Without looking it up, do you know who held the title of Assistant Secretary of Health at the Department of Health & Human Services during the Trump administration? You don’t, do you? That’s okay, because I didn’t, either. (The answer was Brett Giroir, for what it’s worth.) Let’s try another one…

Again, without looking it up, do you know who won the 2021 NCAA national championship in the women’s 500-yard freestyle? I didn’t, either. (The answer was Paige Madden, who actually won the national champion in four different events!) How about the 2020 champion? Just kidding, that’s a trick question. The 2020 championships were canceled because of COVID, but again, you might not have known that, either. And that’s the point I’m getting at.

Think about how obscure these positions and titles are, how hyper-focused on HHS staffing or NCAA women’s swimming you’d have to be in order to retain this knowledge. Pretty intense, right?

After news broke that Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter was accepted by the company’s board (there’s still a somewhat lengthy process between now and when he’ll actually own it), some of his fans felt the freedom to tweet whatever they wanted without fear of Twitter actually enforcing its rules about harassment or misinformation. With this freedom, they… tweeted about the current assistant secretary of health at the HHS and the 2022 NCAA national champion in the women’s 500-yard freestyle - by name (Rachel Levine & Lia Thomas, respectively). Specifically, these people tweeted that these women… were men. That was it. That was the big contribution they had.

What did these women do? Well, they’re trans, and apparently, that’s enough to get the right-wing rage machine worked into a lather.

I’ve already addressed the whole, “Is it fair for trans athletes to compete in sports?” question in a previous post of mine, so if you want that, I recommend checking it out here. (My answer is that it depends.)