A lot of citizens of the eternal internet love to do this, to portray trans people as being a group of indoor kids who carry the same cultural touchstones in their pockets as prizes and are in fact awkward and weird and best left alone. Trans people, queer people, we contain it, too.įor some I believe it to be a way of connecting with other people - that if you paint an entire community with a broad enough brush that it might mean you truly belong there. People crawl from the woodwork to post and revel in the fact that Glenique Frank only came in 6,160th place overall, which is not anywhere near winning and that in the great trans women in sports debate what people aren’t paying attention is that trans women are bad at sports and we should be included in the categories in which we belong, because we are bad at sports, so who cares? And every time this happens I wonder if anyone has ever considered the idea that we are allowed our pride in this conversation.īad faith is one of those universal truths that exists on all sides of an opposed force. When an event like this happens, the lights of social media turn on with grand and ill-considered luminance. The London Marathon, like most marathons, gives you a medal that simply states that you were ever there and that is the medal that Frank is returning. It is not last, but it is not anything else either, it is just the middle where everyone that is not on the podium exists. Which is not first or even second or third or in the top ten.

While it is true that Glenique Frank ran in the women’s category of the 2023 London Marathon and placed ahead of some 14,000-odd women, what information would turn the head of this line is that Frank placed 6,160th overall. But there is a headline, because there is always a headline, that reads Transgender female runner who beat 14,000 women at London Marathon offers to give medal back and I know we are lost. Once I was young innocent and naive and allowed myself to think that surely not all of this is true, that there are simply bigger and more important and better things to concern ourselves with in a world so set ablaze and hurtling towards the infinite abyss. There is no longer a limit to the things I can allow myself to believe, even as an agnostic I am all too aware that the one true faith is conversations held in bad intentions. The Autostraddle Encyclopedia of Lesbian Cinema.LGBTQ Television Guide: What To Watch Now.

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