By David Futrelle
On Wednesday night, pro wrestler Nyla Rose was crowned All Elite Wrestling Women’s World Champion after defeating rival Riho in a scripted match. What made this an especially dramatic moment in the already plenty dramatic world of pro wrestling was that Rose is a trans woman.
Rose’s win, not surprisingly, triggered a transphobic backlash, with some of wrestling’s more backwards fans attacking Rose on social media. But no one seems to be quite as mad about her win as retired pro wrestler Val Venis, who has been loudly broadcasting his displeasure on Twitter for several days straight now.
Here’s a little sampling of his, er, work. As you’ll see, his ALL-CAPS key has been getting quite the workout.
Naturally, he’s trying to present himself as the champion of “REAL WOMEN” against evil soyboy SJWs and “the male species” in general.
He’s also trying his hand at humor, but he’s basically only got the one joke.
Or maybe two jokes?
I would offer some sort of rebuttal to all of these but I’m not sure I have anything to add to this tweet from Twitter MuFo and self-designated “wrestlebitch” Rivka Gheist, describing VEnis, fairly accurately, as a “fucking haggard old pissbaby” and declaring that
Trans women are women, I would happily have them in my locker rooms and face them in the ring. Wrestling is for everyone, including those gender-expansive identities. … Congratulations Nyla Rose, on your historic win!
Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.
H/T — Thanks to Lizuka, who alerted me to Venis’ meltdown
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O/T but somewhat relevant:
TERFs are now finding common ground with conservative Catholics (TW: transphobia, misgendering, homophobia) and I am not surprised.
We also learn in this article that prominent TERF M.K. Fain is an ex-evangelical. Perhaps that explains some of her bigoted views on gender.
That’s my surprised face. TERFs, as conservatives creeps, find common ground with other conservatives creeps that share targets with them ? How shocking and unexpected.
@Naglfar
It never fails to amuse me how people calling for a system with massive disparities are always convinced that under their desired system, they will go from their current low-rung position to the top of the heap.
It seems like every single libertarian is convinced that only government regulation is keeping him in his IT Support job, and in the Free Market he would swiftly become a Fortune 500 CEO.
See also: this lawsuit against allowing transgender competitors in high-school girls’ track events.
Speaking as a former (very) non-elite competitor in girls’/women’s sports in high school and college, I would like to say to all these transphobe “defenders of women”: You never gave a rat’s ass about supporting any girls’ or women’s sports before, so don’t think you’re fooling anyone when you pretend to start now.
Women’s sports, both professional and amateur, are constantly denigrated and sneered at for being “not as interesting” as men’s sports because women on average are physically smaller and slower than men. And many men feel embarrassed or insecure about watching tough athletic women performing feats of physical strength, skill and endurance, at least if those women aren’t dressed in bikinis and deliberately sexualized for the audience.
Consequently, female athletes are routinely ignored, undervalued, mocked, and in the case of professionals, underpaid. (And in some horrific cases, actually abused with impunity due to lack of proper vetting and supervision.)
And now a bunch of transphobic assholes are trying to make people believe that they really care if a tiny number of transgender female athletes might have an “unfair advantage” over their competitors? Sorry pal, you and your ilk have already made it stunningly clear that you’re completely indifferent about unfair treatment of female athletes unless you think it affords an opportunity for airing your bigotry.
The next time somebody tries to tell you how opposed they are to transgender athletes “endangering” women’s sports, ask them to name the most recent women’s sports event they watched. Ask them how their local girls’ or women’s soccer team is doing. Ask them who’s their favorite WNBA or NWSL player. Ask them to name the top female marathoner, or cricketer, or tennis player (come on, that’s a no-brainer!) in the world. They most likely won’t have a clue.
The transphobia of these people would be bad enough even without the hypocrisy of their claim to care about women’s sports, but the hypocrisy is just adding insult to injury.
Vince and Linda McMahon don’t have anything to do with what he’s talking about. The fact that some of you seem to believe the WWE is the only wrestling out there is laughable.
That might be a Dane. They aren’t born with ears that stand up and not everyone gets their Dane’s ears cut.
@Allandrel
Lord, grant me the confidence of an overly optimistic mediocre white man…
@Kimstu
It’s just another way for bigots to latch on to a cause they don’t really care about. They’ll move on when it ceases to be a useful pawn. Sort of like how transphobes also claim it’s about women’s safety in bathrooms while also supporting policies that make it easier for rapists to get away with rape. It’s a way to pretend it’s more than just raw hatred.
Re: Great Danes
When Iwoa Takamoto was tasked with designing Scooby Doo, he sought advice from a Great Dane breeder as to what characteristics were sought after in prize winning examples of the breed. He then proceeded to give Scooby the exact opposite i.e. bent back, bow legs, double chin etc.
Which is why Scooby is a hero for our times.
@Alan
Scooby is Best Dog. Especially in the Mystery, Inc. series.
@ Vicky P
Isn’t he just?
I think a big congratulations is in order. For nyla rose no matter what this asshole thinks. Hopefully he doesn’t take anything away from her victory
Okay, Val. Step back for a bit. Take a few deep breaths. Now tell yourself, “I’m complaining about one of the participants in a scripted match has an unfair advantage.”
@Allandrel
It’s a peculiar kind of egotism and selfishness that fuels the view one is going to magically be among the elite in whatever wildly disparate society they have a droolfest over. I get a lot of black amusement over that same kind of myopia in religion, because with all the fundies believing in the Rapture, they *always* think they’re going to be amongst the elect spirited to Heaven to laugh at all of us sinners enduring the Tribulations. They never think they’re going to be among the left behind, when looking at their general behavior would indicate that, er… maybe they need some work done.
One joke. So many examples.
@Bananananana dakry: Short-Haired, Fat, and Deranged : I don’t think it come from that. It’s more the continuation of myths they were told.
Well, one myth in particular : the American Dream, where someone just need to work hard to be rich and famous. It obviously don’t work like that, both because you also need a lot of luck and/or inherited capital, and because not everyone can work hard enough to be a successful businessman (who didn’t inherit an already working firm, I mean).
Once reality that they aren’t gonna be successful self made man set in, a decent amount of people want to keep the fantasy of success on an automatic formula, but just change the conditions. That’s both a common fuel for racism (“if they weren’t thoses jews, I would have been successful ! Removing them will restore my success”), and for thoses past fantasy (“they said me that because back in the time, it was true ! let’s return to that age standard and it will restore my success”).
The semen retentist in the other thread show how their reasoning work : there is an immutable truth, everything in the world follow from that immutable truth, and litteraly contradiction become impossible because there isn’t a place for it.
At least, the religious type can rely on the fact it’s unclear just how much of the population will get to the paradise directly. Maybe standards are really low or really strange. Here, there’s a mountain of observable facts about success that they refuse to see.
@Ohlmann
And anything that seems to contradict it is a conspiracy run by someone else to deceive, and must be combated.
While the WWE is a fucking hell of a mess (Seriously the fucking dumb shit Vince has been up to can fill a book) and they treat their stars like crap at least they are willing to run a trans women in the womens category and have her win the championship so I’ll give them that… Vince should still fall off the top of the hell in the cell cage into an open manhole
Long-time lurker, first-time poster here and while I normally enjoy just reading the subject material and posts, (well, most of them,) this was so in my wheelhouse (I even have the match on my DVR) that I had to give my two cents in (and head’s up, it’s a lot.)
1. First of all, it’d be extremely generous to even call Val Venis a has-been because that gimmick (sleazy porn star) was peak Attitude Era (the actual John Wayne Bobbitt saved him from a similar “fate” via katana for sleeping with a Japanese man’s wife and it’s every bit as stereotypical as you could imagine), hasn’t been relevant in the wrestling world since then (late-’90s-early-2000s) and wouldn’t be on any wrestling fan’s list for greatest and/or most memorable champions (he’s held the Intercontinental championship, the second-tier belt, twice and never for more than a month,) so he’s just another one of those guys giving hot takes as a desperate bitter means for attention. Consider him no different than Roosh V in that he rode off being “edgy” and now just using whatever salty means to stay relevant and honestly, I’m not even reading what he said, just glancing at Futrelle’s responses (much like Roosh and the like).
2. “Choreographed” is the better word for pro-wrestling than just the usual tired line of it being fake because even champions like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (whose daughter, Simone is just starting in biz,) Chris Jericho (current AEW champion along with a laundry list of other titles especially in WWE) and Kofi Kingston have all said so, but defended it on the grounds that it’s no different than an actor winning an award as 1. You still need to be in proper shape to perform, 2. The crowd still needs to be into you so all the usual storytelling tropes still definitely apply and 3. Even with a booker (the storyteller behind the scenes) planning things out with room for improv within those plans, unexpected things can still happen and at the worst possible times.
Bad Things: Legit injuries, legit arrests, failed drug tests, wrestler should have been tested for drugs (ex. Jeff Hardy, who lives a rock star life in general, was so high out of his gourd in 2011 during a pay-per-view championship match that it was best for his and his opponent’s safety that he be pinned ASAP with the crowd chanting “bullshit!” and his opponent shouting back “I agree!”) and the audience just not being into the wrestler (ex. Roman Reigns has an entire Wiki page dedicated to how hated he was for being shoved down the audience’s throat, plus failed a drug test and nearly retiring due to a real-life bout of returning leukemia,) and/or storyline (AEW’s “Nightmare Collective” group was so hated for the wrong reasons that it was flat-out nixed by part of the group turning on each other and the leader literally going to therapy).
Good Things: While it was bad for Mustafa Ali getting legit injured (though he took it as destiny meant for Kofi,) that opening was filled by Kofi Kingston, who despite not winning, gave such a great performance that it lead to momentum of him eventually winning the WWE Championship at Wrestlemania and holding it for a few months despite only being seen as mid-card/tag-team material by the higher-ups for the past 11 years (which he even contemplated quitting years ago because his career stagnated until joining “The New Day” team which revitalized his career/passion; Becky Lynch being accidentally punched in the nose (by The Rock’s real-life cousin, Nia Jax, who fits into the Bad Things category like Reigns) and bleeding which lead to an iconic look of bloodied defiance, the crowd’s outright refusal to see her as a heel/bad guy because of how valid her points were and how tired they were of her opponent Charlotte Flair (also same reasons as Reigns) that she instead was revised as an anti-hero and that momentum lead to headlining/main-eventing the same Wrestlemania (35) as Kofi Kingston to become a double-champion (Monday Night Raw and Friday Night Smackdown are separate brands in WWE that each have their own Women’s title); And of course, Daniel Bryan was also legit treated like only an upper-midcarder by the brass for being too small and vanilla, but he was so popular it embarrassed said brass into also going with it to become one of their biggest stars in spite of said brass’s intentions. Hell, even John Cena, who for all intents and purposes is the 2010s Hulk Hogan (minus the racism and other asshole behavior,) was on the verge of being fired because he wasn’t focused on like the other “’02 batch/class” until he was heard rapping backstage, went as Vanilla Ice for Halloween then had a gimmick as a white rapper who freestyled on opponents en route to the ring, was so popular he became an anti-hero then eventually the face of the company… where people hated him as the precursor to Reigns except fans both knew it was how he was written so they hated John Cena The Character rather than John Cena The Person as he both agreed with them and made the most of it to the point that said detractors appreciate him in hindsight compared to the others.
3. This happened in AEW not WWE. Besides the facts that Vince McMahon’s real-life wife, Linda is both a failed politician against Richard Blumenthal in Connecticut and she was an early member of the Trump Administration before bailing, in 2006 Trump had a “Battle of the Billionaires” feud and, I shit you not, Trump was the face/good guy in the feud that even had Bobby Lashley (a buff Black ex-army soldier,) as his representative. There’s so much goddamn irony, foreshadowing, etc. to made there that it’s best to save that for another day/post. AEW “only” treats Nyla as a powerhouse villain with zero mention of her being trans, (meaning she’s simply treated as a villain who just happens to be trans and non-stereotypical Native American,) WWE’s latest LGBT-related storyline involved a male-female wedding interrupted by the bride’s secret jilted ex-girlfriend fighting said bride (and it’s a loooong story about all the various flavors of wrongness there) despite the fact that they both have an openly gay wrestler on the roster, Sonya Deville and that she’s been pushing for a tasteful romance storyline with her real-life BFF and tag-partner Mandy Rose, whose instead part of a straight love triangle. Also Jeff Hardy’s incident happened in another company, TNA (“Total Nonstop Action” aka “Impact Wrestling”) which doesn’t drug-test its wrestlers (among other infamous employment problems) which is why/how the incident happened when WWE has said drug policy in place.
4. Besides John Oliver going in on WWE’s ethical problems of doing shows in Saudi Arabia and WWE’s “independent contractor” status which is a legal loophole to avoid paying (McMahon even blamed low quarter revenue on the wrestlers being too injured,) Jesse Ventura outright stated he tried to unionize the locker room in the ’80s, but Hulk Hogan ratted him out. And while WWE does provide free rehab to even former “independent contractors” (ex. Dustin Runnels took the offer to get cleaned up for his pill problems during one of his stints away from the company before joining AEW,) their “Talent Wellness Policy” only came about after the sudden death of Eddie Guerrero in 2005 followed by further scrutiny with the murder-suicide of Chris Benoit (Boxer’s Dementia from all the diving headbutts to say the least,) and the 2007 drug scandal when ELEVEN wrestlers failed testing, which affected the talent pool and storylines to say the least. AEW, so far is the only wrestling biz that actually gives their wrestlers healthcare.
5. Besides deserving more credit than Lizuka gives Nyla (ex. an interview mentioned she was dubbed a ring general by her co-workers in how she coordinated a four-way match,) Riho as the inaugural champion bothered me because despite her surprising experience (she’s 22 and been wrestling since nine,) and the fact that she’s booked as an underdog winning more from cleverness than strength (ex. reversing an attempted submission hold into a quick pin,) she looks like a 12-year-old fan that was brought into the ring, plus the general problem of AEW has, especially with its Japanese wrestlers (“Why is that Japanese lady cosplaying as Freddie Mercury?”), is assuming American audiences already know who they are, combined with Riho having yet to give a promo and the infrequency of her appearances (though not of Brock Lesner’s level). One could even argue nepotism as she used to/still does tag with Kenny Omega, she being one of his on-screen friends threatened with being beaten up (and the deer-in-the-headlights obliviousness of just standing there besides his ranting opponent and the dead giveaway that she’d be the inaugural champion being that the women’s belt is exactly her size, meaning nearly every future women’s champion would have to carry it, drape it over their shoulder, etc. until they get a larger version. So besides representation, I’m glad Nyla won because of the badass presence she makes as the top of the division, her charisma and that she’s legit made me laugh in interviews and online.
6. I recommend The Daily Beast article on Nyla talking about her upbringing, family (she’s apparently married to a cis-woman and have kids together) and what wrestling means to her and what it could mean for any LGBT kids watching at home.
7. FYI: Sonny Kiss, who is Black and gay, is also part of the AEW roster (and was part of the short-lived “Lucha Underground” on the El Ray Network) and hasn’t been stereotyped either despite how genuinely feminine he is and how popular he is with the crowd no matter what a similar tool like Jim Cornette (even worse than Venis with a history of problems to the extent of being recently fired, again, for a racist remark) says.
@Bananananana dakry
Oh, they’ve worked that out: All that matters is if you have the Correct Beliefs, and your actions are irrelevant. Thinking that works matter is for Papists.
PMD literature is FILLED with gloating over people who lived good, righteous lives being divinely punished because they slightly disagreed with what the author says that the Bible says.
@Allandrel
This is one of the biggest practical differences between Judaism and Christianity that I’ve noticed. Most strains of Judaism emphasize personal actions over beliefs (deed not creed) while many branches of Christianity prioritize belief and faith.
That’s basically the ending of every Chick Tract.
Which is very ironic when the new Testament is basically Jesus saying in 1759 different way that deeds are more importants than creeds.
I sometime wonder if the “expiation of our sins” that he is supposed to have done is seeing mankind epically missing the point of any of his speechs.
I’m just gonna point out that WWE did previously have one of their male talents pretend to be a woman and made him one half of the women’s tag champions, then some years later TNA did much the same thing but didn’t even get the dude pretend to be a woman, and I don’t recall Mr Venis or anyone else having hissyfits about this being “unfair to women”.
Plus Nyla Rose is not a million miles off a number of other, cis female wrestlers out there in terms of physique (Aja Kong, Awesome Kong, Viper, Nia Jax) so it seems to me like this is a particularly silly arena in which to claim a trans woman athlete is at an unfair advantage.
But then Val Venis hasn’t been relevant since the time he got his dick chopped off for a storyline so I’m very disinclined to care about what he has to say about this or anything else.
@Ohlmann
The thing about religious texts is that interpreters can twist them to justify just about anything. It’s the only way conservative evangelicals can support Trump’s policies and still think they’re following Jesus’s teachings.
Now, one of Nyla Rose’s coworkers screaming about this on Twitter fucking sucks, yes. BUT, Nyla isn’t being made to play out a story arc about winning the title “unfairly” simply by being trans. And I for one find that fucking amazing considering how recently the WWE had blackface-themed merchandise for a black wrestler.