Somehow, John Oliver from HBO — who did an entire monologue this week about why men who want to play with ladies in sports should be allowed to do so — still has a show.
I don’t know why we gave him citizenship. I don’t know what he added to the country except for being obnoxiously smarmy with a British accent.
The other night he delivered one of the dumbest monologues I’ve ever heard.
John Oliver is so trapped inside the Left-wing echo chamber that he actually believes it’s necessary for him to defend the idea that men should punch women in a boxing ring, that “trans athletes” must be allowed to play with members of the opposite biological sex.
In order to make this claim, he somehow has to square the circle of pretending that men playing with women is not unfair to the women, which means he now has to pretend that men are not better at sports than women.
He bloviated:
When it comes to trans athletes who’ve medically transitioned, studies of cis athletes are not necessarily relevant. A lot of medical, gender-affirming treatments like hormone therapy have a meaningful impact on body and hormone composition. So the question then becomes, what do those impacts mean for athletic performance? We spoke to scientists on all sides of this issue, and the one thing they actually agree on is that, in part, because the number of trans athletes is so small, the body of research specifically about them is extremely limited.
This is amazing. He is essentially saying, “We can’t look at studies that say that men are stronger than women because we’re now talking about men who have had a bunch of hormone treatments. So we don’t know. And so we have to look at the studies of men who have had hormones. But there are no studies. Therefore, men who have hormone treatments don’t have any sort of excess abilities over women. Therefore, they should be allowed to play with women.”
This is a classic in the genre of “absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence.” In other words, absence of evidence that men with hormone treatments have an advantage over women does not mean evidence of absence of that advantage.
This is a classic logical fallacy in which he is engaging: “We can’t look at these studies that say that men are stronger than women, we have to look at the non-existent studies. But those studies don’t exist, and therefore men don’t have an advantage over women.”
That is not how logic works.
He continued:
There are a bunch of studies comparing specific anatomical features like muscle mass in women who transition but which don’t directly speak to their impact on athletic performance. But we were only able to find 12 studies that actually tested trans adult women’s physical fitness in a lab or other performance scenario. Eight have a sample size of less than 20. And two are the single athlete. And look, I don’t have any scientific experience, even though I look like a cross between a scientist and the profoundly sick mice he’s studying. But you probably shouldn’t draw broad conclusions of a sample size of one. Those 12 studies generally find that medically transitioning does impact trans women’s performance, but disagree on how or by how much.
This is hilarious. He’s laying out a bunch of studies that don’t support his own position, but then he’s dismissing the studies because the sample size is too small. So he’s literally cited zero evidence for his proposition so far, and somehow he’s going to magically transform that into the idea that men playing against women is somehow fair.
He continued:
That research you saw earlier actually published the only longitudinal study to date of multiple athletes studying the impact of transitioning on eight long-distance runners. She found after at least a year on hormone therapy their race times turned out to be more athletically, similar to those of cisgender women than cisgender men. But she herself will tell you the study was limited and its conclusions were nuanced. Here she is explaining what we do and don’t know at this point: “It is undoubtedly true that trans women will maintain advantages in some sports, probably not so much in endurance sports, but in size and strength sports. Trans women will also have some physiological disadvantages. Our larger frames are now being powered by reduced muscle mass and reduced aerobic capacity, and that can lead to disadvantages in terms of like quickness, recovery, endurance, things that maybe aren’t quite as obvious as being bigger and stronger” Right. Bigger and stronger bodies are not automatically advantaged in every scenario.
He still provided no evidence to the proposition that it’s fair for men to play with the ladies. We should point out that the expert he is citing is a former man, a person named Joanna Harper. Joanna Harper transitioned to female in 2004-2005. Joanna Harper is in his 60s and he cites his proudest athletic achievement as running 2:23 marathon as a young man. And that’s the person who’s being cited as the unbiased source on trans athletes in opposite sex sports.
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Does this lead Oliver anywhere? Nope.
He continues to argue, based on no evidence, that it’s totally fair for men to play with the ladies, because he says so. After having come up with zero evidence for the proposition that it’s fair for men to play with the women, he then says it shouldn’t be an issue anyway, because no man is transitioning just to play with the women.
That’s weird because there actually are a bunch of men who are transitioning and playing with the women. Not that they wouldn’t do hormone treatments and surgery in the absence of playing athletics, but — they seem to really want to play with the ladies. They could continue to race with the men, but they would lose.
You don’t see a lot of women who are transitioning into “men” who are desperate to play with the men. You don’t see a lot of women who say, “I’m cutting off my breasts and I’m having a fake penis attached and now I want to box the men.” It never happens. I wonder why?
Then John Oliver moved away from his zero evidence to this proposition: Why are you even noticing? Why do you even care? Sure, there are people doing this, but they’re not doing it because they want to beat up on the women. What does that matter to the women? Why should the women care about the motivation for why a gigantic man like Lia Thomas is now racing against Riley Gaines?
Why should Riley Gaines care what the motivation is? I’ll tell this clown why: She now has to race against a dude who was a low-ranked male swimmer but blows the other women out of the water because he’s a dude.
The thing is, hypotheticals like that, circulate constantly and often center around someone transitioning solely to gain a competitive advantage. But as this trans researcher points out, that is an absurd proposition.
He then showed Harper stating, “Trans women don’t transition for sports. No one has ever said, ‘Yeah, I think I’d like to be a woman so I can do well in women’s sports.’ When you go through a gender transition, you lose so many things in life. My own mother said she never wanted to speak to me again. You know, I lost friends, family got divorced. You’d go through all of that just to win a medal in sports? No. Trans people transition because it’s the only way that we can live happily.”
Oliver replied:
Right. No one says I’m going to transition just for the sake of sports. The same way no one says, “Could you please send me more messages about two factor authentication?” Or “when I walk down the aisle, I’d like a solo violin cover of Bawitdaba by Kid Rock.” That is just a made-up person.
Who cares? Who cares about the motivation of the person who wants to play with the ladies? You can have two different motivations, a motivation to add some fake boobs and cut off your penis, and a very different motivation: wanting to play with the ladies now that you are bigger and stronger than all the ladies. It doesn’t have to be the same motivation.
He’s silly and reductive. “Silly and Reductive” should be the name of John Oliver’s show.
The underlying premise of that question from the world’s most famous sports cheater that those assigned male at birth are automatically going to have certain immutable physical advantages, that gets raised constantly, which is why we’re going to spend most of our time talking about trans women and girls, even though in these five states (Alabama, Missouri, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas) these bans impact trans boys in schools, too.
It is obviously true that on average cisgender men and post-pubescent boys have some specific athletic performance advantages, though the relative size of that advantage also depends on the sport and the event in swimming. For instance, my life size and performance advantage is roughly 13% in the 50 meter freestyle, but less than 6% in the 1500 meter free, which is still clearly significant but in general, there’s a lot of overlap in the average performance ranges of men and women.
Basically, it is not the case that any man is going to be stronger or more athletic than every woman, which is sometimes what gets implied here.
That wasn’t the argument. What gets implied is that if you are looking at the ends of the bell curve — which is where top athletic performance happens, the end of bell curve, not the average — if you have men who have transitioned into women at the end of the bell curve, they are almost always going to outcompete women because they’re at the end of the bell curve.
By the way, you can make this dumb argument about anything. Why should we have age ranges in sports? Seriously. Why not have a bunch of 12-year-old Little Leaguers play the Major Leaguers in baseball? Every so often you might have a 12-year-old who is huge, a gigantic 12-year-old kid who can actually hit the ball.
What the hell, if the bell curves overlap at all, then probably we should just get rid of the categories entirely.
We should do this with everything. It makes perfect sense to Oliver.
Or maybe what Oliver is saying is just stupid.
He got mad at House Speaker Mike Johnson because he cited Scripture to the effect that men and women exist.
You don’t have to quote Scripture that men and women exist to know it, but Scripture does say it, and Scripture has a much better record than John Oliver and his stupid glasses.
Oliver mocked the Bible, saying:
It is not just about denying trans women the right to play. It’s about denying them the right to exist. Mike Johnson basically said as much of the House passed its ban on trans athletes when he said this. We know from Scripture and from nature that men are men and women are women, and men cannot become women. That’s right, Mike. As Scripture tells us, man are man and women are women and God is his own son and some mothers are virgins and some mothers-in-law are pillars of salt, and some daughters are sex partners and colorful coats are dream-tellers and brothers are murderers, but also brothers are back-up husbands for wives and babies can be for splitting in half and water is wine …
You’ll notice that he completely elided Speaker Johnson’s statement adding “and Nature.” Johnson’s saying, “For those who believe in the Bible, Bible, the Bible says this, and for those who don’t, there’s a thing called Nature,” which Oliver is ignoring.
But then he does get to dunk with his peculiarly simplistic read on the Bible, which I’m sure has made him a very happy person, deliberately misinterpreting Biblical scripture and religious beliefs.
That particular argument isn’t played out at all, making fun of miracle stories in the Bible. No one’s ever tried that before.
John Oliver is clearly not the brightest bulb in the basket. And somehow he parlayed his shtick into an American citizenship without having to pay President Trump $5 million.
But he’s still a moron.
