This Week in Barrel Scraping: The Juice, Regrettably Loose Once More

This week O.j. Simpson had some thoughts to share about trans women in women’s sports.

by Alyssa Steinsiek

The breathtakingly cool, obscenely talented U.S. women’s national soccer team star Megan Rapinoe recently spoke out in defense of trans athletes in an interview with TIME, stating in no uncertain terms that the weaponization of “fairness” in women’s sports against transgender women is a load of crap. She affirmed that trans women are real women, and that she would have no problem competing alongside a trans woman.

Isn’t that nice?

Of course, it isn’t the first time Rapinoe has supported trans people. Back in March, she even dedicated her TIME ‘Woman of the Year’ honor to the transgender community.

Rapinoe is no stranger to controversy, either, having faced an onslaught of white rage when she made a habit of kneeling during the national anthem in support of Colin Kaepernick.

Now, though, Rapinoe may have attracted the ire of a behemoth she can scarcely comprehend, an undeniable titan in the field of professional athletics, as relevant today as he was in his golden era:

Orenthal James Simpson.

screenshot from Twitter

That’s right! Least controversial sports dude ever, O.J. Simpson, has finally broken his silence on the issue of whether or not transgender people—transgender women specifically, as is typically the case in these conversations—deserve to compete in sports against their cisgender counterparts.

Thank goodness. I’ve been waiting! I’ve been wondering!

But I need wonder no more, because Simpson laid out his thoughts, concerns and suggestions in a handy little three minute video on Twitter. Let me see if I can unpack this dense web of hot takes.

He front loads with a very typical, “you can be whatever you want to be” disclaimer before saying a bunch of off the cuff, ignorant, transphobic bullshit.

Simpson starts off by referencing transgender tennis player Renée Richards, using the new and exciting verb “transgend,” and suggesting that she was “never a great tennis player”... but also that she was able to “do pretty well against the women back then” because she’s, you know, a “biological male.” Whatever the fuck that means.

Next, he references a Connecticut lawsuit brought against the state by four cisgender athletes who are struggling to even substantiate a claim in court, where they are represented by pure evil hate group Alliance Defending Freedom. They claim to have been denied their inalienable right to success by two transgender track and field competitors, despite regularly placing first in competitions, sometimes even against those trans girls.

Simpson’s bright idea, of course, is to create a third category for transgender athletes to compete in! How novel! Nobody’s ever suggested that before. I, for one, am very interested in this idea of a separate, but equal, category for trans people to compete in.

Finally—and this one is my favorite—Simpson regurgitates a question he heard somewhere else: If Mike Tyson decided he “identified as a female,” would you let him fight female boxers? “I don’t think so,” Simpson, whose murdered wife’s diaries detail over sixty accounts of domestic abuse from the former NFL running back, proclaimed.

Truly a bizarre question to ask, if your concern is fairness in sports, about a man who has copped to extensive drug use throughout his career.

This is exhausting.

What people like Simpson don’t get is that these uninformed, ignorant thought vomits cause irreparable harm to trans people worldwide. Conversations that cast us as other, debate our right to coexist normally alongside our cisgender peers, does damage in a way that is difficult to quantify, but easy to see.

When groups like the World Athletics Council institute meaningless, draconian testosterone restrictions on competitors, it isn’t just transgender athletes who suffer. Black and brown cis women are the most frequent collateral of these attacks, told that they must undergo medical intervention if they want to compete, despite being cisgender women, despite being perfectly comfortable in their bodies.

Nobody ever demanded that Michael Phelps undergo surgery to reduce his wingspan. Isn’t that an unfair biological advantage? His list of accolades might suggest so.

Everybody has a right to do what they love, to compete and succeed and be beautiful and happy. They deserve to do that without uninformed weirdos like O.J. Simpson coming at them on Twitter. They deserve to do that without being legislated out of existence.

It’s like Megan said: we’re talking about people’s lives.