Not My Monkeys

 There’s this meme I’ve seen circulated. There was a guy who wasn’t good at swimming. He made the decision in his life to become a trans woman but still competed in swimming and went from being not so good as a guy to winning a tournament as a woman. 

One time I saw the meme posted and about 5 comments were under it with various version of smh or I can’t believe it. The last time I saw the meme a cousin posted it. It was something she shared from a senator. I don’t know if the senator was a state senator or a US senator. For the sake of this discussion it doesn’t matter. What chilled me was the last sentence the senator wrote, something to the effect of: if you don’t understand what’s wrong, you’re a part of the problem.

What’s the problem? That was the first question I had.

Let’s assume that the statement this senator this senator wrote had no pretense to it, which of course it did. But let’s assume it didn’t. If the problem is that a trans female has a competitive advantage (and I am not here to talk about that aspect at all, I am not a scientist. I do not know) then as a senator you have the power to do a few things: you can start a committee to research this issue. You can reach out to whatever governing body is over the swim meet and ask what they are doing to make their swim meet as fair as possible to all competitors. If you felt strongly enough about it as an issue you could draw up a bill and work for it to be passed into law, be it state or national. All of those are within the realm of power of a senator. The senator did not do any of this.

What she did do is put it out in the court of public opinion and phrase it in a way that you should be ANGRY about this entire situation. But, seriously, angry about what? Why should the senator be angry about it? What about the competitors of the meet? I mean, I would care what they had to say. But why is the senator angry? And why does she want other people to be angry about it?

The answer, to me, is obvious: the Senator wants people to be angry that trans people even exist. Which I find very, very problematic. Trans people have existed for a really long time. For me, the active word in that sentence is “people”. They are human beings. They exist and they want to exist in their spaces. Who is anyone to deny them that? 

If some smart people want to get in the room and discuss ways that trans people can fairly compete in sporting events with the gender in which they identify, I’m all for that. If this swimmer went through all sorts of hormone therapy, etc, just to win a swim meet that is on her and her soul (I do not know the swimmer’s preferred pronouns). But this whole thing about getting hyper upset over a meme and more importantly, this person’s journey, is not one I’m super interested in. The speculation about what genitalia a person does or does not have is borderline macabre.

My last few paragraphs I don’t consider political and though I’m about to make a statement about politicians I don’t consider it political either: politicians need to get back to creating rules to help their constituencies. This nonsense of getting these large platforms just to make people angry at each other while also solving zero legitimate problems while also using those platforms to enrich only themselves is getting wearisome. The irony is that meme designed to hurt one particular minority group just ends up hurting us all in the end. That should be the thing people should be most mad at.