose more support than you gain.
patrick II
Even if I irrationally hated a 16 year old transgender for running track, I don’t think that I could bring myself to a level of hate high enough that I would feel compelled to go to her track meets to harass a teenager.
Archon
@Steve LaBonne:
While morally I agree, throwing people under the bus seems to be working just fine for Republicans
UncleEbeneezer
@patrick II: You mean a “transgender person”. Fwiw, calling someone “a transgender” is considered extremely offensive and is very much frowned upon by the Trans/NB community.
mrmoshpotato
@Dorothy A. Winsor: These sad, bigoted sacks need to find a hobby.
Parfigliano
Literally throw these “adults” in a wood chipper
satby
Joe Biden spoke today. Strong, sharp, and looking healthy. I miss him.
persistentillusion
@Old School: Wil Wheaton just did an Instagram reel in tribute to her. Apparently, when he was 16-17, they were both cast in what he describes as “an after-school special on troubled families”. And he goes on to say that Swit was gentle, patient and kind to him. He had a terrible home life and her kindness at the time moved him when he learned she had died.
Bupalos
One of these things is not like the other. The dissimilar investments in the kids that occurs between school districts is both a national disgrace, and in some sports and many extracurriculars absolutely gives the lie to the idea of meritocracy or equal competition. To file this along with the kind of cheap loser whining that the article is centered around really derailed it a bit for me.
trollhattan
Cause, meet effect.
Always remember Hunter Thompson: When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
trollhattan
@satby: You left out feisty. :-)
satby
@trollhattan: That’s the Joe we all admire.
And if you don’t, there’s something wrong with you.
NobodySpecial
I’ll be the first one to say she should be able to compete, but I hate this paragraph.
“Anyone who has ever played or seriously engaged with sports knows, however, that “fairness” is often the first word out of the mouth of a loser. There is always, always something “unfair” for the loser to latch onto and turn into an excuse. Walk around any youth sports competition and you’ll hear plenty of them: That team has a kid who is too big and strong; the rich kids from one county over have access to better equipment; my kid would have won if he hadn’t rolled his ankle last week.”
I hate it for the same reason I agreed with Lyndon Johnson.
“You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”
We didn’t think of the descendants of slaves as “losers who should be shoved in a locker,” and we should always try and organize competition fairly, and understand that when it’s not fair, it’s not automatically wrong to point out it’s not fair.
Trans athletes competing isn’t unfair because biologically we know transitioning removes the physical disparities, and these complainers in this case are wrong, but let’s not fall into the NASCAR mindset of “If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.”
Baud
@satby:
It’s pretty clear there something wrong with a whole lot of people right now.
satby
@Baud: true that.
laura
Bullying should be a crime, but it is as ingrained in our society as to be common, if not normal.
Anti- trans laws will always end at show us your pussy. Always. It’s vulgar and it is conditioning society to accept the policing of all girls and women. That my Governor has acceded to this othering of a child to further his presidential ambitions is yet another reason to reject Gavin Newsom.
Bupalos
@satby:
What I admire about Biden is he’s probably the most empathetic major national politician in American History, as well as a genius at parliamentary maneuvering. A true human being, with some significant skills.
This braggy “I can still beat you up” stuff and “I have no regrets about anything” I find neither admirable nor distasteful. Just part of his unique personality and understandable, given the path he’s trod the last few years.
Also this:
“BIDEN: Why didn’t they run against me then? Because I’d have beaten them.”
Is both mostly true and at the same time fairly dishonest in it’s shallowness.
bbleh
@Archon: remember that they are “relentless sociotropic boundary-maintainers, norm enforcers, and cheerleaders for authority” (emphasis mine). A big part of their identity — and their status among their perceived peers — is pronouncing who is In and who is Out, and especially with them now, once Out you are Out for good. So there is a constant incentive to shrink the group (purging disloyalty, increasing purity, etc. — see MFT). And everyone who is still In applauds it, because it reinforces their own vision of themselves.
Considered entirely coldly, it’s not a strategy for long-term success, so it’s not something Dems should undertake. And that’s before you get to the moral depravity of abandoning a marginalized group. See also Pastor Niemöller.
brantl
@Gretchen: I think that would be fourth, one place higher than before.
Chetan Murthy
@laura: you’re goddamn right on that. Even if’d had any intention for pulling the lever for Gov. Goodhair in a primary, I would no longer have it. He’s disgusting.
SpaceUnit
A lot of folks don’t understand the extent to which the issue of trans people in sports will bypass a normie’s capacity for rational consideration and jab directly at their brain’s outrage lobe.
That’s why Republicans harp on it. It gets votes.
trollhattan
Well crap.
Wish my business cards read SacSewer.
Professor Bigfoot
@Matt McIrvin: Gotta say that in the right accent:
”Son, if you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.”
Bupalos
@Archon: “we can’t give an inch” is a great way to lose a war. But I think “the trans issue” is very much under defined here. I think we’re at a place with trans girls in HS sports where we should cede ground back to “that’s for each community to decide.” With a subtext of “if you can’t manage to expand your mind, we can’t force you.” Because this just literally isn’t something we could actually win through legislation or administration. The politics simply isn’t there in too many districts, and a forced intrusion of the issue where the districts are not ready would be disastrous for Democrats and only heighten dangers and backlash around broader issues of trans inclusivity.
Chetan Murthy
@trollhattan: I saw my doc a couple months ago, asked him for the MMR shot. He gave it to me, no muss no fuss. I’m 60, grew up in the US, so surely I got whatever was on offer when I was a kid. But it’s been a long time, the booster doesn’t do damage, so why not.
All us olds who aren’t certain they got the most modern version of the MMR, should ask their doc about a booster. It’s most contagious communicable disease afflicting humans, IIRC> The most contagious.
japa21
I have a young grandson, 8, who used to be awful when it came to playing games. He would whine and quit if he didn’t win.
Mrs. Japa and I had he and his brother stay at our place on Sunday night while their parents were out of town.
We made it very clear that if he was going to do that we wouldn’t let him join in the games. He didn’t whine at all.
One of the problems is that the people who lose at something and then whine, or those that harass and bully, don’t pay a price for it. The women mentioned in the post actually feel that they have been rewarded by the positive reactions to their behavior and therefore shown they were correct. In a just society, they would be shunned.
In grade school, during a winter carnival, I was going to be in an ice skating race. I told my father I was dropping out. When he asked why, I told him I knew I would finish last. He said, “So what, somebody has to finish last. If you drop out, somebody else will. ” I raced and actually finished next to last.
Two lessons learned:
1. Only one winner
2. No matter where you finish, it’s better you tried than that you didn’t.
And if you can make se3nse out of all that garble, you’re better than I am.
trollhattan
@Chetan Murthy:
100% agree. “I had a slight case of measles” is a thing said by nobody who had measles.
brantl
@Bupalos:
BIDEN: Why didn’t they run against me then? Because I’d have beaten them.”
Is both mostly true and at the same time fairly dishonest in it’s shallowness.
Oh, bullshit.
Bupalos
@brantl: Note for future politicians- who would ignore this note, because power is what it is, VERY difficult to drop: If you’re think “maybe I shouldn’t try to hold on to power” then you’re probably well past the point where you should have handed it in.
Biden’s answer is a deliberate obfuscation from the reality that he himself considered whether he should run again or not. And from the way the political sands shifted out from under his feet after the debate and various politicos started half-admitting that they thought this shit was crazy. It’s a shallow, time-shifted answer and he knows it.
I really hate how polarized online spaces root on the lowest and (from a liberal perspective) least likable version of Biden, a Biden who would have been politically irrelevant if that’s what he had hung his hat on. He really is really a towering figure in American politics for reasons mostly having to do with his deep humanity and pain, and people in online spaces just love when he kind of Trumps it up.
sab
@Bupalos: Not so much when you are throwing not only some supporters (trans) but all of their relatives under the bus. And they have fellow travellers ( Lgbtq) . Pretty soon every one feels they are under the bus. Not a good way to build a coalition. Works for Republicans who buy supporters with oligarch money. Won’t work for us. Our guys are mostly volunteers
ETA I think I am respodimf to what you responded to not you in this comment.
mrmoshpotato
@Bupalos:
Fuck that. Biden would’ve bitchslapped any Democratic primary challengers with their own bones.
Bupalos
@sab: Dunno, I’m a relative of a trans woman, firm believer that transitioning saved her life and maybe other lives, even as the horrible fact that she had to go to Mexico for surgery almost cost her life.
Maybe it’s where I’m positioned as a trans family member as well as softball coach in the exurbs that prompts my thoughts. But fighting battles you literally cannot win has costs that folks who don’t fight those battles on the ground don’t calculate in the same terms. Just offering an opinion. I think standing on this hill (forced national recognition of trans girl’s right to participate in girl’s sports) now would do far more harm than good.
There’s no arc of justice. Sometimes it’s Ruby Bridges, but sometimes it’s Herschel Grynszpan. You have to know what area code you’re in.
Bupalos
@mrmoshpotato: Oh yeah, that sounds exactly like Biden, and how he became a strong politician. “I’ll bitch-slap a motherfucker!!!”
Look, I already said the statement was true. There’s a way to lie with the truth, and that’s what he did there.
mrmoshpotato
@Bupalos: It was shallow of Biden to say he would’ve beaten any primary challengers?
brantl
@Bupalos: let me know when you’re willing to cede your personal or group’s rights for some sort of larger group advantage. Otherwise support trans people just like you support everybody else. We don’t leave men/women behind either. That’s not just the marines.
brantl
@Bupalos: You really are a master of vague and specious arguments.
Bupalos
@mrmoshpotato: Sure. Every sitting president will beat a challenge. It has nothing to do with their overall political strength generally and everything to do with the particularities of the system and how parties are. It’s the lamest brag in history as a sitting president to say “I would have won the nomination.” You can do that and be in the bottom 2%.
Now, things are changing, and Biden is from a different era. So I won’t say that he SHOULD have known that his best chance to advance his own political agenda was something other than “test and see whether ‘octogenarian that sometimes appears confused’ is still a barrier.”
But personally I do think he was wrong, and I think he kind of knows now that he was wrong. And that there were failures around him that enabled his mistake. I have no idea what to make really of his “fight me” stuff.
Just an opinion though. Don’t internet me. I’m just trying to provide a kind of alternate perspective.
Bupalos
@brantl: You don’t always win by just being maximal.
Trans women in sports is relatively maximal, it cleaves off some of our coalition. It’s pretty clear we lost religious non-whites with our inability to even announce our position here, let alone defend it.
Really, can anyone say from some popular source that people would have consumed what Harris or Biden’s position was on trans girls in sports? Didn’t we just avoid the issue and try to say “It’s only Republicans who bother about this???” But it’s also somehow a fundamental moral test for everyone? Does this compute?
Republicans are pressing us on this because they win on it. The only way you can stop them from winning on it is by taking it out of the sphere it’s currently in. I’d recommend “we know what’s right, but we don’t force people or communities to be what they aren’t yet capable of being. We hope you get better, because this is wrong, and it’s hurting everyone.”
Anyway, I just wish we could agree this isn’t politically easy. Oh Jesus, I just typed that on the internet!!
columbusqueen
@mrmoshpotato: Exactly. People forget that in 50+ years, Joe never lost a race.
columbusqueen
@Bupalos: I’m sorry, but rewarding fascists by throwing one group under the bus only emboldens them further. So stop making BS arguments a la Newson & start figuring out the best way to protect everyone.
karen gail
@trollhattan:
I can still remember having measles; I was banished to bedroom and was only allowed to leave to use the bathroom. I was “blessed” to spend nearly two months with the measles, for some reason the doctor believed that I got every kind of measles one after another. (Back in days when doctors came to house so as not to expose others to sick people.)
The worst part was the first case was after Thanksgiving, I can thank a cousin for that gift; and ended sometime after Christmas. So trapped in dark bedroom listening to Christmas music; doctor was sure that dark was better than being allowed to watch television or read. It had to be the winter of 1967 since mother was pregnant with brother at the time so I had no adult contact during day until Grandmother came to stay with us.
satby
@brantl: she was tied for 5th, so she could still have been 5th.
dnfree
@Bupalos: You’re exactly right. The high school in the Chicago suburbs that my grandson attends is the most diverse in their conference, as well as having the broadest spread of economic backgrounds. Their conference includes very affluent suburbs where, for instance, the golf team has been taking lessons at the country club since childhood, while at my grandson’s school there are kids golfing for the first time as freshmen. But there are other schools from poorer districts that don’t even have a golf team.
It’s not just school funding; it’s community and parental wealth.
sab
@satby: But she has a cushy post college ride on the RWNJ gravy train. Not learnig any actual job skills. Hope that bites her in the ass someday.
patrick II
@UncleEbeneezer:
Thank you. Lesson learned.
dnfree
@brantl: I think there’s “before the debate” and “after the debate”. Before the debate there were only a couple of primary challengers who had no chance to beat Biden, because he was seen as the safest bet in spite of his age. After-debate Biden (if it had happened earlier) would have had more challengers and one of them might have won. Biden is still in denial about how bad the debate was, and so are some of his supporters.
dnfree
@columbusqueen: Joe never lost a race? He ran for president long before 2020. He had to drop out because he said things that were exaggerated or misattributed.
Lyrebird
@patrick II: You make sense to me, and the people who a) want to censor books about Ruby Bridges and b) are ready to (tips hat to @Professor Bigfoot: ) ride out and spread hate do not make sense to me. Not like I am any kind of judge, but I think all of us standing against terrorizing other people’s children are needed right now!
Sister Golden Bear
I’ve been offline all day, but I just wanted to belatedly thank Anne for calling attention to this travesty. And of course Gov. Unctuous Hairgel had to put his two cents in so we could throw trans people even further under the bus.
Matt
@Archon:
There’s a word for somebody who says they’d vote for Democrats except for “all the gender stuff”.
That word is “liar”.
Another good one is “bigot”. Perhaps even “fascist”.
columbusqueen
@dnfree: i refer to any electoral contest between Joe & a Republican. He’s always beaten the weaselly little pricks.
PatrickG
The downside of switching to a new phone is that you have to reconfigure your pie list. Fortunately, I only have one reflexive contrarian to add.
Gloria DryGarden
They push the transgender “issue” and make a thing of it, because it makes polarity, and gets vote. (And it’s a distraction from way more important policies and actions). Similar to how republicans befan pushing anti abortion agendas, because it turned out voters. It got people to the polls.
it worked, and see where it’s gotten us…
dnfree
@columbusqueen: The debate changed things. We don’t know how much it changed them.
Gretchen
@JanieM: Yes, that’s the story I was thinking of. Thank you for finding it.
billcinsd
@dnfree: There were 8 candidates on my primary ballot in June