’Twas a hotly contested competition, as Vera’s and Emma’s goggleboxing demonstrates, but in the end it’s sports journo Samantha Lewis (‘she/they’) who takes gold for Worst ABC Piece on the Paris Olympics with this effort:
We’ve got a spectacular combination of elements here:
- The requisite levels of vitriol (‘vomit up’) and condescension (‘get a grip’).
- A splendid stab at the wild accusation: Lewis accuses Lucy Zelic of being ‘racist’ for querying the eligibility of Barbra Banda and Racheal Kundananji for the women’s category in the Olympic soccer comp. Banda and Kundananji are both black Africans, certainly. But so too, very likely, are the women they deprived of a place in the Zambian women’s soccer team, and many members of the teams from other African countries that Zambia defeated, in large part due to Banda’s performance and captaincy, in the 2022 COSAFA Women’s Cup. Seems Lewis doesn’t give a stuff about them. So who’s the racist now? (Answer: Nobody. This quite obviously isn’t about race.)
- A brave and stunning example of the red herring: the accusation that Zelic’s ‘transphobic’. Zelic nowhere says that Banda or Kundananji are transgender. In fact, nobody’s said they’re transgender. In fact, they aren’t transgender. The most widespread supposition among the knowledgeable in such matters is that they’re intersex, most likely XY 5-ARD. Can Zelic be transphobic when the people she’s talking about aren’t transgender? Lewis gets points towards gold for making it so. And thereby adding to the general public’s confusion and conflation of transgender and intersex. Extra points, too, for disregarding the wishes of intersex organisations in this matter. The Darlington Statement calls on people to refrain from ‘instrumentalising, or co-opting intersex issues as a means for other ends’. By using the Banda and Kundananji situation to launch the potentially damaging slur of transphobia against Zelic, Lewis has done precisely that.
- A skilful slide in the direction of unfairness: Lewis subtly suggests Zelic is ignoring the fact that the Zambian coach is under investigation for sexual abuse of players. Not so: Zelic does mention this, and does so in some detail. But Lewis boldly doesn’t let that stand in the way of her/their attempt to make Zelic look insensitive to a mainstream feminist issue.
- An inadvertent revelation of the ABC’s double standards. Points for bringing her/their employer into disrepute. Remember Antoinette Lattouf? Sacked in December last year for an alleged breach of the ABC’s social media policy? Because she posted a link to a Human Rights Watch report about Gaza? Which was taken as her expressing a ‘controversial’ and ‘provocative’ personal view? By any standards, this effort of Lewis’s is more controversial and provocative than Lattouf’s. Abusive, insulting, irrational, biased, inaccurate, wrong. Yet Lewis is still doing her pieces for online ABC News, while Lattouf’s unfair dismissal case is heading for the Federal Court. Verily has it been said: Staff are allowed to express personal opinions at the ABC. They just have to be management’s opinions. Thank you, Samantha, for demonstrating that.
But what really clinches the gold for Lewis is her/their spectacular failure to read the room – an (in)ability much in evidence in the ABC newsroom when it comes to women’s sex-based rights. She/they give/s us to understand that establishing sex-based criteria for the women’s sports category is not a ‘*real* integrity problem’ for women’s sports. Just one day after Lewis posted this tweet, Italian boxer Angela Carini threw in the towel 47 seconds into her bout against Imane Khelif, with a suspected broken nose. And from that point on, sex-based criteria for women’s sport blew up into the hotbed issue of the Paris Olympics. And Lewis, blinded by her/their allegiance to gender-identity ideology, just never saw it coming.