What Happened to Women’s Rights?

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2023

⏱️ 142 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

My guest today is Inga Thompson, one of the most decorated cyclists in American history.

You might ask, besides being aware I’m something of a bike geek, why am I having a cyclist on the show? Well, we’re not here to talk about bikes or training diets.

We are here to talk about what happened to Inga when she spoke out in defense of women’s rights. Not against bible-thumping religious fundamentalists who think women belong in the kitchen and bedroom making dinner and babies, but against her fellow liberals.

Let me be clear: this is a sensitive and complex issue. Transgender individuals often experience body dysmorphia. Common treatments for dysmorphia include hormone therapy and gender affirmation surgery, which typically entails surgically creating a neovagina, breast implants, facial feminization, and sometimes hair transplants or alteration of the vocal cords.

These physical changes often help alleviate the symptoms, but they do not fundamentally change the physical advantages the transgender—born biologically male—athlete would have over biological women when competing in women’s sports.

This poses the challenge of conflicting rights, which is the subject of this conversation...

What should we do when transgender athletes, with all the physical advantages of being born male, compete against and defeat biological females?

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Michael Sherman Shower Show.
0:16.0	All right, everybody, it's Michael Sherman. It's time for another episode of the Michael Sherman Show.
0:18.0	I have a special episode for you today.
0:22.0	I'm titling this episode,
0:23.3	What's happened to women's rights? My guest today is Inga Thompson,
0:28.2	one of the most decorated cyclists in American history. She competed at the 1984, 1988, and 1992 Olympic Games
0:36.9	with the best result of 8th place in 1988. I saw her compete in the 1984 Olympics
0:42.1	standing on the side of the road in Orange County, California
0:45.2	as she chased Connie Kopner and Rebecca Twig, two of the greatest cyclists in the world at that time.
0:50.6	I'll never forget her signature long ponytail whipping about as she
0:53.6	sprended her bike taking 21st place in an international field not that long
0:57.8	after she had entered the sport.
1:00.3	Inga won silver medals at the world Championships in 1987, 1990, and 1991, and plays third at the Tour de France,
1:07.6	1986 and 1989.
1:10.1	She also won the US National Road Race Championships in 87, 88, 90, 91, 93.
1:16.0	And in 2014 she was inducted in the US Bicycling Hall of Fame in a sense were to advance women in sports and as such serves on many advocacy groups and has her own
1:26.5	Inga Thompson foundation. inga Thompson foundation that advocates for women's sports.
1:33.0	So, you might be asking, besides being aware that I'm something of a bike geek, why am I having on a cyclist
1:39.3	on this show?
1:40.3	Well, we're not here to talk about carbon fiber frames, electronic shifting, training
1:44.3	diets, or why the word suffering seems to appear whenever you're describing our sport.
1:48.8	In fact, we're not even here to review a generic history of women's cycling, or sorry women's rights starting
	...

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