TWIBS: Right-Wing Media Lies About Trans Athlete, As Usual
After competing the only way she’s allowed to, Sadie Schreiner is once more being hounded by right-wing “journalists” trying to create something from nothing in pursuit of a nonstop culture war against trans people. Par for the course, I suppose!
by Alyssa Steinsiek
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s oldest column! Every Friday, Alyssa Steinsiek digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Let’s talk about trans athletes and the way conservative media lies about them.
Sadie Schreiner is a two-time All American track and field runner who used to compete for Rochester Institute of Technology. Thanks to the cowardice displayed by the NCAA and its president Charlie Baker in the wake of a flatly discriminatory executive order that bans transgender women and girls from competing in women’s sports, Schreiner must now compete in the USA Track & Field governing body’s “Open” category. She did just that at last weekend’s USATF Open & Masters Indoor Championships, where she won two events: the 200 meters and 400 meters in the women’s open division.
Schreiner is allowed to compete in spite of the NCAA bans because she meets the USATF’s standards for transgender competitors. Unfortunately, this wasn’t enough for the right-wing outlets reporting on the competition explicitly to win culture war points.
BlazeMedia, Glenn Beck’s vile afterbirth news outlet, stoked that fire by commenting on the fact that Schreiner’s competition didn’t show up for their races. Karleigh Webb, writing for Outsports, points out that her two opponents failed to show up for any of the events they were registered in, suggesting that they simply did not attend the event… which sounds imminently less inflammatory than pretending that they refused to compete against Schreiner as some sort of protest against her participation. It’s not like these competitions gatekeep competitors: To be eligible to compete, you need only be 14 or older, hold active USATF membership, and pay a $22 fee per event.
Fox News beat the same drum, while also pointing out that Schreiner won against teenage opponents. They characterize her win as something akin to theft, though I suspect they wouldn’t have penned an article accusing a cisgender adult of “taking first place from a 14-year-old.” There’s no virtue signaling to be done about that sort of thing, is there?
The Daily Wire decided to both dead name and misgender Schreiner throughout an article in which they insist her competition was staging a protest. The only “sources” they cite to prove this claim are the Fox News article I mentioned before (which also provides no proof of a protest), and an obscure nobody transphobe on Twitter.
It’s hard to believe that these are our enemies in the media. They’re clueless buffoons latching on to absolutely anything they can, no matter how minor it may be, and then twisting it into evidence of a grand silent conspiracy against transgender athletes. The truth, of course, is that very few trans athletes even exist, and even fewer are record smashing titans, though I don’t enjoy suggesting that we must be mediocre athletes if we are to be allowed to compete.
Sport is a human right. We know this to be true. Right-wing outlets clamor to frame this issue as “men competing against women,” but the reality is much less interesting: women are competing against women. Inevitably, one woman must win. Transgender women are not winning competitions and breaking records at breakneck speed or with any abnormal regularity. These people simply want to exclude us from every facet of everyday life that they can.
I hope athletes like Sadie Schreiner keep on refusing to let them.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a trans woman journalist who reports on news relevant to the queer community and occasionally posts on BlueSky.
