Last Week Tonight contacts WoLF seeking comment on women’s sports

Apr 4

The show seems to be taking issue with UN’s Reem Alsalem on her report on women’s sports.

On April 02, WoLF received a request for comment on “a segment on transgender athletes” from DM (Dee) Brent, “researcher and fact-checker at Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, a show on HBO.”

The show is scheduled to air on Sunday, April 6, although it is unclear if this segment will actually make the cut. In the interest of transparency, we are publishing the full correspondence between Dee Brent and WoLF.

We will leave it to the audience to decide if the show appears to be fair and impartial.

Questions from Last Week Tonight to WoLF

Hi there,

My name is Dee. I'm a researcher and fact-checker at Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, a show on HBO.

Though our story lineup is subject to change, I wanted to reach out because for this week's episode, airing on Sunday, April 6, we're likely going to air a segment on transgender athletes. As part of that piece, we may include details about a report written by Reem Alsalem, UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, and submitted to the UN General Assembly last year. That report contains data from the website SheWon.org, which was apparently submitted by your organization.

Ahead of that, I wanted to give Women's Liberation Front ample opportunity to respond to details that concern this report, and some of the data cited therein. Please be advised that our script is still in-progress and isn't set in stone yet, so our questions pertain to details that may or may not end up in the segment, and don't necessarily reflect the final product.

Our questions are below. Our deadline for a response, should you choose to provide one, is 10am ET on Friday, April 3. Please let me know if you'd like to set up a phone call to discuss any of this in the meantime, or if you have any questions for me.

Thanks for your time,

Dee

*****

On the Origins of SheWon Data in the UN Special Rapporteur's Report:

The Special Rapporteur's report cites the following statistics: "According to information received, by 30 March 2024, over 600 female athletes in more than 400 competitions have lost more than 890 medals in 29 different sports.29" The footnote for that citation reads: "Submission from Women's Liberation Front, International Consortium on Female Sport and Dianne Post on behalf of Lavender Patch." Is this citation accurate? Did you submit this data for consideration to the Special Rapporteur? How did you become connected with the Special Rapporteur prior to this submission? Did the Special Rapporteur request this specific data from you?

There is a link in the above footnote to the website SheWon.org, which is apparently the original source of this data. Does your organization have any connection to this website? DId you vet this website or these statistics in some way before including them in your submission to the UN Special Rapporteur?

Regarding the website SheWon.org and its data set:

According to posts on the message board Ovarit, a user named WatcherattheGates created the SheWon.org website in June 2021. (link here: https://ovarit.com/o/SaveWomensSports/34535/i-snagged-shewon-org-who-can-supply-the-info) That user initially posted: "Hi, everyone, amazingly the simple URL SheWon.org was available, so I snagged it. I can make a simple website that lists which women would have won what award if they had not been displaced by a man. But I am not a sports person. Is there anyone who could supply content?" At the bottom of the above thread, user WatcherattheGates wrote: "OK, the site is up and ready to accept info! Just use the comments function on the site to send me the info." Were you aware of the origins of this website when you included its data set in your report? Any additional comment here?

According to posts on Ovarit, it appears that Ovarit users have continued to help out with various aspects of maintaining the SheWon.org website. For instance, in a post from January 2024 (link: https://ovarit.com/o/SaveWomensSports/529522/update-on-shewon), user WatcherattheGates wrote: Hi, everyone, we keep plugging away at SheWon.org! ... excitingly, we now have a page (https://www.shewon.org/males ) that lists known TiMs in sports. If you know of any more TiM individuals that are not on that list--we found a new TiM athlete just tonight!--DM me. We want as comprehensive a list as possible. Shout-out to the developer from Ovarit who created the new page, who is a shero! :-) There are also many instances on Ovarit of individual users submitting examples that end up on the SheWon.org site. And on the sympathetic website "Red State Feministists," there was the following disclaimer (link: https://redstatefeminists.org/shewon/index.html): "SheWon.org cannot be contacted directly, due to the potential for harassment. The women of Ovarit know how to reach us." Were you aware that the website SheWon.org is operated and maintained by anonymous Ovarit users when you submitted its data to the Special Rapporteur? Any comment on this information?

According to the website, anyone can submit information to the SheWon.org data set. The website clarifies: "Every submission to She Won is carefully reviewed by our team of volunteers." Is it accurate to say that anyone can submit to SheWon.org Were you aware when you submitted the website's data that its database is reviewed by a team of anonymous volunteers? Any additional comments here?

In tallying the total number of medals in this data set, it appears that SheWon.org counts one medal lost for every woman who places after the disputed athlete in question. So if a disputed athlete places first, then the second, third, and fourth place athletes in that event are counted as being denied medals; if the disputed athlete places second; then the third and fourth place athletes are counted as being denied medals; and so on. Were you aware this was She Won's methodology when you submitted its data? Any pushback or clarifications here?

The data set appears to contain information about events all across the world, and at all levels of competition. It appears to include events dating back to 2001. There are instances of lower level competitions being included, such as a "Fun Run" in Topeka, Kansas. There are also examples of events that may be less commonly thought of as sports, such as an Irish Dance competition, and Poker events. Were you aware this was She Won's methodology when you submitted its data? Any pushback or clarifications here?

Please let us know if there's any additional response you'd like to provide, or if you have any questions for me.

Thanks again,

Dee

WOLF’s Response to Last Week Tonight:

Hi Dee,

Thanks for reaching out to us, and for making time to talk with me. That was kind of you. I have to say, your questions are almost identical to other media queries we've received recently. It's really quite astonishing.

We'll answer you openly, as we have the other requests. We note the tone of your questions is fairly accusatory, as though you feel we did something wrong by looking at the stats available on shewon.org and submitting input to the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls regarding women's sports.

Women's Liberation Front is a radical feminist organization that has worked for 11 years to restore, protect and defend the rights of women and girls.

You asked about our relationship with the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls. One of Women's Liberation Front's key policy advocacy positions is to end male violence against women and girls. Any feminist organization concerned with violence against women and girls would of course know of the work of the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls. The UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women was created by a UN mandate issued in 1994. The following year was the Beijing Conference on Women, where Hillary Clinton famously said, "Women's Rights Are Human Rights, and Human Rights are Women's Rights." It was an incredible decade for women's rights advances, now sadly being rolled back globally and in the United States from all sides. Reem Alsalem has held the mandate since 2021. We enthusiastically support her work, as she's the finest women's rights advocate ever fielded by the United Nations. She added 'girls' to the title, making it the Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, and we applauded that move.

How did we know to submit input for her report on women's sports?

Not much mystery there. If you look at the Special Rapporteur's website: https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-violence-against-women, and scroll down, you'll see where she lists calls for input to reports she will be making to the UN General Assembly and / or UN Human Rights Council. This is standard process. The current call is for input on Surrogacy. WoLF is opposed to surrogacy and all commercial sexual exploitation of women. We also submitted input on her prior reports on prostitution and emerging frontiers of violence against women and girls.

In her report to the Human Rights Council on Prostitution last year, the UNSRVAWAG said what women globally have longed for the UN to say: that prostitution is an organized system of violence against women, and that 'sex work is work' artificially sanitizes and hides the brutal reality of prostitution. Women around the world cheered these statements from her. We strongly support the Nordic model, for all the reasons she listed in her report on how violent prostitution is for women.

You can read WoLF's submission on Violence in women's sports here: https://womensliberationfront.org/news/wolf-submits-input-to-un-for-report-against-violence-against-women-an-girls-in-sport

Women's Liberation Front has long supported keeping women's sports female. Prior to the UNSRVAWAG's call for input on violence in women's sports in 2024, Women's Liberation Front had long engaged in the issue of men and boys identifying as female competing in women's sports, and the serious damage it does to women and girls:

- This is a summary of our work on protecting Title IX

- Here is our latest news on women's sports

- Here's a summary page of our women's sports blog updates

Regarding the website SheWon.org and its data set:

WoLF has no connection to SheWon.org.

SheWon.org and HeCheated.org provide something incredibly useful that women globally had been looking for: tabulation. Over the past few years, story after story has broken of male 'transgender' athletes taking wins in women's sport. Both sites are repositories for the record of lost titles and medals taken from women by men.

Despite the NCAA cavalierly dismissing all concerns as just a tiny number of 'transgender' athletes competing in women's sports, a search for 'transgender athlete wins' shows that males winning in female sports is now ubiquitous.

We're incredibly grateful to women out there volunteering their precious time and efforts to keep the record straight. We don't know who they are, but we sure appreciate them.

The requirement to accommodate 'trans inclusion' in sports is only being forced on one sex: women. Why is that? Why don't we see FIFA Men's World Cup teams flooded with women identifying as men, demanding to get on the pitch? Where are all the former female athletes, now 'transgender', in the NFL, AFL, Canadian hockey leagues, US basketball leagues, and heavyweight boxing championships? No women are walking off the field with men's medals. It's only men taking medals from women. We'd love to understand the mental pretzel people are operating within where they don't see this as sexist oppression. There is an absolute conflict with women's sex-based rights when gender ideology vaults 'transgender' as a new and supreme protected class over women and girls. Radical feminists always have known this was a problem and we've been pushing back for ages.

The framing of your questions indicates you seek to discredit SheWon.org because volunteers put it together. You question its accuracy and some of the ways it calculates the loss to women and girls. But you missed that sports authorities and organizations like the NCAA and IOC aren't compiling that data, as they've obliterated sex with gender identity. There is an implied sense of outrage in your questions - how dare women keep track of stolen sports titles!

That smacks of Progressive Misogyny.

You questioned why stats are being compiled on more than one medal lost when a male wins a women's competition. There's a ripple effect from introducing an element (men) to women's sports competition that should never have been there:

The female that would have been the winner, if not for a male competing, is now knocked into second place.
That knocks the second place female winner into third place.
Which then knocks the third place female athlete off the podium completely.

Plus the woman or girl who never got to compete at all, and the ones who choose not to for their own safety or dignity! When you think about the girls who never competed because of this newly erected barrier of having to face males in competition as a female, just counting lost titles actually UNDER counts the number of impacted female athletes.

There are so few opportunities for female sports scholarships and monetary prizes that this male colonization of the tiny bit of terrain female sports occupies is particularly cruel. This is happening globally.

Progressive misogyny is misogyny, and as feminists, we reject it every bit as much as we reject restrictions on our reproductive rights, commercial sexual exploitation of women by men, and male violence against women.

Men have learned that they can enter women's sports by just saying they are women now. Some men game that. Other men try to expose the fallacy of 'inclusivity' in women's sports.

Humans can't change sex, but will absolutely game a system that seems tailor-made for them to do so. Southpark aptly illustrated how men will enter and dominate women's sports by saying they're now women in the "Go Strong Woman, Go" episode in 2019.

Men who know inclusion of males in women's sports under the banner of trans is a farce are trying to show the world just how idiotic forced 'inclusion' is. In 2023, male powerlifting coach Avi Silverberg entered the female competition to openly mock Canada's policy of letting any men who identify as a woman into women's sports. He was allowed to compete, and of course he dominated. He then gave numerous interviews to media precisely to expose how wrong it is to let men like him compete against women.

We play sports with our bodies, not our identities. We hosted a great speaker in October, Dr. Greg Brown, a sports medicine specialist at the University of Nebraska. His talk was "Males and female's bodies are different, and that matters in sports." You can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8LZaOICIMY

His research showed that even after taking opposite-sex hormones, trans-identifying males still outperformed top female athletes.

Summing up, there is just no fairness possible when males are allowed to compete with women in women's sports categories.

What about other categories besides sports on shewon.org?Title IX in the USA was passed to give girls a chance to play sports. Before it passed, girls had no places to practice and compete. They had to wait until boys weren't using those spaces. Girls wore the hand-me-down jerseys of boy teams. Title IX made sports possible for girls. All kinds of activities for women and girls to enjoy and compete in have sprung up since then. The gain here in providing opportunities for women and girls being able to participate and achieve in all aspects of public life cannot be underestimated. This righted centuries of exclusion of women and girls. It's unbelievably ironic that males now seek to colonize all things female, and any objection by women is met with threats, silencing, and ostracization, mostly by men, which serves to exclude women and girls from public participation. To us, this is absolutely oppression of females, erupting in new form.

Thank you for reaching out to us, and giving us the opportunity to respond. We appreciate this opportunity to engage with you.

While we are happy to see you have taken an interest in women's sports, we would encourage you to expand the scope of your investigation for this segment or future ones. For example, why not cover what is happening in women's prisons, too?

We would be delighted to stay in touch on any topics related to women's rights and provide a feminist perspective.

Sharon Byrne
Executive Director, Women's Liberation Front