Good news – now everyone can be a victim

We are terribly remiss in our coverage of women’s sport in The Spectator, so I thought I would try to put this right a little by drawing your attention to last week’s 2018 Maste rs 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 provoked some discussion. It wasn’t simply that Rachel was quite obviously a man, but that she hadn’t even the grace to disguise herself very much. Usually when men transition, 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 rummaged 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 Specious Twattery at some dimbo college in Canada. 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 lesbian, 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.