John Oliver is gaslighting us about men in women’s sports
His defence of ‘trans inclusion’ is a masterclass in liberal sophistry.
Smarmy regime comedian John Oliver – one British export that really deserves a huge tariff – provided us with a prime example of liberal sophistry this week. In a segment on his HBO show, Last Week Tonight, Oliver set forth a masterclass in bullshit. The topic? Males who claim a trans identity in order to play in women’s sports.
Oliver’s bad-faith obfuscations on the trans debate should be studied by future generations who want to understand the insanity of our time. He manages to hit every bullet point in the misrepresentation playbook.
He begins his monologue by attempting to belittle widely held concerns about basic fairness in women and girls’ sports, by claiming this is some kind of bizarre fringe obsession. It’s ‘an absolute fixation of the right’, he says. In truth, letting boys play on girls’ sports teams – and all that goes with it, such as boys getting their junk out in the girls’ locker rooms, men injuring female players and boys winning medals meant for girls – is one of the most unpopular policies among American voters of all political stripes.
But Oliver would rather pretend otherwise. He implies that it’s all the fault of Fox News and the Republicans. Their ‘relentless focus’ on men in women’s sport, he says, has led to ‘more than six in 10 adults’ saying that ‘trans girls’ should not be allowed to compete against actual girls. In other words, the dumb rubes who watch Fox have been brainwashed into thinking people with penises should not be in female changing rooms. Apparently, if the nasty, shouty right-wingers hadn’t spoken up about this issue, then most people would have no problem with men in women’s sports at all.
Oliver then zeroes in on a single example in a rather niche sport: fencing. Adopting a pose of false incredulity, Oliver raises the story of Stephanie Turner, the brave fencer who was disqualified from a tournament earlier this month for refusing to compete against a man. He then acts as if there was no good reason for the news to give it any coverage:
‘Wait, that’s the story that everyone’s going to be interested in, are you sure about that? The story about fencing, and not the one that’s caused the stock ticker in the corner of your screen to go bright red like an inflamed haemorrhoid? Also, I challenge those anchors to tell me one thing about fencing, besides Lindsay Lohan did it against herself in The Parent Trap. I don’t think you can do it.’
Of course, Oliver could have picked some other high-profile examples of women losing out due to trans-inclusion policies. It even happened at last year’s Olympics and Paralympics. But that wouldn’t fit the narrative that this is essentially a non-issue.
Oliver also adopts that other commonly used gaslighting tactic. It starts with: ‘[Insert bad thing here] never happens!’ And then comes the next move: ‘Okay, it has happened, but it’s totally harmless.’ He does this on Last Week Tonight by suddenly turning his focus on to children. Trans kids, he says, ‘just want to play sports with their friends’. Oh yes, of course, John. And grown men in fishnets ‘just’ want to use the ladies’ bathroom. And male sex offenders ‘just’ want to be housed in women’s prisons. Let them live!
For maximum sympathy points, Monday’s show featured a 15-year-old boy from New Hampshire who wants to play on a girl’s team because he thinks he’s a girl. In the interview, Iris, as he calls himself, says in a tremulous voice that he feels ‘annoyed and upset’ about the fuss over girls’ and women’s sports. He is interviewed standing next to his mum and holding a chicken, signalling to the audience that these are good, simple people who just want to play sports like everyone else, gosh darn it.
What this boy needs is a sane adult to tell him that facing reality is not oppression, and just because he thinks something is real, that does not make it so. But there would be no progressive political point-scoring in that, I suppose.
A few months ago, in another attempt to dismiss the public’s concerns, Oliver said that there are ‘vanishingly few’ boys who claim to be girls competing in girls’ sports, but ‘even if there were more, trans kids like all kids vary in athletic ability’. Now, of course they vary in athletic ability. But that doesn’t change the fact that boys’ bodies are overwhelmingly stronger than girls’ bodies – which might just be the reason poorly performing boy athletes suddenly rocket to the top of leagues when playing against girls.
Sorry, John, but millions of decent people can see, plain as day, that this should not be happening. Those of us who live in the reality-based community understand that male bodies and female bodies are different. No amount of gaslighting or sophistry is going to convince us otherwise.
Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here