A male weightlifter once dubbed "New Zealand's Strongest Man" applied last week to compete in a women's powerlifting competition. His intention was not to defeat women in the sport, but rather to discredit the notion that biological men don't have a physiological advantage over their female peers — an advantage which male transsexuals appear keen to simultaneously exploit and deny.
Global Powerlifting Committee New Zealand has since denied Dale Shepherd's application, adopting new rules over the weekend that will preclude him from taking the stage to make his point.
While Shepherd suggests the new rules are similarly "deficient," it appears that with his controversial application, he may have forced a shift in the right direction without having to break a sweat.
A weighty concern
Some middling male athletes have transitioned over to women's sports in recent years, ostensibly in hopes of leveraging their sex-specific biological advantages to displace female athletes, thereby securing prize money, sponsorships, and other spoils.
Perceiving this trend to be unfair and unsportsmanlike, a number of men in the world of weightlifting have taken action.
Dale Shepherd, 52, is one of a handful of men to protest gender identification policies and make a mockery of the trend of noncompetitive men seeking to try their odds against women.
The British rapper Nzube Olisaebuka Udezue, whose stage name is Zuby, did so in 2019.
The Times reported that Zuby, an Oxford graduate, beat the British women's deadlift record as well as the bench lift record, then joked that the stunt was "strong, stunning and brave."
Zuby said his protest "struck a nerve," demonstrating "the fallacies of the arguments on the other side."
"I have seen people saying there is no inherent biological strength difference between men and women. I posted it being a bit tongue-in-cheek, showing what I think is the obvious absurdity of their argument," said the British rapper.
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