Don’t be fooled by transgender athlete Hubbard’s Olympic failure: woke warriors still pose dangerous threat to women’s sport

Despite Laurel Hubbard crashing out of Tokyo 2020 on the day the weightlifter became the first openly transgender athlete to compete in the Olympics, her inclusion shows women’s sports are still under threat from 'wokeness'.

Perhaps the biggest lesson learned from Laurel Hubbard’s appearance at Tokyo 2020 is that the woke mob will stop at nothing in their war on women, but social justice warriors mustn’t be allowed to use the weightlifter’s failure in Japan as evidence that women’s sports aren’t under threat from trans inclusion causing their collapse.

Never before have an Olympian’s statistics outside of competition demanded more attention than those recorded within.

At a height of 6 foot 1, the super-heavyweight dwarfed almost all female weightlifters in the field. At 43, Hubbard was more than double the age of most competitors in Japan, having transitioned at the age of 35 after an 11-year career hiatus.

In the end, the journey came to a close with three zeroes.

Hubbard was handed a hat-trick of noughts after failing to register a weight in the women’s +87kg snatch lift finals, finishing dead last in the group and thus truncating what was expected to be one of the weightiest Olympic stories in Tokyo.

READ MORE: 'Celebrating the end of women's sport!' Women boycott Dove over 'virtue-signalling' support of trans athlete Laurel Hubbard

But despite Hubbard’s hapless showing, women’s sport is still under threat from woke warriors intent on crushing fair competition under the guise of gender equality to push an agenda that will surely flatten females competing in their chosen field.

The argument before Hubbard’s strapping frame made its sizeable imprint on Japanese soil was that the ruling provided an affront to fairness.

Waves of social justice warriors have thrown their weight around and threatened that resisting allowing trans women to compete with women is new-age fascism. In fact, it follows the logical argument that biological men have a significant strength advantage over biological women.

However, Hubbard falling at the first hurdle in the radically woke race to strip a born woman of the chance to compete for a medal must not be interpreted as disproving that very argument, and to imply it does poses a dangerous threat to women’s sport. 

Hubbard would not have qualified for Tokyo had the tattooed Aucklander not already deprived a woman of medals in previous tournaments, and should the floodgates be sprung open for more transgender athletes to sweep up spots in disciplines where strength is tantamount, women’s sport will be damaged beyond repair.

There is already worrying evidence that indicates the roots of radical woke-ism runs right up to the very top of the Olympic tree.

In the lead up to the Games, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) heaped frankly misplaced praise on Hubbard for showing "courage and tenacity" despite ditching lifting for 11 years and only taking up the sport again once transitioning to a woman when the competition would be logically lower.

How tenaciously courageous.

Hubbard was granted a Tokyo place due to the IOC’s rule permitting any transgender athlete to compete as a women if thier testosterone levels were below 10 nanomoles per litre for at least 12 months before their first competition, despite Hubbard benefitting from male levels of testosterone for 35 years.

That’s like allowing a sprinter to dope for three-and-a-half decades so long as they go cold turkey a year before running their race. 

And while IOC medical chief Dr Richard Budgett agreed the scientific nuances that allowed Hubbard to compete should be reviewed and fresh attention be paid to transgender athletes’ eligibility, there were snippets of Budgett’s speech that were cause for great concern.

“Everyone agrees that trans women are women,” Budgett blundered, which is not only untrue but wipes out any regard for the only ones among us who know what constitutes actually being a woman: women.

Budgett then babbled that the prospect of women’s records being annihilated by allowing athletes with clear and unfair advantages to compete with women had been “overstated”. 

And it was no surprise that Budgett’s words went down like the discarded barbell after Hubbard’s failed third lift among womanhood all over the web.

Trans expert Dr Joanna Harper provided perhaps the most absurd punchline to the parley by smugly declaring “sports aren’t designed to be fair” before casually comparing Hubbard’s involvement to a dubious penalty kick given in football or the ‘unfairness’ of Usain Bolt being the “biggest and strongest” on a level playing field, which would make some slight grasp at sense if in this instance women weren’t being penalized for, well, just being women.

Although the commentary on Hubbard read like a tale of twisted rhetoric carefully crafted so as not to tread on trans toes and to avoid incurring the wrath of the woke even at the expense of logic, in the end it’s what wasn’t said that spoke the loudest.

Silence was golden, silver and bronze in the post-finals press-conference in Tokyo as all three medal winners in Hubbard’s category refused to comment when asked for their thoughts.

After the trio’s tense pause, the answer came. “No. No thank you,” said American bronze winner Sarah Robles, whose feat of becoming the first US woman to win Olympic medals at two different Games has had the limelight somewhat stolen from it due to Hubbard’s considerable shadow being cast over the entire discipline.

It was somewhat ironic that the three invoked their figurative 5th amendment on the argument, as generally what women say on the matter is largely ignored and filed under ‘transphobic’ by leftist lunatics, despite their perceptions being the most relevant. Nevertheless, the muted message was loud and clear.

Hubbard’s failure in Japan must not be purported by radical social justice warriors as proof that trans women’s physical advantages do not exist or that the inclusion represents anything even closely resembling a level playing field.

The worrying sign it has been celebrated as a major milestone for inclusion means the issue is likely to come back bigger and stronger, but perhaps with a tad less testosterone.

When it does, more must be done to make sure women’s sport doesn’t become just another statistic in the woke war to manipulate even the most blatant facts to ratify their radically woke agenda.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.