Mick Hartley

From Genevieve Gluck at Reduxx:

A trans-identified male in Denmark who has been given permission to compete against women in football is being celebrated by national media. Oliver John Collenette, who calls himself Olivia Kjærgaard Collenette, began claiming a transgender status approximately three years ago, and shortly after began demanding the right to play on a women’s football team. Now, he has been granted approval by DBU Zealand (DBU Sjælland) to play on one of the club’s women’s teams.

In a glowing interview published this week by the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR), Collenette expressed his disappointment that the policy allowing men like himself to compete in women’s sports was not yet a national measure. To date, only DBU Zealand, the local governing body for football on the island of Zealand, has put into place guidelines allowing men to “identify” into women’s teams.

“I’m actually happy that I can play with the gender I identify as. But it’s not so nice that you don’t know how it will be in the other unions. It would be nice if it were nationwide – if the whole country supported transgender people,” Collenette told DR.

Until recently, Collenette had played football on men’s teams. “It was terrible for me when I played with the boys. I didn’t feel like I fit in, and I felt left out of the community,” he told the national broadcaster. “The fact that I was wearing girls’ clothes and felt like I was being looked at a lot and not really talked to… I was ostracized and I felt like I wasn’t welcome in a way, so it made me very insecure.”

Collenette indicated, in the interview, that women expressed opposition to his inclusion in women’s sports. “In the beginning, when we went to games, we always asked the teams before we showed up if they were okay with playing with us. When they heard there was a transgender person, they said no.”

“I don’t see why it would be a problem for biological women to play alongside transgender women who act and identify as women. It’s not about taking anything away from anyone, it’s about creating more diversity,” Collenette added.

The entitled brat. Of course it’s about taking away from someone. It’s taking away from the woman whose place he’s taken. More than that, though, it’s about the straightforward unfairness of it: a man playing against women.

It’s so easy for the media to celebrate this “diversity” when it’s a man playing the victim. It just builds on the same old tradition of women being ignored: of women not really counting