Less Than This Guy

Author’s Note: The second half of my peaking post will be delayed by a week due to an impending deadline. In the meantime, enjoy this piece about a recent beauty pageant fiasco.

It’s rare that you get to see a visual demonstration of the devaluation of women and girls in society as a result of trans ideology. And this is one of those even rarer incidents in which the picture tells almost the complete story by itself. Nearly the entirety of the story that will be my focus today could be gleaned from just this opening picture, paired with the headline of Jo Bartosch’s Spiked Online piece about it: “An overweight bloke just won a Miss America beauty pageant.” What more is there to say? (But really.)

I think it’s pretty obvious that the times the trans movement’s excesses have generated the most public outrage and backlash have been the times a particularly striking visual representation accompanied—or even preceded—the story. Indeed, these pictures were the stories themselves, and they needed way fewer than a thousand words to tell it. Any rational human being seeing swimmer “Lia” Thomas towering over actual women on the winner’s podium at an NCAA college Division I national championship, or “Rachel” McKinnon looming nearly twice as large as his female cycling competitors,¹ can clearly see the inequity being demonstrated in front of his or her eyes. It’s the best type of thesis statement, one that comes without the need to deploy any language whatsoever: what’s being depicted is unequivocally, obviously, unfair.

Rhys “Rachel” McKinnon.

William “Lia” Thomas.

When photos and stories like these emerge, they tend to have an outsized place in the news cycle for a couple of days, and for good reason. In particular, the visual spectacle provided by Lia Thomas’s swimming career at the University of Pennsylvania generated the most discussion among those of my friends who blindly support “trans rights” than any other incident in years—and, I would wager, Lia was responsible for changing more than a few minds on this issue. Theoretically, you can obfuscate, argue, and qualify about the effects of testosterone-fueled puberty or the disadvantages of strength imparted by estrogen-based cross-sex hormone therapy to your heart’s content, but in reality, we have a strong reaction to such stark images of injustice that is impossible to deny, since we are visual creatures, and seeing is literally believing.

For what it’s worth, 70% of respondents in a recent survey admitted they believe transgender “girls” (that is, young boys or adolescent males who claim a female identity, such as Lia Thomas) would have an advantage over biologically female girls (the only kind), even though over 60% of Democrats in the same survey were generally supportive of “trans rights.” The discrepancy here is a pretty good demonstration of how “trans rights” as a rhetorical device functions: it wraps a whole host of these complex questions about fairness, inclusion, justice, opportunity, and women’s safety and dignity into a single bland, neat package, hiding what’s actually inside. The deployment of such phrases to bulldoze over these concerns has been extremely successful in suppressing these conversations, and images like the ones discussed here may be valuable in jumpstarting them again.

In the days that followed Brian’s Miss Greater Derry victory, many feminist women that I follow commented on how backwards it seemed to them that the level of attention and outrage over this incident was so much greater than the reaction to men in women’s single-sex spaces, shelters, and prisons. Undoubtedly, the women forced to share close quarters with trans-identifying males in these situations have an added element of vulnerability and endangerment that beauty-pageant contestants or college athletes don’t—plus the disadvantage of being isolated, immobile, and nearly invisible to the public eye. So why don’t we get as angry, when we are absolutely warranted to?

Unlike beauty queens and elite college sportswomen, female prisoners—though the harms they suffer from are almost without exception worse—are “an easy group to ignore,” being essentially invisible to mainstream society and silent without committed advocates on the outside. The very nature of carceral confinement means there is almost no opportunity for something taking place inside a prison to produce such an arresting visual spectacle to bring the news cycle to a halt. The stories that have come out about sexual abuse perpetrated by trans-identified males in women’s prisons may contain a mugshot of the perpetrator, but no pictures beyond that—these stories will come to us in text form, bland and impersonal, easy to ignore. Female prisoners don’t have an arresting, impossible-to-ignore visual presence in society the same way athletes, beauty pageant contestants, politicians, and actresses do; prison is the opposite of a glamorous place. So beauty pageants and sports competitions are the places this issue gets attention, because they are the places we can see it: photos like these literally grab us by our monkey brains, not allowing us to look away, arresting our other thought processes and confronting us with injustice in a way we can’t help but be moved by. The heartbreaking truth is that we just won’t care if we cannot see.

Let’s take another look at this picture. Brian (pronounced bree-ANN, Miss Greater Derry) and the other crowned pageant winners—all female—pose on the front staircase of a columned brick building. The group is posed in such a way that Brian is the focal point of the scene (although considering his comparative size, it might have been difficult to arrange it any other way), and he appears to be one of only two contestants wearing a floor-length gown, the other pageant winner with a full-length dress nearly hidden in the back row. Brian’s scarlet dress draws the eye immediately for its color and size, not to mention its long, flowing train, reminiscent of something that would perhaps be more appropriate on a bridal gown. The lacy material billows nearly to the bottom of the picture frame, emphasizing Brian’s girth in relation to his fellow contestants in a way that is far less than flattering. To almost any sane viewer, though, his outsized presence in this picture is an excellent metaphor for the way his inclusion in the competition has edged others out. In the photo and in real life, he has taken up space that would have gone to a woman who had likely worked a long time for such a chance—who most likely would have dedicated a significant portion of her time and effort leading up to this competition to remaining small and delicate and beautiful, while Brian has been able to sidestep all of these requirements on his way to being crowned the winner. If this picture was someone’s attempt at parodying the invasion of woman-identified males into previously female-only spaces and events, I might say, good work, but let’s try to make it a little more subtle and believable. If seeing is believing, you might actually have to be blind to miss the point here.

Obviously, it’s not as if being overweight is a crime in itself, nor is it just the inclusion and prioritization of a man into what was previously a female-exclusive competition that’s aggravating here—what’s painfully obvious is the double standard, as, Jo Bartosch also notes: a woman of Brian’s girth would have been “laughed off the stage.” It’s the fact that all their lives, girls are told implicitly and explicitly that their only worth is in how they look, so much so that they strive and strive and starve themselves to meet impossible standards…and all that is shown to be worth absolutely nothing if a male wants in on the fun. What they are being told is that men can opt out of all those things, and STILL win, and they are the bigoted bitches if this makes them feel bad.

A lot of the feminist comebacks I saw frequently repeated in response to this story (“let the males have the beauty pageants!” “trans women only in beauty pageants from now on!”) have a point that I believe is worth considering: Why do we care so much about beauty pageants? Aren’t they inherently harmful and anti-feminist in nature? Which, well, of course they are, but this response seems to be missing the point by saying, “well, you should be glad to have it taken away, because it was dehumanizing in the first place!” Yes—the female gender role is built to be inherently dehumanizing, and no woman should have to perform it, and it’s still misogynistic to pretend males who do perform it are it better than us.

That is unequivocally the message being communicated here, and that is my main concern. What kind of messages are we sending to girls about how and when they can be valued? Yes, in the fact the beauty pageants exist at all, the message is more often than not “you can only be valued for your looks.” Girls get told implicitly that because they’re female, they’re excluded from a range of traditionally “male” activities—but can succeed in THIS area, where they are basically judged on how well they can be ornaments. Even here, though, the second any male wants it—wants anything you have, for that matter—it’s given to him immediately, and you have to believably fake being happy for him or suffer worse than a social death. I feel for these girls because they accepted their place in a dehumanizing system and tried to excel where they were, with the hand they were dealt. And then they got told, “Just kidding, these rules are arbitrary, and we can break them any time we want, but we’ll only do so to serve men” (because spoiler alert, this system already serves men, and has the whole time). Female people can play the game perfectly, leap every dehumanizing hurdle that has been set up for them, and still lose for the most arbitrary and entitled of reasons.

It is natural—contrary to what trans ideology might say—to feel a sense of unfairness when presented with evidence that rules are not applied uniformly to all, that while the vast majority must strive and struggle, a select few can opt out of these requirements for very little reason. When these injustices are divided along the lines of biological sex, we used to call that sexism.

So, yes, the messages beauty pageants send to their female contestants about how and when they can be valued are terrible. And we should be far more outraged about the incarceration of women with violent males than we should a beauty-pageant kerfuffle. For me, it’s the messages we’re sending to all of these girls about what they’re worth. In almost all cases involving a trans-identified male staking a claim to something that was previously only for women, the answer is “less than this guy.”

William “Lia” Thomas.

Charles “Charlotte” Clymer.

1. I’m also partial to this picture, where McKinnon’s bike obscures the sign behind him so the text could be read “sport is a man right".”