On Friday October 7, the Dr Phil Show did a what I think was a very good episode discussing whether it's fair for TIMs to participate in women's sports. https://youtu.be/jxxuNlmaG1E
Making the case that women's sports should be for females only were Olympic gold medalist, feminist civil rights lawyer and champion of fairness in sports policy Nancy Hogshead-Makar; Riley Gaines, the outspoken NCAA D1 swimmer who was forced to compete against Lia Thomas and has been speaking out against the unfairness; and Harvard professor and expert on testosterone Carole Hooven, author of "T."
Promoting the view that men should be allowed to use claims about their gender feelz and hormone levels to muscle in on women's sports was a young TRA TIF, Layne Ingram, the women's basketball coach at Lansing Community College in Michigan. Ingram started taking testosterone in 2017.
In my view, Hogshead-Makar, Hooven and Gaines all did an excellent job. So did Dr Phil and his production team, who made great use of graphics put together by Emma Hilton that show the extent of all the various kinds of physical advantages that males have over females that make them perform so much better in most sports.
These three women and Dr Phil all made clear, convincing arguments and provided solid evidence for why sports need to be segregated by sex. They provided strong refutation of the TRA claim that males who reduce their testosterone lose so much of their male sports advantage that it's fair to let T-reduced TIMs into women's sports. Yet at the same time, they all came across as compassionate, fair-minded, emotionally mature grownups who've given careful, respectful consideration to the feelings and POVs of TIPs and sincerely don't want to see anyone discriminated against or treated badly on account of gender identity.
By contrast, I thought the TIF Layne Ingram came across as totally unfamiliar with the facts and in complete denial of physical reality. She had no decent arguments whatsoever, just the same old nonsensical TRA slogans and untrue claims we've heard a million times before. She seems to have gone on national TV so sure that her position is the correct and unassailable one that she didn't bother to even attempt to bone up on any facts and evidence beforehand. She just kept repeating nonsense that there's no proof that TIMs - and males in general - have physical advantages over females.
Ingram also struck me as seeming not to giving a single solitary fuck about female athletes and what's fair for them, or for fairness in sport in general. Very scary in my view from someone who is a coach of college women's basketball team. The only people Ingram showed concern and compassion for were TIPs like herself. It was really pathetic seeing her cape for Lia Thomas, claiming that what matters most is that Thomas is happy and gets to live and be seen by others as his "authentic self."
Ingram's performance ended up just really going to show that the testosterone she's been taking for 5 years really is a super powerful drug that does more than cause TIFs to grow facial hair and pack on more muscle. Taking T also seems to have fostered tunnel vision, hubris and the sort of self-centeredness so commonly seen amongst gender specials who typically can't see beyond the narrow interests of their own small, navel-gazing, outer appearance-obsessed community.
Taking T and drinking the gender woo kool-aid has apparently helped foster a ridiculous persecution complex too. At one point, Ingram said being trans in the USA today means "walking around in a society that wants to kill you." Which stood in stark contrast to the fact that Dr Phil and all the other guests on the show bent over backwards to be really kind and respectful to her, and to express support for her and other TIPs.
Towards the end of the show, another young TIF or non-binary woman in the audience brought up the issue of XY DSD athletes who compete in women's sports like Caster Semenya, repeating the oft-heard lie that they are "cisgender women" who have the same levels of natural testosterone as males. Hooven made it clear that athletes like Semenya are not "women with high testosterone" the way they're often described, and said that females do not make testosterone in amounts that come anywhere close to even the bottom edge of the normal male range.
Hooven's twitter thread about the show:
https://twitter.com/hoovlet/status/1578584856644456448
Article on Ingram here:
I was pleasantly surprised by that episode. Especially by Dr Phil saying that just because he doesn't believe men should play on women's teams doesn't mean he's a bigot. I expected him to be kind.