Debunking Veronica Ivy's False Claims About Trans Women in Female Sports

Veronica Ivy gaslights Trevor Noah with fallacious statements and scientific misinformation about the physical advantage of trans-identified males in female sports.

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On July 1, Canadian male athlete and trans rights activist Veronica Ivy (formerly Rachel McKinnon) sat down with Trevor Noah on The Daily Show to discuss the debate surrounding the inclusion of trans women in female sports. Ivy, a trans woman, became the first male athlete to win the UCI Women’s Masters Track World Championship in the 35–44 age bracket, and has been a leading voice arguing for including trans women in female sports.

In all honesty, I was fully prepared to witness Noah be a doormat and capitulate to every one of Ivy’s talking points, but was pleasantly surprised at some his honest, common sense pushback. To be clear, it was obvious that Noah was walking a very narrow tightrope littered with eggshells over a field of landmines. He could not simply ask a straightforward question, but was forced to place considerable distance between himself and the questions he was asking by framing them as “SOME people might argue that X, and what would you say to THOSE people?”

What stood out in this discussion was the amount of transparent dishonesty involved in Ivy’s responses, but perhaps this shouldn’t have been very surprising given that the title of Ivy’s PhD dissertation is “Reasonable Assertions: On Norms of Assertion and Why You Don't Need to Know What You're Talking About.” If anything is clear in this interview it’s that Ivy is either truly clueless, or entirely dishonest.

Below is a transcript of Noah’s questions and Ivy’s responses, followed by my rebuttals in bold text. It is my hope that I will be able to shed some light on the common rhetorical tactics and logical fallacies used by gender activists to “win” the debate.