More Than Sports: Martina Navratilova Hardens Position Against Trans Women
The former tennis champion was once targeted by conservatives over her lesbian identity. Now she embraces a politics of exclusion and transmisogyny that goes way beyond sports.
by Evan Urquhart
Martina Navratilova really, really does not like trans women. Her recent tweets calling trans women “blokes” and objecting to trans lesbians being recognized by an LGBTQ+ organization in a video on the importance of lesbian visibility represent a new low in a long history of comments expressing opposition to transgender rights.
Navratilova’s anti-trans comments go back at least as far as 2018 when she tweeted that “there must be some standards, and having a penis and competing as a woman would not fit that standard,” in reference to trans inclusion in women’s sports. Most athletic governing bodies have based their standards on the testosterone levels trans women athletes have, as testosterone is believed to confer an athletic advantage on athletes who were assigned male that is be negated by a period of hormone therapy.
Right wing publications were delighted by the 2018 tweet, which led Navratilova to delete it saying she had more to learn about trans athletes. The same pattern of tweeting in opposition to trans women and later saying she had more to learn would repeat in 2019, according to an archive of stories by Outsports. She has subsequently come to oppose trans women in sports more vociferously, as covered by far-right news outlets like the Daily Wire and Fox News. However, in recent months the lesbian former tennis champ has also revealed that her antipathy to trans women goes well beyond any interest in fairness for women athletes.
In October, Navratilova objected to a 3-year-old statement by actor Daniel Radcliffe stating that trans women and women and he supported trans people’s rights, and yesterday she tweeted angrily about a video by Stonewall in the U. K. that included trans women among the lesbians being recognized by the group.
screenshot from Pink News
Navratilova’s evolution from expressing outwardly-reasonable concerns about trans women in athletics, showing no interest in the more nuanced conversations about how fairness and inclusivity can be balanced in that realm, and then moving on to openly display hatred and disgust towards all trans women has been a common trajectory among anti-trans activists, and echoes the progression of the anti-trans movement on a wider scale. However, Navratilova’s views are out of step with the majority of lesbians, who are actually less likely to hold negative views of trans women than other groups.