Serena Williams is said to be the God of tennis and one of the greatest women to ever be on the field.
Her excellence in this sport has made her one of the most successful and wealthiest sports stars in America.
She earned $27 million from endorsements and prize money in the year 2017 alone. One of the main factors contributing to her amazingly successful career is her remarkable physique. With a height of 5 ft. 9 in., she can bench press 225lbs which is 70lbs more than her body weight.
At the age of ten, she played with US men’s champion, Andy Roddick in Florida, and beat him with a score of 6-1. However, if they played against each other later when Roddick was Man’s World No1, he would probably beat her by a humiliating margin.
Serena would be considered to be lucky if she picked up a few points. This would be the case not only with Roddick but if she played against any of the 1000 best male tennis players around the world.
John McEnroe once said that if Serena Williams were ranked in the men’s tennis category, she would probably rank 700th, however, other experts differed and said he was a bit too generous.
This does not mean that she is not a talented tennis player, just that men’s tennis is a lot faster, stronger and bigger than her. So, it would not be sexist or wrong to say that Serena would be beaten by the top 1000 men tennis players of the world.
Now say a 25-year-old male player who earns $100,000 a year and is ranked at 200 amongst all the players in the world suddenly wants to identify and compete against female players, maybe for actual transgender-related reasons, or for duplicitous and commercial reasons.
In that case, after he had undergone hormonal treatment and adequately reduced his testosterone levels, he could spend the next 3-4 years playing on the women’s tour as a woman. She would instantly become the best female tennis player ever to have graced the field.
She would effortlessly win every tournament and break every woman’s tennis record and even beat one of the greatest, Serena Williams. She could then retire after earning thousands of dollars and announce that she identifies as male again.
For someone who thinks that no sportsperson would give up on his/her integrity to do this, some sports people like Lance Armstrong remind us that for money, they can stoop to any level.
This is the scenario, Martina Navratilova, another tennis legend, articulated in a newspaper op-ed, which instantly made her one of the most hated LGBTQ women in America.
Within a few hours of this column appearing Martina was dropped as the ambassador for Athlete Ally, which is a US-based organization that campaigns for LGBTQ sportspeople. Not only that, but she was also viciously attacked on social media and was alleged of being Transphobic.
This is absolutely unacceptable because she has been facing a lot of abuse since she came out as gay in the year 1981, and has been a loyal ‘member’ of the LGBTQ community for decades. So much so that she hire Renee Richards, the first tennis player to come out as a transgender, as her coach.
However, after the barrage of insults and humiliation that came her way, she responded and apologized for using the ‘cheating’ but stood strong beside her opinion.
Several other athletes like Sharron Davies, who is a former British Olympic swimmer, supported her and said that transgender women should not be allowed to compete in female competitions.
However, she too was victim to a lot of hate and accused of being a Transphobic person by transgender cyclist Rachel McKinnon, who very recently was crowned the UCI Masters Track World Champion despite the significant size advantage over the other female competitors.
These days everyone uses the term ‘phobe’ to silence people even if they are respectfully suggest something that is evidently unfair. Firstly this debate should not even be taking place when Martina Navratilova is so evidently right.
Secondly, the fact that she is so brutally bullied for daring to say something so right is just proof that the negatively aggressive transgender lobby does not want to hear this.
Nevertheless, amidst all the commotion, the facts speak for itself. The more transgender women compete in women’s sports, their performances grow more dominant.
The transgender community has rightfully fought for several years to win fairness and equality, yet now they are shaming someone just to have an unequal and unfair advantage over women in sport.
No one has an issue with transgender people and them wanting to have equal rights, but it is not ‘transphobic’ to say that they have an edge when it comes to women’s sport, as they have biologically male bodies.
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