For tennis legend and gay rights activist Martina Navratilova, it’s clear that she’s far from being the hippest gal on the LGBTQ scene. In fact, for today’s biologically-challenged youngsters, the groundbreaking lesbian icon is persona non grata. Once again she has angered modern LGBTQ groups by insisting that trans women competing in female sports are “cheating.” After her statements were published in The Sunday Times, LGBTQ group Athlete Ally has severed ties with Navratilova, calling her words “transphobic.”
On February 17, Navratilova wrote a piece for British outlet The Sunday Times, claiming that “Letting men compete as women simply if they change their name and take hormones is unfair.” She insisted that no matter how many people believe that men should be able to “decide” to be women, throwing them in the same athletic competitions as biological females boils down to “cheating.”
Part of the tennis great’s purpose in writing the article was to defend her views posted on Twitter in recent months. “There must be some standards, and having a penis and competing as a woman would not fit that standard,” she argued in a social media debate between her and outraged supporters of Rachel McKinnon, a Canadian trans woman cyclist who claimed to have received “100,000 hate messages” after winning a high profile women’s cycling championship.
But since doubling down on her views via The Sunday Times, Navratilova has prompted even more backlash from the LGBTQ crowd. The outrage was so intense this time that gay rights sports group Athlete Ally revoked Navratilova’s position as its advisory board ambassador.
Athlete Ally released a statement that said: “Martina Navratilova's recent comments on trans athletes are transphobic, based on a false understanding of science and data, and perpetuate dangerous myths that lead to the ongoing targeting of trans people.” The group added definitively that “trans women are women, period. They did not decide their gender identity any more than someone decides to be gay, or to have blue eyes.”
Activist group Trans Actual also bashed the gay hero/turned bigot, tweeting in response to her article that “We're pretty devastated to discover that Martina Navratilova is transphobic … trans women don't have an advantage.” If only saying so would make it true. But as a simple reminder, The American Council on Science and Health affirms the obvious: that “men have more muscle mass: Skeletal muscle constitutes about 42% of a man's body mass but only 36% of a woman's body mass.”
It added, “The reason that the world's fastest male 100-meter sprinter (Usain Bolt) is nearly one full second faster than the world's fastest female sprinter (Florence Griffith-Joyner) is because of biology, not the male patriarchy,” reminding readers that trans groups think this sex discrepancy is merely “sociological.”
Sadly though, Martina Navratilova’s professional relationships have to suffer for this BS. But honestly, it’s probably best that she’s no longer an ambassador for a group suffering a total break from reality. She should take solace that she’s being thrown out of the loony bin.
