New York Post Made Cheating Central to Story on Lance Armstrong Trans Comments

Even a relentlessly trans-hostile right wing tabloid couldn’t miss the hypocrisy of one of sports’ biggest cheaters attempting to weigh in on the fairness of trans women in athletics.

by Evan Urquhart

Why don’t you ride on into the sunset, Lance

Lance Armstrong’s bizarre decision to present himself as a neutral arbiter of questions about sports' fairness became one of the clearest messaging wins for the transgender rights side of the debate in recent memory. Armstrong, who is most famous for the breadth and complexity of his illicit doping scheme, is so obviously the wrong person to weigh in on fairness in athletics that even outlets that routinely exploit trans women in sports for cheap clicks are covering this as a story about hypocrisy and obliviousness.

Case in point, the New York Post! The Post is notably anti-trans as our coverage has documented. But even they presented the story of Armstrong’s bid to be the arbiter of sporting fairness as primarily one of Armstrong’s buffoonery, and the internet’s joy at calling him on it:

screenshot from the New York Post

Prejudice (specifically transmisogyny) combined with the public’s near-total lack of knowledge about the contours of this issue has allowed the questions about trans women’s participation in women’s sports to become a major political wedge issue in American politics. This is despite the fact that trans women have been allowed to compete as women in the Olympics since 2003 without a single trans woman winning gold. Trans women winning women’s sports competitions is so rare that right wing outlets, including the New York Post, routinely scrape up stories about trans women winning their age bracket in obscure races nobody has heard of, or being 1/4th of the winning team at a high school track relay event.

Armstrong’s oopsie is therefore a rare bright spot in an information environment that has consistently found ways to present trans women as dominating women’s athletics despite never having dominated any sport, and having an unfair advantage despite a lack of any scientific evidence supporting that. Tomorrow will most likely be back to business as usual for those in the business of lying about trans women in sports, but for today the news is that no matter how much prejudice is skewing the topic in the public imagination Lance Armstrong, of all people, doesn’t get to weigh in on it.