ROD LIDDLE
Good news – now everyone can be a victim
where a shrill but microscopically tiny per-
centage of the population get to have things
their way, to the detriment of everybody else?
The gap between male and female abil-
ity at sport is immense (and not noticeably
narrowing): to take an extreme example,
both the Australian and USA women’s foot-
ball teams — among the best in the world
— have been beaten by sides composed
of 15-year-old boys. An average pub team
would hammer the England women’s team.
Unless, of course, the England women’s
team was comprised of Raheem Sterling,
Harry Kane, Jordan Pickford et al, who had
suddenly decided to identify as women for
the afternoon.The authorities now try to police the
issue by focusing on testosterone — but
that is a red herring, and does not account
for those other advantages enjoyed by men
such as height, weight, spatial awareness,
speed, musculature, and not being impeded
by a pair of mammary glands bouncing up
and down. There is only one meaningful test:
what chromosomes do you have? Every-
thing else simply evades the issue and does
a huge disservice to the women who have
trained long and hard for their sports only
to find themselves outgunned by a bearded
person who has decided to acquire the sou-
briquet Loretta.
Simply to say this, of course, is to be
committing a hate crime. And yet it is alsoincontestably true. It worries me that many
things you can say these days are both true
and a hate crime. It speaks to me of a society
which is trying desperately hard to distance
itself from the most pernicious and incon-
venient of things — reality.
Meanwhile, the government is thinking
of expanding the term ‘hate crime’ until it
covers absolutely everybody in society, even
straight white men. In other words, all crimes
will be hate crimes, to the point where the
term itself becomes utterly redundant, even
if it wasn’t already.
In one sense this is fine — it means that
people will no longer be treated as if they
had ‘protected characteristics’, because it
will be against the law even to hate people
because they don’t have ‘protected charac-
teristics’. That is, all characteristics, or a com-
plete lack of them, will be protected. But it
is also a further expansion of the lucrative
anti-hate industry, which is doing the same
as all other pressure groups and attempting,
in the end, to encompass the entire world in
its glorious victimhood.
You might remember that when the disa-
bility charities started out they were fighting
for rights for a tiny proportion of the popu-
lation who were both discriminated against
and, of course, handicapped. They even used
that word. But eventually, in pursuit of more
money and having seen their early goals
attained, and through the immense hubris
which attends to people who run campaign-
ing bodies, we were told that one in five of us
is disabled, and then one in three. And dis-
ability was no longer about not having any
legs, or being blind, but having a bit of a bad
back. Just as the LGBTQI lobbyists — who
once stuck up for a persecuted tiny minority
— will tell you these days that one in three
of us are gay or bi or, hell, something which
Jesus Christ didn’t like very much.
In other words, we can all be victims of
something. But if we really are all victims,
then it seems to me that there are no victims
at all. It is all just life, with its tiresome vicissi-
tudes, its hurtful impositions, its utter unfair-
ness. Someone tell Rachel McKinnon.SPECTATOR.CO.UK/RODLIDDLE
The argument continues online.W
e are terribly remiss in our cover-
age of women’s sport in The Spec-
tator, so I thought I would try to
put this right a little by drawing your atten-
tion to last week’s 2018 Masters Track Cycling
World Championship — in particular the
sprint category for 35- to 44-year-old women.
The gold medal was won, in Herculean
style, by the Canadian Rachel McKinnon.
Her appearance on the podium pro-
voked some discussion. It wasn’t simply that
Rachel was quite obviously a man, but that
she hadn’t even the grace to disguise her-
self very much. Usually when men transi-
tion, they put a bit of effort into it — maybe
some lippy, a pair of staple-on breasts etc.
It’s not usually very convincing but hell, at
least they tried. Not Rach. She just looked
like a large bloke in spectacles. If you rum-
maged around in her shorts, I wonder what
you would discover — possibly the usual
frank’n’beans, so to speak. Rach tells people
she identifies as a woman, which allowed her
to enter into the race (and of course win it,
much to the very great chagrin of the bronze
medallist Jennifer Wagner, who suggested it
‘wasn’t fair’).
Rachel McKinnon also identifies as a
‘doctor’, having completed a PhD in Spe-
cious Twattery at some dimbo college in Can-
ada. His — sorry, Rach, I’m not going along
with the charade any further — Twitter page
also lists several other things he identifies
as: ‘Public Intellectual, Trans Woman, Queer
Chick, Strident Feminist, Athlete, Vegan’.
Yes, of course, vegan. I think we’d get along
terribly well. He was about 29 when he
decided to tell people he was a lady and has
subsequently decided that he is also a les-
bian, which seems to me to be having your
cake and eating it. McKinnon accepts that
men have certain advantages over women
when it comes to many, if not most, sports,
but suggests that tall people or powerfully
built people also have advantages over those
who are short or feeble and so the issue of
gender doesn’t matter one bit, really.
It is an absurdity of course. And yet this
narcissistic idiot’s fragile sensibilities are
totally indulged by the authorities, infuriating
his female competitors and making a mock-
ery of the sport. How did we get to this stage,
All crimes will be hate crimes,
to the point where the term itself
becomes utterly redundant‘Things have changed
since I was a lad.’