The End of Girls' and Women's Sports

Let’s take the measure of the mind of Joe Biden-- such as it is. We recall, with chagrin, that candidate Biden, during the election campaign, offered this nugget of what now passes as wisdom. He said this at an October 15 Town Hall:

The idea that an 8-year-old child or a 10-year-old child decides, ‘You know I decided I want to be transgender. That's what I think I'd like to be. It would make my life a lot easier.’ There should be zero discrimination.

Fair enough, as many have noted, Biden did not mention transitioning. But, if the child wants to transition, what about that answer says that it should not be allowed.

Keep in mind, we are talking about mutilating an eight-year-old child. And we should also emphasize the glib, mindless tone of the response. For Biden, changing genders is as easy as changing your mind, because it will make life easier. Has there ever been a more ignorant remark. If any Republican had dared say such a thing, he would have been drawn and quartered by the media.

Transgender activists insist that being of the opposite gender represents a higher truth, a truth that surpasses one’s chromosomal makeup. They do not say that it’s just a convenience, something that will make life easier. Besides, anyone who thinks that the multiple mutilations that a human being will undergo to transition will find life easier is delusional or stupid or both.

Who knows what Joe means by his “zero discrimination” remark, but in practice, it means that the state must treat the eight year old as the gender that he or she decides to be. Where does that go and where does that stop? The courts will eventually decide, because that’s how we Americans decide truth these days.

Anyway, as of today, numerous commentators have excoriated the Biden administration for eliminating girls’ and women’s sports via executive fiat.

Abigail Shrier explains it well in the Wall Street Journal this morning. As you know she authored the definitive text on the social contagion of transgenderism and the damage it is doing to girls. The book title is Irreversible Damage. 

Shrier describes the Biden order, succinctly:

The Biden executive order is far more ambitious. Any school that receives federal funding—including nearly every public high school—must either allow biological boys who self-identify as girls onto girls’ sports teams or face administrative action from the Education Department. If this policy were to be broadly adopted in anticipation of the regulations that are no doubt on the way, what would this mean for girls’ and women’s sports?

The answer is easy. It ends girls’ and women’s sports:

“Finished. Done,” Olympic track-and-field coach Linda Blade told me. “The leadership skills, all the benefits society gets from letting girls have their protected category so that competition can be fair, all the advances of women’s rights—that’s going to be diminished.” Ms. Blade noted that parents of teen girls are generally uninterested in watching their daughters demoralized by the blatant unfairness of a rigged competition.

Apparently, gender based strength differentials are not social constructions. And they cannot be eliminated by what is gingerly called testosterone suppression:

I say rigged because in contests of strength and speed, the athletic chasm between the sexes, which opens at puberty, is both permanent and unbridgeable. Once male puberty is complete, testosterone suppression doesn’t undo the biological advantages men possess: larger hearts, lungs and bones, greater bone density, more-oxygenated blood, more fast-twitch muscle fiber and vastly greater muscle mass.

In Connecticut, boys who had failed in competition with other boys signed up to compete in girls track and field. Naturally, they won handily, and therefore deprived girls of the chance to advance to regional events and to receive athletic scholarships:

It should be no surprise, then, that the two trans-identified biological males permitted to compete in Connecticut state track finals against girls—neither of whom was a top sprinter as a boy—consistently claimed top spots competing as girls. They eliminated girls from advancement to regional championships, scouting and scholarship opportunities and trophies, and they set records no girl may ever equal.

Some might call it a gross injustice. Apparently, those who are fighting for social justice have found one injustice that they can easily abide. As for the performance gap, Shrier gives us the data. Here again is one instance where activists are happy to ignore the facts and the science. They are led by hapless Joe Biden, who keeps saying that we should follow the science, all while ignoring the science of gender differences:

How big is this performance gap? To take one example cited by the Connecticut female runners in their complaint against the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference, the fastest female sprinter in the world is American runner Allyson Felix, a woman with more gold medals than Usain Bolt. Her lifetime best for the 400-meter run is 49.26 seconds. Based on 2018 data, nearly 300 high-school boys in the U.S. alone could beat it.

Think about it. Hundreds of American high school boys can outrun the world’s leading female sprinter at the 400 meters. Here we are not talking about professional athletes, or even college students.

So, the disparity is rank and cannot be attributed to social injustice.

As though that is not bad enough, at a time when everyone is agog over the talent shown by a fictional chess player in a television show called, The Queen’s Gambit, the truth is that the best female chess players cannot compete against the best male chess players. The same applies to bridge players. One wonders why such should be the case, but it is.