Transgender Athletics; Misogyny Run Amok

It takes a rugby referee to call quit on the insane practice of allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports. 

Given that rugby is a contact sport, when biological males play against biological females the result is: a proliferation of injured women. Now, referees are refusing to work these games because they know that they might eventually be sued. And besides, being sensible human males they do not like to be officiating over a match where women are very likely to be badly hurt.

The story comes to us from Once-Great Britain. Megan Fox writes:

Rugby referees in the UK would rather quit their jobs rather than watch male players who identify as females injure and maim actual female players. The Sunday Times reported that the fear of "being sued as more men claim to be women join the women's leagues and end up hurting natural-born female contestants with their strength and speed" has led to their decision to resign rather than take the liability.

The refs also report that they have been warned not to question even bearded men for fear of being seen as non-inclusive. Women's rugby does have a testosterone limit, but instead of testing the participants, refs are told to take the transgender athletes at their word.

Did you get that? The thought police have told the referees that if they dispute the proclaimed gender identity of a man with a beard they will be attacked as bigots. And shunned from polite society.

The Times of London first reported the story:

Referees would not speak on the record but instead shared their concerns with the Times anonymously. One said, “being forced to prioritize hurt feelings over broken bones exposes me to personal litigation from female players who have been harmed by players who are biologically male. This is driving female players and referees out of the game." Another said he is tired of being called a "bigot" for doing his job and questioning the male athletes.

Of course, the new “woke” attitude is driving women out of the sport. And disadvantaging them in other ways. 

Charlotte Allen collected some of the evidence:

In 2016 another male-to-female transgender sprinter, Nattaphon Wangyot, took home all-state honors in Alaska’s girls’ track-and-field competition. In 2018, Rachel McKinnon, a transgender philosophy professor at the College of Charleston, won first place in the women’s cycling sprint 35-39 age bracket at the Union Cycliste Internationale’s Masters Track Cycling Championship. A photo of the event shows a hulky McKinnon in bicycle shorts towering over the second- and third-place winners. Transgender mixed-martial-arts fighter Fallon Fox cracked the skull of her opponent, Tamikka Brents, in a 2014 match, culminating a brief career of five wins to one loss. In 2012 trans woman Gabrielle Ludwig, 50 years old, 6’8” in height and 220 pounds in weight, joined the women’s varsity basketball team after enrolling at Santa Clara's Mission College in California. She had fought in Operation Desert Storm as a man and had been married and divorced twice before changing her birth certificate to reflect her new female identity. Ludwig’s coach predicted to the  Mercury News that she would be “the most dangerous player in the state”—a not unsurprising assessment since Ludwig was about a foot taller on average than any other woman college player at the time.

The story is so outrageous that it has gotten the attention of some feminists:

Biological men taking over women's sports is a major issue. Not only are records at stake, but scholarships and women's educations. There are feminists like Martina Navratilova who are being silenced for sharing valid concerns about allowing men to dominate women's' sports. Navratilova was kicked off the board of Athlete Ally for penning an op-ed vocalizing her concern that the practice of letting men compete with women is "unfair."

Male-to-female transgender athletes are vanishingly few in number (like male-to-female trans people in general), but as the above examples indicate, when they compete, they pose a crushing existential threat to women’s sports. That is because the very existence of women’s sports is predicated, as Martina Navratilova recognized, on the now-highly politically incorrect observation that the two sexes are radically different physically. Women on average are not only smaller than the average man, but they cannot punch as hard, lift as much weight, or run as fast, owing to the enhanced bone density and muscle mass that testosterone affords (healthy young men’s testosterone is about ten times the level of women’s, and even when male-to-female trans people take testosterone-suppressing hormones, their bone and much of their muscle structure remains).

As you know, the difference between male and female bodies is not a social construct. It is built into the organisms. In the military, many “woke”  countries are now opening all military jobs to women. They do not understand that women are weaker than men and thus more likely to be injured.

An extensive report from the Borden Institute demonstrated that female soldiers were more likely to suffer injuries than their male counterparts:

The authors emphasize that, anatomically and physiologically, women are not the same as men; lower extremity biomechanical differences between men and women may account for gender differences in training injury rates. Women have increased pelvic width, forefoot pronation, heel valgus angulation, pes planus, external tibial torsion, and femoral anteversion. Additionally, because of the estrogen influence, women have less lean body mass and greater ligamentous laxity. The combination of anatomy and physiology appears to predispose women to a higher risk of pelvic stress fracture and anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tears. The diagnosis of pelvic stress fracture has been reported as 1 in 367 female recruits, compared with 1 in 40,000 male recruits, and rates of ACL ruptures for female athletes range from 2.4 to 9.7 times higher than in male athletes.

So, let’s call it for what it is: misogyny run amok. Hats off to the few women who are standing up against this madness and also to the British rugby coaches who are refusing to countenance an activity that ends up crippling women athletes.