Can We Please Stop Lying About Trans Athletes?

I am open to good faith arguments on this. There just aren't many around.

Note to readers:

So, I wrote this. Then I went on vacation, resolving to think about it and give it a few more editing passes. While I was away, John Oliver released a lengthy segment on exactly this topic and I thought, ‘Oh, shit, now I’ll need to update my piece. Surely, Oliver and his team of writers will have brought their A-Game, and raised arguments I wasn’t aware of or hadn’t thought about.’

I needn’t have worried, really. Oliver’s segment can be viewed here in its entirety. If you haven’t watched it yet though, I’ll ask you a small favor: read my piece first.

I think almost everything Oliver does in his 42 minute monologue is covered here, by me, and I think if you read me, then watch him, you’ll see his show as a textbook example of the phenomenon I’m describing. Which will make me seem very smart and prescient! Even though he beat me to publication because of my trip to the beach, which was super awesome and relaxing but unhelpfully timed.

I may ultimately respond more directly to Oliver. I think his segment merits it. But for now, I don’t feel like there’s any need. Nothing he said really answers anything I’m saying here. He doesn’t add anything to the body of activism and messaging I was responding to when I wrote this. He brings nothing new to the discussion at all, which is sad commentary for a man whose show used to be genuinely thought-provoking.

He uses more emotional pleas than I do, and also tells more jokes. But on the substance, no point John Oliver raises makes him an exception to my observation that advocates for trans inclusion in sport rely on ludicrously bad arguments and dishonest rhetorical framings to make their case.

So yeah, do me first! But if that ship has sailed, I hope you’ll still find this worthwhile.

****

Gavin Newsom is the Governor of California and [what passes for] a Democratic starter. He’s considered by most to be on any reasonable short list for the party’s next nominee for president. He’s also spent most of his career mostly to the left of the Democratic middle. So it was all the more surprising when he recently appeared on arch-conservative Charlie Kirk’s podcast (CORRECTION: hosted arch conservative Charlie Kirk on his own podcast) and came out against the inclusion of trans girls and women in girls’ and women’s sports leagues.

I’ve been writing about politics for 10 years, and I think this represents the first time I have ever dedicated an entire post to trans issues. The most obvious reason for this is that until very recently, I was simply too afraid to write about the subject. The risk was far greater than any reward.

If you wanted to chime in, you could either come down in full force on the side of the most vocal trans activists and allies, or you could kick them straight in the teeth. Either way, you were pissing off a group of people who were already pretty well primed to be pissed off. And if you tried to chart some middle course, you were going to be all alone in no-man’s-land, with everyone pissed at you. Not worth it.

I think it’s time to weigh in though. Because the politics of this are getting very real now, and may have serious implications for party viability moving forward. And for all our talk about trans inclusivity, I think basically everyone is doing it the fundamentally wrong way, at least on the sports issue.

From a policy standpoint, trans inclusion in sports isn’t an issue of inclusion at all. It feels like it should be, because we’re considering telling an entire identity group that they may not do something it appears other groups can do. But this is wrong.

There’s no question over whether trans people can play sports. They can. The question is whether they may decide in which league they play. Since cis athletes are not permitted to do this, there is no civil rights violation in telling trans people that they may not either. This question, whichever side of it you take, is a very narrow one: how should we segregate sports? By sex, or by gender identity?

I’ll still be using the word “inclusion” quite a bit, purely out of expedience. But when I do, bear in mind that the “inclusion” I’m talking about is only one, very specific kind; admittance to the league of the player’s choosing. The broader kind - just being allowed to play - is not at issue, as it is not under any meaningful threat.

Another reason I’ve never written about this is that my expertise, such as it is, is in politics. It’s not in athletics, biology, anatomy, medicine, or any of the other, parallel fields touched on by this debate. That isn’t to say that I don’t know anything about those fields - I’ve absorbed quite a bit over the years. But the price of admission to this arena was always very high. I was never sure enough of my footing to walk too far out on any limb.

Part of what has made this debate so heated is that a rare area of agreement between its opposing sides is that nobody, on either one, thinks they should have to be having it at all. The Truth, for both TRAs (Trans Rights Activists) and TERFs (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists) alike, is self-evident. Their side is right, their side should win without compromise, and to see things even a little bit differently is to reveal yourself as a hopelessly deluded bigot, either against trans people or against women. These people do not merely disagree with each other. They bitterly hate each other.

To stick so much as a finger into that crossfire was to virtually guarantee seeing it blown off. The only safe places in this war have been firmly behind either of the two lines, or off the battlefield entirely. I opted to sit on the sidelines because I had - and still have - no interest whatsoever in suiting up to join either army.

I don’t have any problem with trans people. Why the hell would I? No trans person has ever done anything to harm or mess with me in any way. I don’t want to go around banning them from stuff, or making their already hard lives any harder. But I also think that, quite unlike racial minorities or gay people, extending them full and unquestioned access to society, in all the ways they want, does raise genuinely complicated questions about safety, privacy, and fairness. If nobody - actually nobody - wants to hear me dither and prevaricate on this, why invite the headache by speaking up? That was always how I felt, until liberal figures like Gavin Newsom (and John Oliver) made it more okay for us to talk about this.

I also - and this will become very important later - have no real commitment to sports of any kind. I like sports, I guess. I can take in a game and have fun doing so. But I don’t watch sports with any regularity, or follow any teams. This is true of both women’s and men’s sports, by the way. I’m not invested in any of it, and generally think that people, westerners especially, care way too much about the enterprise. I’m really no more impressed by a guy who can rattle off NBA stats than I am with a guy who can tell me the name of every Pokemon and what it evolves into. Being a sports fan is not, in my view, any cooler or more interesting than being a garden variety nerd, even if one of those things codes as macho and the other does not.

I raise this point because later on, I’m going to be making some quite radical proposals for how trans people might be fairly included in the sports leagues of their choosing. I just want you to know in advance that: no, I’m not kidding; yes, I would be fine with these ideas being implemented, and I could not possibly care less if even the admittedly bad ones end up ruining something you love. Because it is not a thing that I love. I just don’t care.

Not incidentally, I think this is true of a lot of people in this conversation. I want it out in the open, because if your reaction to any of this is, “Shut up, Dave, you don’t even care about sports,” that’s totally true! I don’t! Either way! But at least you’ve got the benefit of knowing where I’m coming from.

It can be hard to take the chirpier activists seriously on this because one gets the very strong sense that they aren’t really sports fans anyway. TRAs can sidestep questions about competitive fairness because they care much more about inclusion than about the integrity of the contest. Meanwhile, TERFs can be utterly uncompromising, even in the face of ideas that might answer questions of competitive fairness because they don’t care about the contest either, they care about the issue and its societal implications.

And hey, if you’re that rare bird who’s a major sports fan, and really does come down firmly on one side or the other of this, good for you. I see you too. My point is just that this debate attracts some activists who are in it for the activism, and less for the sports. I should know, because I’m mostly one of them! And it might be appropriate for you to take me less seriously as a result of that. Probably, you should.

In my view, people should be open about their priors on this. If you care more about inclusion than fairness, just say so. That’s a perfectly valid position to take. And if your concern is more about trans access to women’s spaces in general, and less about sports specifically, you should admit that too.

The Politics

That was a lot of throat clearing - as I said, I’m nervous about this one. I don’t enjoy getting yelled at, and it’s not my intention to upset anyone. I just want to make sense of this, and hopefully give other spectators the tools to do so as well. So let’s get into the meat of this thing by taking a lay of the political landscape as it presently exists.

But to my trans readers and their allies, I’m afraid the news here is not good. It’s not good at all.

Recent polling from the New York Times demonstrated that about 80% of Americans oppose the inclusion of trans girls and women in girls’ and women’s sports.

That’s dire. For activists wishing to codify inclusion in women’s sports for trans women, this isn’t so much an uphill climb as a cliff scaling. And lest you think it’s just Republicans coming down on the TERFy side, Democrats are against it too by a margin of close to 70/30 (I’m not sure there is a single Republican anywhere who is okay with this - I suspect that the 6% who said they were misunderstood the question).

You don’t see a lot of 80/20 splits in political polling, and for a very simple reason: an 80/20 issue isn’t generally considered an issue at all. It’s considered a settled matter. 80/20 is the split you see over questions like whether littering is bad, or whether ‘Come On Eileen’ is a good song.

In all serious, here are some actual 80/20 issues:

80% of people, or near enough:

• Oppose cutting police and “soft-on-crime” policies

• Oppose legalizing meth, heroin, and fentanyl

• Support legal weed

• Support access to birth control

• Oppose post-viability abortions

• Oppose abortion bans that don’t include exceptions for rape or incest

Part of the reason this is considered a relevant wondering is that, as we discussed, the intense tenor of the debate has scared away most prospective participants. A top presidential contender announcing to voters his agreement with 80% of them wouldn’t even register as news under most circumstances. But on this, it definitely is news.

It’s news because Gavin Newsom has now made it official: this is a valid topic of debate. Even on the left. Proponents of full inclusion for trans athletes can no longer shut the conversation down with accusations of bigotry. That cat has escaped the bag. And for many, this new spotlight is going to feel pretty hot. Supporters of trans women competing in women’s sports are used to only three things: enthusiastic agreement from friends, seething hatred from enemies, and pin-drop silence from everyone else. That’s all about to change.

A high profile liberal who doesn’t hate them but doesn’t agree with them either is going to be a fresh phenomenon for many. Already, Newsom has sent Bluesky into a tizzy of rage and confusion.

The point is, the fight is here. And it’s now. The TRA alliance can either buckle up for it or they can simply lose. There is no longer any third way.

Why Even Care?

As stated above, the fiercest participants in this debate would mostly rather avoid the debate entirely, and just skip to the part where they win. Do we really need to be talking about this so much?

A fair counter to the lopsided polling is that, when asked to rank their priorities, it’s not clear that voters in the last election cared much about trans issues either way relative to other concerns. Some October polling from Gallup has been making the rounds since Newsom’s podcast appearance. It indicates that, when asked to rate the importance of 22 political issues, “transgender rights” came in dead last.

At the rock bottom. 22nd out of 22. So…tempest in a teapot right?

I’m not convinced this says what it seems to be saying.

Nobody wants to sound like an idiot, even to a pollster. I don’t know the order in which Gallup presented these options to respondents, but it wouldn’t have been hard to work out what kinds of things were going to make it onto the list. Take a moment to consider what kind of screaming, thumb-in-the-eye moron would say out loud that they cared more about trans girls playing volleyball with their friends than about the economy.

Of course when asked to stack that issue against other, much more consequential issues, people were going to say they didn’t really care about it. There’s actually a name for this: “social desirability bias,” and it’s seriously messed with political races in the past. Its specific, political variant, even has a name of its own, ‘The Bradley Effect,’ and you heard about it a lot when Barack Obama looked set to beat John McCain to the Oval Office (which he ultimately did). The idea is that voters have a good sense of what a socially desirable answer to a poll question is - “Yes, I would vote for a black candidate” - and will give it, even when they know it’s not true, and that it doesn’t reflect their actual beliefs or plans.

What’s more important, trans issues or immigration? Obviously, people are going to say immigration, since purely on the numbers, immigration is a much bigger deal.

But it’s the little things that get under the skin.

Bad Arguments

There’s a kind of intellectual violence in forcing people to pretend they aren’t seeing what they are obviously seeing. When you try to tell a normie that there is no problem associated with biological males competing against biological females, and that if they think there is, it’s a consequence of their being stupid and hateful, you are giving them a kind of psychic gut punch. It doesn’t come across as an expression of tolerance, it comes across as a kiss-my-boot power flex.

And as we know from the polling, it does not win hearts and minds.

I’d like to wave off what I consider to be the very worst arguments in support of trans women’s inclusion in women’s sports, so that we can quickly advance to what I think are better frameworks for evaluating this.

1) Why do you care? This basically never happens. Trans people are a tiny minority. Let it go.

Really? I mean really? Is that how it works? Is that how we set policy? Minorities aren’t important if they’re small minorities?

First of all, have you considered that this could just as easily be deployed as an argument against inclusion? “We’re not excluding that many people, so who cares?” Honestly, if you’ve ever trotted out a version of this dumbass talking point, you really ought to hand in your Serious Card. You do not deserve it.

2) Trans women aren’t that much better than cis women. They don’t always win, so we don’t need to worry about this.

This is ridiculous and childish. The argument here is that trans women aren’t at an unfair competitive advantage because they aren’t always at an unfair competitive advantage. Which is true, but not the point. At issue is what we do when they are at an unfair competitive advantage.

What is the logical endpoint to this line of thinking? Trans women should get to participate alongside cis women…unless they’re good?

Yeah, I may not be a big fan, but I don’t think that’s how sports works. Being good was - at least in my athletic days - kind of the goal.

3) Lots of studies say this is totally okay.

Let’s check back in on public opinion: 80% of Americans (actually 79%, but I’m rounding) do not regard this as a fair practice. Those aren’t “we’re divided” numbers, and they aren’t “it’s complicated” numbers. Those are “this is common sense” numbers. And it is common sense.

The people claiming they have “studies” saying that trans women enjoy no biological or anatomical advantages over cis women are forgetting something very important: folks get to watch a highly engaging “study” on exactly this question every two years. We call it ‘The Olympics.’

And the results are in: biological males have the edge. The only real exceptions to this are in style or precision sports: synchronized swimming, shooting, equestrian events, rhythmic gymnastics, figure skating, etc.

Some women have outpaced some men in long distance swimming also. Not really at the Olympics, but in some ultra-long distance events, women have been known to top the charts.

There’s also a case to be made that competitive advantages are flattened in cases of trans women who have undergone Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT). I don’t doubt the truth of that, but it isn’t generalizable to women’s sports writ large, and it obviously doesn’t help us at all in cases where the trans women in question have chosen not to undergo HRT.

But Do “The Studies” Actually Say This Is Okay?

No. They do not. Of course they don’t. There are not *lots of studies* saying anything like this. There are a handful of studies saying they say this. But the studies themselves do not say it.

Let’s look at a few examples of this rhetorical misdirect at work:

From the website, GenderGP, we have the klaxon headline, ‘Transgender Women Do Not Have An Advantage In Elite Sports’ and it steers us toward a study called, ‘Transgender Women Athletes And Elite Sport: A Scientific Review’

Wow, okay. That settles it then, huh? Let’s look at the study in question.

It was commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport and run by an outfit called E-Alliance, described as “a research hub for gender + equity in sport.” So already, we might have cause to wonder if the study’s architects didn’t have a specific outcome in mind when they engineered it.

And right off the bat, there would appear to be a few problems in regarding this work as being able to assure us that ‘Transgender Women Do Not Have An Advantage In Elite Sports’ (admittedly, not the language used in the study itself). The problem: the researchers acknowledge right up front that they couldn’t find the answer to that question. There wasn’t enough data. And what data they could find didn’t tell them what they needed it to tell them.

From the executive summary:

“The research findings in the biomedical area are inconclusive. Studies which make conclusions on pre- and post-hormone replacement therapy (HRT) advantage held by trans women athletes have used either cis men or sedentary trans women as proxies for elite trans women athletes. These group references are not only inappropriate for the context but produce conclusions that cannot be applied to elite trans women athletes. Further, there is little scientific understanding about the attributes or properties of HRT, namely testosterone suppression and estrogen supplementation, on the physiology and athletic ability of trans women athletes. This ignores the potential for estrogen supplementation to reduce Lean Body Mass (LBM), and for testosterone suppression to produce holistic health disadvantages.”

Okay, so they didn’t do the homework because they couldn’t find the right chapter in the textbook. Weak sauce. Also, the few results they did manage to scrounge up weren’t specific to any sport. So they have no ability to tell us anything - are we talking about soccer or skeet shooting?

Here, the study’s authors are using circular reasoning to dodge accountability. They have plenty of data about performance differences between men and women. But that data is unusable, because we’re not talking about men and women, we’re talking about trans women and women. But in biological terms, isn’t that a distinction without difference? Unless the trans women in question are receiving HRT?

No, it turns out. They’ve covered that base.

“The second perspective is a sociocultural one. Researchers in the sociocultural field of study argue that social factors contribute to performance advantages to a far greater Executive Summary 2 extent than does testosterone and that assessing testosterone levels is another way to perpetuate the long history of policing women’s bodies in sport. Researchers highlight the many social factors that contribute to differences in athletic performance, including, for example: discriminations, disparate resource allocations, inequities, and violence against women in sport in the forms of sexism and sexual violence in sport contexts, arbitrary differences in rules and equipment between men’s and women’s sport, as well as histories of barring women from certain sports. This body of work also highlights the foundational histories of anti-Blackness, anti-Global Southness, and misogyny which maintain inequities in sport.”

Whoa. How did “anti-Blackness” and “anti-Global Southness” get into this? Are they relevant?

Not really, it turns out, but it doesn’t matter. The neologisms are just dressing on the word salad. This (very long) section of the study serves only to direct us toward a red herring: the possibility that men might only be better at sports because “sociocultural” factors make them that way. Men’s and boys’ programs have more money and they face less discrimination, so how could they not be better?

The study doesn’t actually claim that this explains the disparities in performance, by the way. It just claims that other people claim it. And since they failed to find another explanation - how could they when they couldn’t look for one? - “sociocultural” must be the ticket.

To recap: the authors discounted data that said biological males were stronger and faster than biological females, because it didn’t speak to their specific question, which was about trans people. They couldn’t answer that question, owing to a lack of data (owing to their having discounted all of it). But whatever, men are probably only better due to “sociocultural” factors which, apparently, cease to be operative the moment an athlete transitions, even if they transitioned later in life. So in summation, trans women have no advantage over cis women, because we made it impossible for us to prove that they did, and even if they did, there might be a non-biological explanation. Case closed.

“We set out to prove that birds don’t exist. We didn’t see any birds, because we didn’t look for any birds. Also, other people say they don’t exist and have explanations. Ergo, birds do not exist.”

Okay, but whatever, who the hell is GenderGP anyway, right?

I didn’t cherry pick this. It came up as the top entry on at least two, differently-worded Google searches asking for the best evidence in favor of integration being no biggie. Which isn’t my way of claiming to have exhaustively researched this topic. I have certainly not done that. What I have done is what I thought any ordinary layperson might do if they heard that “studies” proved it was okay for trans women to compete in women’s sports: I Googled it.

I looked for the “studies,” and this is what Google’s algorithm thought I should see. Which is pretty unimpressive. Google has about a 90% market share in the world of search engines, so if people are asking for scholarly research, and Google is showing them research that boasts poor scholarship, it’s a problem.

And unfortunately, things aren’t much better if we check in with the NIH, the ACLU, Human Rights Campaign, Gender Justice, or the NIH again.

Seriously, go down the link rabbit hole on any one of those. You will find no serious study anywhere that backs up the claims made in the headlines, and no indication at all that this issue is really much ado about nothing.

All of these resources follow the same, highly unpersuasive pattern:

1. Assert bold claim

2. Admit bold claim cannot actually be verified

3. Suggest that some other explanation might verify the claim

4. Leave the dots unconnected

5. Reassert bold claim on the grounds that it would be great if it were true

The Wrong Question

Supporters of trans women being allowed to compete in women's sports are approaching this all wrong.

As we’re coming to, I think there are actually some ways that would allow trans women to fairly and safely compete in sports against cis women. I won’t pretend to be especially preoccupied with the issue, or to be some kind of major proponent for that kind of inclusion. But I’m not inherently against it in any top-down way. Show me how it can be safe and fair - and I’ll be proposing a few ways of my own imagining - and I’ll get on board. My feelings aren’t that strong here.

But my feelings are very strong about the, “it’s no big deal” argument. That is utterly shameful nonsense. It is a big deal. Men and women are different in sports. I am honestly embarrassed to have people sharing my side of the aisle who are willing to repeat this lie that they aren’t.

As I said though, the good news for proponents of inclusion is that we’ve been asking the wrong question anyway. This issue isn’t about “inclusion” and it isn’t about “civil rights.” It has nothing to do with either concern.

“Inclusion” isn’t at issue, because trans athletes aren’t being excluded, or “banned” from anything. At the very worst, they are being held to the same standard as cis athletes: they must participate in the sports league that corresponds to their biological sex, not their gender identity. Nobody* is arguing that trans people should be prohibited from playing sports. The much narrower question is whether their sex or their gender identity should determine the league in which they play.

*There is one, complicated exception to this as far as I am aware. We understandably spend more time fretting about trans women and girls in leagues typically reserved for biological women and girls than about the reverse. Trans boys and men are not considered to have any meaningful advantage over cis boys and men in sports. So really, who cares if they sort into leagues according to their gender identity? The bigger issue arises when they can’t. A trans man receiving HRT is likely to be at an advantage over a cis woman in the same league. It’s functionally (if not morally) akin to doping, and may need to be treated the same way. In that sense, a trans man receiving HRT really would be “banned from sports” entirely; out of the men’s league over gametes, out of the women’s league over medical needs.

But past that exception, nobody is being “banned” from athletic competition. They’re being restricted from choice, sometimes for reasons of which they disapprove. But since a cis athlete does not have the “right” to choose their sports league, there is no civil rights deficiency experienced by a trans athlete who also does not.

Okay, but separate doesn’t mean equal, right? By this reckoning, players in the Negro Leagues weren’t “excluded” either. Maybe we should bring those back?

Not remotely the same thing. The unfairness of the Negro Leagues was that there was no reason to segregate sports by race at all, since race is not correlated with athletic ability.

Or…maybe we’d be better off saying that if there is a correlation, it is definitely not one that favors white people….

This is as opposed to segregation by gender/sex, which is considered by most to be noncontroversial.

So the elephant in the room: should it be?

Do We Even Want Segregation?

The biggest problem with the “no big deal” argument (apart from its being total bullshit) is that if allowing trans women to compete against cis women is really “no big deal,” then why should we have women’s sports at all?

Female athletes are paid less, they reliably enjoy inferior access to facilities and equipment, fewer people watch them, and if all that weren’t enough, they have to endure podgy, beer-guzzling douchebags telling jokes about them between mouthfuls of buffalo wings.

If these leagues really aren’t any fairer for women, why the hell do we even have them? Until very recently, we didn’t. Professional athletics weren’t an option available to most of our grandmothers. The idea that it should be okay for women to play sports at all, never mind professionally, isn’t much older than the color television. A woman born the day Title IX became law is just 51 years old at the time of this writing. The world, as it existed before organized women’s sport, is not a distant memory. Lots of people alive - lots of people playing sports - can remember it.

But is there a better way? Have women’s sports leagues outlived their usefulness? I’m not arguing that we ban women from competing, but if there’s really no reliable difference in the ways that men and women play sports, why not just desegregate everything?

Desegregation: A How-To

The most obvious argument against desegregation is that men and women are different, and that a sports league that allowed both sexes/genders* to participate would end up being overwhelmingly, if not entirely male.

*Quick note on terminology: I’m using “sex/gender” instead of “sex” or “gender,” for two reasons. The first is that I have no interest in litigating whether these are really different constructs or not. The second reason is that if they are different, the point of the discussion is deciding which one we should use. If they aren’t, the point of the discussion is deciding whether we should use the thing that they both refer to or whether we should use nothing at all. I’m covered on all bases with “sex/gender” even if it’s clunky writing.

Let’s stipulate that we do want to desegregate sports, but that we’re not empty-headed muppets who think that men and women are exactly the same on the field. How might we approach this?

One, easy way would be quotas: every team, in every major sport, has to be 50% male and 50% female, and they have to get equal playing time within a small margin of error.

I can already hear the angry men, spraying out their beer and choking on their wings in savage protest: BUT THE WHOLE POINT OF PROFESSIONAL SPORTS IS THAT IT REPRESENTS THE PINNACLE OF ATHLETIC EXCELLENCE. IF WE LET GIRLS PLAY, IT WON’T BE THE PINNACLE OF ATHLETIC EXCELLENCE ANYMORE, WAHHHHHHHH.

Ok, here’s the thing, guys: you really don’t watch pro sports because it’s the pinnacle of athletic excellence. It almost never is.

For one thing, you’re quite happy to watch college football and March Madness, even though neither rivals the standard of play in the NFL or NBA. But even when you’re watching the pros, you’re watching your home team. Whether they’re good or they suck!

Look, loathe as I am to admit it, the New York Yankees are usually the best baseball team on earth. But not with my actual balls in an actual vice could you convince me to watch one of their games unless it was against a team I was hoping would smoke them. The pursuit of excellence is not why we tune in. We tune in for the tribal rush of wanting to physically dominate an out-group.

And we could still do that if women were playing!

But this might get tricky in contact sports, where safety concerns could call the wisdom of this approach into question. Happily, Uncle Dave has the solution: weight class.

Basically, we’d treat American football, ice hockey, maybe even basketball the way we treat boxing and wrestling. So you wouldn’t have the NBA and the WNBA, you’d have the heavyweights, the middleweights, and the flyweights (or whatever). All leagues would be subject to gender quotas, all would be desegregated, and all would be at least a degree safer from not having pint-sized lady-quarterbacks getting annihilated by hulking, 350-pound defensive linemen.

How would trans players fit in? Still a topic for some debate, but at least the pressure would be off. Maybe they’re wild cards who could fill either quota. That would be a cool way to make them more sought-after by team managers. Or if that’s too easily manipulated, maybe it at least can matter less - to us and to them - how they’re counted, so long as they know they can play.

Hey, at least one advantage to these mostly stupid ideas is that we’d at least get more sports out of it, right? Wouldn’t it be kind of awesome to have three times as much hockey to watch? Three times the baseball and football?

Anyway, take my advice or leave it. It’s no skin off my teeth. As I said, I don’t watch sports now, and I’m not going to start, even if the leagues implement my pan-gendered re-stratification ideas and name the new rules after me.

Didn’t care before. Don’t care now. Still won’t later.

But How Hard Is It To Just Not Lie?

In a recent appearance on Piers Morgan, trans influencer, Blossom Brown, made a viral, somewhat shocking argument.

Brown was in a heated exchange with Riley Gaines, an activist opposed to segregating sports by gender identity. Gaines set up what she obviously thought was a gotcha moment, trolling Brown by asking, if biological women should have to play against biological men, why shouldn’t Paralympians have to play against normally-abled Olympians?

Brown not only took the bait, but started swimming right away with it: they should!

And I’m just gonna say it, I appreciated the hell out of Blossom Brown for making that case.

Not because the idea of combining the Paralympics with the Olympics is a good one. It is not. In fact, it might be the single worst idea I have ever heard in my life.

But it is, at least, intellectually honest. Brown is against segregation in sports. Period. So fuck it, let’s desegregate sports.

Here’s the thing: it is actually okay to care more about trans inclusion than about fairness in sports. If liberals hadn’t been so hellbent on lying to and gaslighting everyone, they might have recognized sooner that they could just tell folks the truth: they don’t care what this does to women’s sports. They care about something else.

Liberals value inclusion over fairness all the time. Hiring, promotion, college admissions. Even the most milquetoast iteration of “affirmative action” requires the tacit admission that we’re not going to do things totally fairly, and that that’s both intentional and okay.

I worry about the political ramifications of this moving forward. For the Democrats, I mean. Not only is this an obvious loser of an issue, but Gallup’s polling aside, there is something deeply alarming about a person, not to mention a party, that will look you dead in the eye and tell you that up is down. That black is white.

If the left is willing to embrace a position so obviously untrue as, “men and women aren’t really that different in sports” what can we expect to be the limits of their mendacity? But they don’t have to lie about this! They could just say, “Our principles dictate that fairness and safety should subordinate to inclusivity. Progress is more important than process.” And let the cards fall where they may.

But they’re not saying that. They’re being authoritarian creeps, telling people to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears. It has harmed more serious efforts at inclusion, harmed themselves, and most of all, harmed trans people, who are likely to spend many more years paying for the idiotic stridency of their supposed “allies.”