The Tokyo olympics provided a powerful example of the principal less is more. There was a silent undercurrent of schuedenfraude when the US women's football team was beaten by Sweden. The sporting world had not forgotten the cringing histrionics of Megan Rapinoe, the US team captain at the previous Olympics. With her ostentatious purple hair, arch goal celebrations and the public statements about Trump, she did very little to advance the global tolerance of LGBTQ+ issues. In Tokyo, Lauren Hubbard, the NZ female weightlifter, came and went with scarcely a whisper as she failed the weight early in the competition. Hubbard had become a freak show, the MSM predicting that with the build of a man, she would trounce the opposition. In the event she acted with decorum and will return home to NZ to live a life with dignity. The MSM, deprived of a comic target, did not widely report that the Canadian women's football team won the gold medal with a transgender player, Quinn. He has, or is, transitioning to become a man, and was selected for the team on the basis of 'gender assigned at birth'. Fair enough. He dropped his first name, Rebecca, and uses the mononyn 'Quinn'. He is a professional athlete, respected by all, and by virtue of Canada winning the football final, is the first, and will always be the first, transgender athlete to win an Olympic medal (of any sort) and a gold medal. A far more effective advocate of tolerance than Rapinoe. Quinn does raise the Q whether the public finds it easier to tolerate and understand a woman becoming a man (Quinn) as opposed to a man becoming a woman (Hubbard). Is this an issue to do with looks and appearance? But that is a debate for another day.
