An activist and a doctor appear before Congress. One insists that female tennis players are “stronger” than men. The other claims she can’t comment because she’s not a sports medicine physician. This is the peak of a delusion that has ramifications for everyone.
Over the past month, not one, but two progressive defenders of a trans woman’s “right” to compete in biological women’s sports have suggested that there is no innate athletic difference between genders. First, a professor and op-ed columnist for The New York Times proclaimed that she wasn’t a boxer, but – if she were – she’d have no problem getting in the ring with a biological man. Elizabeth Spiers took to Twitter, “I’ve never boxed in my life but if I did I’d be fine with boxing a trans woman in my weight class. The women’s sports nonsense is just a vehicle for transphobia and has nothing to do with fairness in sports.” It’s almost impossible to believe she actually believes this, nor did she agree to get punched in the face by a man, but that didn’t stop her from defending the statement and insisting anyone who disagreed must be a transphobe. Pay no attention to the simple fact that the long, well established, indisputable history of men abusing women is based entirely on the fact that they are physically stronger in general. In fact, a woman getting in the ring with a man already happened in 2014 in an MMA contest. The biological woman suffered a concussion, a broken orbital bone, and had to have seven staples in her head after a first round knock out. As she described it, “I’ve fought a lot of women and have never felt the strength that I felt in a fight as I did that night. I can’t answer whether it’s because she was born a man or not because I’m not a doctor. I can only say, I’ve never felt so overpowered ever in my life and I am an abnormally strong female in my own right. Her grip was different, I could usually move around in the clinch against other females but couldn’t move at all in Fox’s clinch.” Somehow, however, we’re supposed to believe I’m not quite sure what. That women submit to being raped by men they could otherwise overpower? That battered women could easily overcome their assailants, but simply chose not to? Otherwise, I guess the next time my wife asks me for help hauling something inside the house or even opening a jar, I should tell her to do it herself, equality between the sexes and all. That’s certain to go over well.
Not to be outdone, Kelley Robinson, the first queer, black President of the progressive Human Rights Campaign declared before Congress that female tennis legend Serena Williams was capable of beating professional male players. “There’s been this news article about men that think they can beat Serena Williams in tennis,” she said. “And it’s just not the case. She is stronger than them.” The only problem with this assertion: The match already happened in 1998, when both Serena and her sister Venus lost to the 203rd ranked male tennis player. Karsten Braash was fifty years old – well past anything resembling prime for a professional tennis player – and still he prevailed. Serena Williams herself also told David Letterman in 2013 that a men’s grand slam champion would beat her “6-0, 6-0 in 5 to 6 minutes.” “It’s true. It’s a completely different sport,” the champion continued. “The men are a lot faster, they serve harder, they hit harder. It’s a completely different game. I love to play women’s tennis. I only want to play girls because I don’t want to be embarrassed.” Regardless, Ms. Robinson continued to insist that men do “not definitively” have an athletic advantage over women. She was not alone even at this single hearing. Dr. Ximena Lopez, a pediatric endocrinologist who provides gender “affirming” care to even minors, claimed she was completely unable to provide an answer to the basic question of whether men are naturally stronger than women, insisting she is not a sports medicine physician. “As a medical professional, I don’t have the scientific expertise to provide an opinion,” she said in a disturbing echo of the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson, who claimed she could not define the term woman at all. “I’m not a biologist,” she said.
Of course, one needn’t possess any particular expertise to wonder why the ladies only play three sets in tennis as opposed to five, or why the tees on a golf course are set 100 yards closer to the hole than the men’s. I say this as a man more suited to the lady’s tees myself, but the fact remains it takes a special kind of willful ignorance to pretend men and women are physically equal. A cursory Google search reveals the truth. Teenage boys as young as 14 years old hold running records faster than fully grown women in almost every category. In the 100 meter, the women’s record is 10.49 while a 15 year old boy ran 10.20. In the 200 meter, it’s 21.34 compared to 20.89 for a 14 year old boy. The list goes on, including the high jump, pole vault, long jump, shot put, distance, and more, all track and field events where an either 14 or 15 year old boy bests a fully grown woman. Top high school boy’s soccer teams can beat the Women’s National team. In 2017, the world famous US women’s team played the FC-Dallas U-15 boys team in a friendly scrimmage. The women lost an astounding 5-2. This should not be surprising when you see the photos. The 15 year old boys are already significantly taller and larger than the women. One posed for a selfie with Megan Rapinoe, and he towers over her even at this young age. Thus, it’s no surprise that a professional WNBA team would get crushed against a mediocre NCAA team, especially given that women’s basketball players do not have the vertical leap to easily dunk the ball. There is not a sport on the planet – or even anything close to a sport such as the game of pool – where women regularly or even occasionally beat men. Men dominate in bowling, for example. Name a sport – any sport – and men will – on average – perform significantly better. The situation is so obvious and indisputable it’s difficult to find contrary examples, even though it is equally true that some women can beat some men. Serena Williams would make quick work of me on the tennis court for example, but that is not the point trans supporters are trying to make.
Their point is far more delusional and insidious, do not believe your lyin’ eyes, there’s no difference between male and female athletes, or if one exists, one needs a degree in something to properly comment on it. Why would they peddle such an obvious falsehood? First, we should be clear that people are entitled to hold whatever delusions they wish. I’m sure many of these same individuals would claim I was delusional on any number of topics. Some delusions are fundamentally different from others, however, namely those that are used to impose their will on a much larger portion of the populace that simply does not agree for whatever reason. In this case, these individuals are using their delusion about the relative athletic capabilities to advance a controversial, untested, and largely unexamined position, namely that men and women are fundamentally interchangeable, and the only differences between them are constructions of society without any objective reality. This is not a position without consequence for women in particular and society at large. I’ve already discussed how the trans movement threatens to erase the female identity, and it doesn’t take a particularly astute observer of current events to note that the trend only goes one way, that is against biological women. No one is concerned about the impact of trans men in biological men’s sports because everyone knows there will be none. There is no chance that the next NFL first round draft pick was born a woman. More disturbingly, Nike, Adidas, Bud Light, and other woke companies are not replacing male models with trans male models. Instead, it is only biological women that are losing their unique identity and a lucrative pay check. For reasons that are not at all clear, the same is true of the push to redefine obesity as beautiful, where we don’t see advertisements featuring Chris Farley dressed up for the Chippendales skit or anyone claiming a fat man can do everything, but we do see insidious “expert” supported messaging and propaganda aimed at women, effectively encouraging them to gain weight. The reasons might be unclear, but the consequences for women’s rights, health, and personal well being are all too real and only likely to get worse.
Women are not the only ones affected either. Everyone who does not endorse this newly invented, gender saturated reality, will be targeted. Recently, Professor Johnson Varkey was fired from a community college in Texas for teaching about X and Y chromosomes in a biology class. “When teaching the human reproductive system, Dr. Varkey also stated that human sex is determined by chromosomes X and Y, and that reproduction must occur between a male and a female to continue the human species,” a law firm representing Professor Varkey wrote in a complaint against St. Philip’s College in San Antonio. “In the course of teaching Human Anatomy and Physiology, he made these statements in every class for 20 years, without any incident or complaint.” The existence of X and Y chromosomes and their role in defining sex for 99.999999999999% of individuals on the planet is about as settled a science as you can possibly get. As with anything in biology, there are exceptions to almost every rule, but any discussion of the human reproductive system that doesn’t address the different chromosomal makeup of men and women is no discussion at all. The idea that a professor could be fired for speaking simple truths about an objective, well-established, and easily measurable reality is something more suited to a great satirist, and yet this is the inevitable consequence of the world the woke are making. Sadly, we can expect to see more of these stories in the future, along with who knows what else. For example, do you want to be treated by a doctor who doesn’t know or doesn’t believe the most basic facts about human reproduction? Do you want the doctor in charge of your cancer screening to not check for prostate cancer in men or cervical cancer in women because they believe the two are the same?
Ultimately, the battle lines will be drawn between objective reality and an artificial construction. I know many will take issue with my choice of words above. There are certainly those who disagree that the trans activist position is “controversial, untested, and largely unexamined” as well as “newly invented,” but an examination of their position reveals the underlying truth. One side is arguing that those things we can measure – biological differences such as those that lead to athletic performance are based in genetics beginning with the X and Y chromosomes – matter. We can debate what role society plays in shaping the preferences of an adult individual, whether differences in percentages of people who go into nursing for example, are an effect of conditioning rather than biology, but we cannot debate that there are fundamental differences between the sexes and ultimately the genders. The other side is arguing that a person’s perception of who they are and how they feel is paramount regardless of any underlying differences in their biology. In this view, a person is what they tell you they are, but as we have known since time began, one cannot open up another’s head and peer inside to measure or analyze their thoughts. This does not mean that people cannot feel like a gender different from their birth, but it does mean that there is no way to objectively prove what gender they are. There is no measurement that can be performed on a child to determine that they are stuck in the wrong body. We have only the child’s word to go on, and as anyone with any experience with children knows, that can be a very changeable, ephemeral thing. The situation is further complicated because these same activists embrace an ever growing pantheon of genders. We’re not simply being asked to believe that men can be women or vice versa. These same people can also be non-binary, fluid, two souls, and more, by some counts over 50. What evidence is there that any of these exist in any measurable fashion other than someone saying so? Further, what does gender even mean if there are so many of them you can’t keep track? Putting this another way, if there are 50 interchangeable genders, there are no genders because the term ceases to have any meaning, which strikes me as exactly that the end goal is and brings us back to the original question.
Why would they peddle such an obvious falsehood? I can think of two related answers: The first is power, if they can get you to willingly or even unwillingly state that there are no differences between men and women that matter, they will have achieved total control. This is George Orwell’s famous two plus two equals five assertion made real. The second is less obvious: The bond between a couple, either man and woman or same sex, is stronger than the bond between a person and society. I think of my wife first and everything else second. She is my partner and together we can accomplish more than apart. If that bond can be broken by promoting the idea that we are not stronger together, everyone is what they want at any given moment, and we can change that from moment to moment, it will be replaced by a forced bond with the government. People isolated, alone, and told they are under imminent attack will turn to whoever they feel can protect them, and it should be no surprise who will play that role if peak delusion leads where these individuals want.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 