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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@An Impish Pepper
You may be right. After all, I only knew who Vox Day was because I come to this blog.
But it’s not like these people are particularly subtle. Vox Day’s YouTube stream is literally branded “Darkstream.”
@Naglfar:
Yazidi is a cultural-religious group. Although there is a traditional language associated with the Yazidis, it’s not been spoken by very many Yazidis at any time in the recent past. Rather, they mostly speak a variant of Kurdish, but that has everything to do with living mostly in Kurdish territory. They generally speak the local language, whatever that is, and that happens to be Kurdish for most of them.
I’m not at all sure, but what I’ve read traces the Yazidis’ religious traditions back to a time when Zoroastrians interacted with Jews or early Christians, though it also changed due to the influence of Islam (and thus it is hard to determine whether the “original” Yazidi ideas were more Zoroastrian-Jewish or more Zoroastrian-Christian). There’s never been a written holy book of the Yazidis, so linguistic evidence is scant. Yazidis who don’t speak Kurdish as their primary tongue have sometimes translated their hymns and myths into other languages.
The sum total of my knowledge was a documentary I watched and a couple of articles I’ve read some time ago – not even anything book length – so while I’m pretty confident about the core question (‘Do Yazidis speak Kurdish?’) if this is at all important to you, you’re better off with a book from the library than listening to me.
@ crip dyke
An osteo-archeologist friend has been doing a lot of work with the Yazidi. Sadly, mainly digging up mass graves for the war crimes tribunal.
She’s been telling me some interesting stuff though. As for language, a lot of Yazidi speak a form of Kurdish; but some call the language by a different name to emphasise a separate identity.
Maybe like someone saying they speak “American”.
A quick google shows it’s called Ezidiki.
And lead to this interesting article…
http://www.yezidisinternational.org/abouttheyezidipeople/glossary/
@Tabby: I’ve seen plenty of people complain about smaller guys getting wins over big guys. Because apparently they can buy Brock Lesnar steamrolling everyone on the roster and then struggling with a 50-something who hasn’t wrestled in over a decade, but not a 200-pounder beating a 300-pounder.
Which, y’know, there have been MMA fights that actually see a 200-pounder beating a 300-pounder, so that’s cool.
@Alan Robertshaw:
Great source! I found this
To be particularly enlightening. Although taken fully at face value, it would seem to be saying that no one speaks Kurdish, just like no one speaks “Romance language” even though lots of people speak French or Italian or Portuguese.
It’s scripted. Kayfabe I think is the term. So, even if there were some weight to the argument that transwomen have an advantage over other women in sports (spoiler alert” there is weight to that argument), how the hell would it apply here? These idiots make me tired all over.
@Katamount, An Impish Pepper
Older adults can definitely have far right views and further them on the internet. However, they tend to do it in different ways. JP and VD (I love how that can also stand for “venereal disease” in addition to his name) are the fuel for younger people, while most baby boomers seem to prefer QAnon-type stuff on Facebook. This is a bit unusual, but not by that much.
I think this is warranted for Vox:
@Crip Dyke
Thank you for the information. That helps me understand this a lot better.
My guess is that the Kurdish dialects would be classed more accurately as separate languages but aren’t because of racism or the lack of states for the different groups. As Max Weinreich said:
@ naglfar
I like that.
Reminds me a bit of “Never say ‘you and what army?’ to a general; they just point out of the window.”
@Naglfar
I’d have to try and do my own research regarding languages. The conflation of separate languages as dialects or the classification of dialects as separate languages is a thing – I can think of China and the Balkans as the most obvious examples for this I believe, but I don’t know. I’m not aware of the Kurdish situation ATM.
I hear that the main reason that languages in China have some degree of mutual intelligibility is largely superficial and down to a shared writing system. With the Balkans, with the recent genocide being a symptom of it, otherwise likely different registers of one language or “sprachbund” are considered separate for largely nationalistic reasons (which encompass race and religion I believe primarily).
I never liked wrestling when I was little. I kinda thought it was a dumb meathead thing. As I got older, I realized that even though it’s all scripted and choreographed, it’s not necessarily fake – after all, live stage theater is scripted and choreographed and we don’t really think of that as fake, do we? I realized that professional wrestlers are basically live theater actors who also do their own stunts, and just like live stage theater, there’s a lot of potential for thongs to go wrong and sometimes improvising to cover for a mistake makes the best moment of the show. It’s still not really my thing, but now as an adult I can understand why it would be appealing to watch.
O/T:
Yet another reason Bloomberg shouldn’t be the nominee:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/dominicholden/michael-bloomberg-2020-transgender-comments-video
@Tabby: There’s a clear difference between Rey Misterio, who has an adult build despite the height and face of a child, even when his own son is bigger than him, compared to Riho, who now that I think about it, reminds me of Tatsumaki from “One-Punch Man” in being an adult who doesn’t look like it (even in-Universe) and people claiming she does by Japanese woman standards.
@[email protected]: It’s already been said both before and after my previous post that AEW and WWE are completely different companies, meaning Venis and Nyla have not only never worked in the same company, they’ve never been active at the same time, either.
As for Jericho, I hope he’s not a right-wing tool that just hides it better (it’s too late and I’m not in the mood for whatever Google results I might find,) so I just hope that he was more mad for vanity/attention whore reasons than political ones. He’s stood up for women wrestlers before, has no history of dickhead behavior (unlike “Big Cass”, an ex-WWE wrestler who was such a Trumper he defended Trump’s Muslim ban to the very face of Muslim Syrian-Canadian, Sami Zayn*, before he was fired for a number of other dickhead acts backstage some months after his tag partner, Enzo Amore was fired for rape accusations,) so until proven otherwise, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt for peace of mind.
*Speaking of which, Zayn being a Syrian and running a charity for Syrians, is one of the few WWE superstars outright banned from the trips to Saudi Arabia because of that with others either choosing not to go for moral reasons, (Daniel Bryan explicitly because of the Saudi’s anti-LGBT policies and Kevin Steen in solidarity with Zayn who’s like a brother to him,) Cena either not going for the same reasons but definitely because his agent knew it’d be bad PR, did go yet made a negative into a positive by donating their pay to charity like the aforementioned Mustafa Ali or had to go, but intend on skipping out next time after how shitty they were treated by the boss there.
Pretty much from the get-go, the Saudi trips are so unquestionably for McMahon to get a paycheck that not only are the matches there functionally “non-canon” with bullshit one-off titles and trophies designed to entertain the royal family (seriously, the Saudis are so out of touch that they wanted to see wrestlers who’ve been dead for over a decade,) said matches tend to be embarrassingly bad such as the Undertaker vs. Goldberg match (see TVTropes’ “So Bad Its Horrible” page for the full details, such as WWE still going despite it being it being right after Jamal Khasshogi’s murder.)
Thanks for the interesting informations about linguistics.
Kei-O-Wat, Riho is short and thin, but honestly? When I look at her I see a woman with a 22-year-old’s adult face and adult body, even if that body is short and thin. I wonder if her size and her choice of ring attire are making people think she looks like a child.
Photo of Riho on Twitter
And Rey’s adult build? Here he is standing beside Big Show in WCW. That’s a much bigger size differential than Riho and Nyla Rose.
In the absence of a currently active open thread, this seems a vaguely related thread to post this in.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51553815
What is it? It’s an opaque URL so we have no idea whether it’s interesting or not before we click it.
@Alan Robertshaw
That sounds quite grueling. I figure I could carry a 60kg pole with others or a 79kg stretcher, but I think those are the only course items I could realistically do. I’ll leave the rest to those with more guts and endurance.
@Surplus
It’s a news story.
About?
Usually there’s a capsule précis right in the URL, but in this instance it’s just alphanumeric gobbledegook.
@Surplus
The first woman to pass the Para test in the British military.
The headline is “British Army officer becomes first woman to pass brutal Para course”
Ah. Well, then, I suppose congratulations are in order. Along with meltdowns from the right wing.
O/T, but this is practically an open thread at this point anyway:
If you want to see another example of how much of a two-faced liar Mike Bloomberg is, look no further.
TL;DR is that last year, as I mentioned above, Mike said that trans* people (whom he calls “heshes”, “its”, and “men in dresses”) are acceptable to throw under the bus. Now he sells T-shirts about protecting trans* rights. There may be no better metaphor for the American capitalist grifter.
He needs to learn biology.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GGdiscussion/comments/ete11k/billy_d_aka_oneangrygamer_has_returned_and_is_as/
Going back to this for a moment, now that I have a few seconds free to respond:
Compare the entire head of the dog in that tweet to the heads of the dogs I posted, not just the ears. The Danes have a much longer face / longer lips than Labs do. The dog Venis posted in that tweet doesn’t have the Dane face, but the Lab face. Wherever he got that pic from, it clearly wasn’t from typing the words ‘Great Dane’ into a search engine.
(I know, minor point in the rest of this idiocy, but Venis’ lack of research on that point had to be noted.)
@Alan,
I’d heard that about Scooby Doo’s design inspiration before, and found it interesting. It also reminds me that hunting down (one of) the recent updates of the property could be rewarding. Specially the version where it basically states that Shaggy/Velma and Fred/Daphne were officially canon. And maybe a few of the other new versions too. (Kinda wary over the live action version, mostly because of the CGI Scooby alongside the live actors throws me off for some reason.)
Super late to the party (busy week), but I just wanted to say:
Thank you, Val Venis. I now feel more vindicated than ever to have supported Dusty Rhodes (AKA Goldust) when you two feuded all those years ago.
I’d hope for you to get some venereal disease, but a tool like you would probably just communicate it to his hapless partners.