Atlas Transitioned
On Trans People and the Olympics - 01/08/24
Right now, everybody has Olympic Fever – cheering on athletes and teams and placing bets and crying with emotion over a person jumping really high, and even though it’s happening in Paris, France – most British people have managed to not let that upset them too much.
I’ve never been much into sport. I couldn’t ever really feel, or understand, that competitive urge to outdo my classmates during P.E, mainly because I was too busy thinking ‘Am I going to die? Am I having a heart-attack right now?’ after being made to run around and around a square field for an hour.
The only sport I was ever good at at school was the 100 meters ‘I’ve Forgotten My P.E Kit, Sir’. If there were medals being handed out for thinking up unique ways to not do P.E I still probably wouldn’t have taken the Gold, because I was always pretty average across the board and could only ever come up with ‘I left it at home’. Still, I was good at it. I’d place. Our P.E teacher got so fed up with me ‘forgetting’ my P.E kit that, after a while, he’d let me just sit on the grass hill by the field, usually with another long-haired, queer-coded reject, and act as a sort of ‘cheer leader’ for the boys while they played rugby below. I don’t think the boys ever noticed our cheers, and if they did – it probably made them uncomfortable. I saw this initially as an act of begrudging kindness from the P.E teacher, but looking back – maybe it was supposed to be some sort of queer-phobic humiliation ritual. I didn’t care – it meant I didn’t have to get muddy and I could spend the time in my own imagination, worrying about being transgender – and contemplating exactly when or how I should come out and if it would kill my parents to know their child was a mega-fag. Not now I thought... I have to collect the cones.
It’s not that I don’t understand competitivity – I've read Atlas Shrugged. Well, I’ve read some of Atlas Shrugged. I read about 80 pages of Atlas Shrugged, it was boring. But I get the gist – people like to see other people achieve amazing things – even if it’s at the detriment of others. Especially if it’s at the detriment of others, in some cases. And I am competitive in other ways – for example, I hate to see my comedy peers achieve undeserved success. I understand the mechanism of using jealousy and spite to drive you on forwards.
And, I’ll be honest, I’m not immune to the spectacle of The Olympics. Gymnastics is always a category which makes my jaw drop – seeing people flip around and jump and spin and move their bodies in flexible angles that I don’t think my body could ever achieve, even if it were hit by an oncoming train. It’s impressive – almost incomprehensible – that someone could even do something like that. The result of years of perseverance and discipline – missed social engagements, self-isolation... to sculpt a self-realised version of themselves into existence and present it to the world, on the national stage. Only the toughest, most resilient can do it. I am not immune to being impressed by that.
But as a trans woman, it’s very difficult to get too invested into the sporting world. Over the last couple of years, it’s been made very clear to me that society at large wants us as far away from that world as possible. To them, we represent ‘unfair advantage’. To them, we are ‘cheating’ not only at the sports we’ve entered, but also in our lives.
At first, I found it really difficult to comprehend why a trans person would even want to do sports. I know this has more to do with my own disposition to reject those who rejected me growing up (also my love of frozen pizzas and vapes) but I have come to understand that some people simply enjoy it. I can’t argue with that. But what is being communicated to trans people right now is something like: Sorry Freak, you can’t. Not with us, anyway. Go and start your own team. We don’t want you coming in and messing up what we’ve got going on here, so scram why-dontchya! We let you go outside dressed like that, but that’s far enough. Don’t push it!
Many trans athletes, particularly trans women, have been pushed out of their respective sports by ‘peers’ who refuse to compete with them. There have been protests from disgruntled professional snooker players, and most recently, darts players – which I think is kind of interesting. It’s interesting, because – let’s be honest here – snooker and darts are not sports. I’m sorry – they're not. They’re pub games (and I’m tired of pretending they aren’t). Not only do trans women hold zero unfair advantage in these fields, there’s no more skill in being good at darts or snooker than there is at being the ‘best’ at Wii Bowling. Or being the Gold medalist in flipping a coin into an empty pint glass. How dare you tell trans women they can’t chuck a dart at piece of cork on a wall. No self-respecting ‘sport’ should ever be able to take place in a Wetherspoons.
When I think about what it takes to be an Olympian, I think about those things I mentioned before. The determination. The social sacrifice. The dedication to perfection and overcoming the odds. The single-minded vision to achieve your dreams. And then I think about trans people. We define these qualities.
Having the courage, mental fortitude and resilience to transition is not something to be taken lightly. It takes years and years and years of effort and physical transformation. It’s a gauntlet to be run. A trial by fire. It beats snooker or darts hands down every time. And if you can’t see the athleticism in that, then why don’t you give it a go, if you think you’re hard enough?
And yes, there are some ‘performance enhancing’ drugs involved. But that’s just the game now, baby. You gotta juice up to keep up!
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