Tennis Legend Apologizes to Trans Advocates. They Call Her a Nazi in Return.

In a long essay published last month, tennis legend and LGBT icon Martina Navratilova made the startling, shocking, some-would-say-common-sense claim that it’s really not fair to have men competing against women in sports. Like, at all. But even though this is something that pretty much everyone figured out at the dawn of civilization, this is now a controversial viewpoint because…well, you know why. There are now men who believe they are women, a certain portion of society has accepted them as women, and now they want to go everywhere women go and do everything women do. And that includes competing in women-only sports, where they invariably dominate.

But to speak plainly on this issue is to invite doom upon your head. Navratilova was excoriated by the LGBT community, thrown off some “ally” group, and generally told to go jump in a lake by millions of deluded Twitter twits who have had their share of the Kool-Aid. In response, the tennis great wrote an apology essay on Sunday in which she said she was sorry for making the transgender community feel bad…but did not exactly walk back her common-sense opinion on the matter.

“What I really wanted to do was try to open up the debate about equality and fairness in relation to transgender participation in women’s sport,” she explained. “There were too many voices that were silenced and shamed into submission and that is not right. My aim was to encourage a more scientific, rather than emotional, conversation and to search for a solution that would work better than current arrangements.

“I was motivated by concern about the future of women’s sport and my worry that by trying to be fair and inclusive for one group, others can be adversely affected, that eliminating one kind of discrimination can inadvertently give rise to another,” she continued.

She apologized for saying that transgender athletes were “cheating” by competing in the wrong-gender sports, but she said it was still necessary to debate their inclusion and how it should be handled.

To Dawn Ennis at Outsports, this was tantamount to Nazi-like behavior. The transgender sports writer has since taken down the portion of his article where he compared Navratilova to JOSEPH GOEBBELS (!!), but the tone of his criticism is much the same.

“The playing field will not ever be level if trans athletes are not given a chance to compete as the gender with which they identify. Separating, excluding and discriminating are not solutions,” Ennis wrote. “And we agree with Ms. Navratilova that it would be best if this could be discussed with a focus on science, and objectivity, and most of all civilly, without name-calling by either side. That would include calling trans women ‘men’ or ‘males.’ That would mean understanding that trans women are women, and trans men are men. Those who say otherwise are either TERFs or transphobes. And the existence of trans women as women is not up for debate.”

TERFs or transphobes. Gee, that sounds like name-calling to us. As does comparing a woman who has a legitimate gripe about men competing in women’s-only sports to a Nazi. But hey, it’s not nearly as bad as (horror of horrors) stating the plain fact that a man is a man. THAT is terrible beyond words.