Castle of delusion pt. 2: The athletics question
Chickens coming home to roost, and all that…
There exist a large chunk of people who honestly, genuinely believe that there are no physical differences between biological men and women. I never ran in to any such people until grad school, when I got in a bit of trouble for explaining to a badly out of shape woman that fighting a man is almost always significantly more difficult than fighting a woman–that’s why it’s considered a much greater offense for a man to hit a woman than for a woman to hit a man, after all. Commonsense shit.
This being the halcyon days of 2010, there was enough space for the non-moronic people around me to nod in agreement. Older school feminists, aware that a complete embrace of relativism could rob them of the privilege of victimhood, rallied in my defense.
In 2020, a young humanities grad student could easily see his career ended for making such a statement. No one would say a word in support, lest they risk ruin themselves.
The more obviously incorrect a belief is, the more violent its believers are in defending it. If your argument is paper thin and can be easily rebutted by a small child, you cannot broker any dissent toward it. This is a human tendency that certainly does not stem solely from the vagaries of contemporary liberal identity politics, but oh my god they have weaponized it to a degree I did not honestly think was possible.
Because now, good god, now this belief–so manifestly and obviously wrong that it qualifies as a delusion–this is now orthodoxy. You are not allowed to push back against it in public. Trans women are women and since all women are the same trans women in sports have no advantages over regular women because they don’t, they just don’t, they’re exactly the same, every bit about them is the exact same.
An oft-repeated line is that there exists “zero evidence” demonstrating male athletic advantage. This is untrue, but we could probably forgive scientists for this omission even if it were–kinda like how very few studies have been done demonstrating that the sky is blue or water is wet, researchers don’t tend to focus too much on matters that were so settled they were never even raised.
The existence of women’s only sports leagues, at the very least, suggests that there’s some profound differences in the athletic abilities of the sexes. Then there’s the fact that every single track and field world record is presently held by a biological male. Ditto weightlifting records. There’s also that one time that both the Williams sisters got the living shit beat out of them by a dude who was ranked 203rd in the world and took cigarette breaks during matches.
But, oh, here is where the professional obfuscators from Gender Studies departments get to deploy their skills. First we’re told that gender doesn’t exist so this conversation is moot. Also gender is the most important part of a person’s identity and it should determine their access to different spaces and even whether or not they have a right to speak. Gender is also not a binary but a scale, and also if you evince too many traits stereotypically associated with a different gender that means you’re trans.
It’s very easy to build delusional cases when no one is allowed to criticize anything you say. Or when you have been allowed to position all your statements and beliefs as existing beyond the bounds of verifiability, because truth is just, like, a matter of preference.
And that’s how we end up with this absolute masterpiece of a tweet thread by a feminist writer with a plethora of bylines in top-tier publications. Why should sports be gendered, she wonders? Gender is such an arbitrary distinction… why not segregate on something more tangible, like height or weight or skill?
Skills-segregated sports leagues are herein presented as a novel concept. The assumption being that sports are somehow not already segregated by skill? And that weight and height and athletic ability don’t factor into a person’s skillset? And that these aren’t very, very obviously influenced by sex?
That’s the level of delusion we’re at right now. This is what you’re not allowed to criticize without risking professional and personal ostracization.
I’ve long complained about how Americans’ unfamiliarity with violence leads us to develop unhinged worldviews. This is how, in 2003, identity politickers like Dan Savage argued in favor of the Iraq war, since liberating that nation’s people would save its homosexuals from state oppression. It’s how I once attended a talk about “decolonization” that started with a moment of silence for our Brave Troops overseas. It’s how anyone can support starting new wars and still call themself a feminist, oblivious to the fact that the massive destabilization caused by literal war leads to hundreds of thousands of women being murdered, raped, and enslaved.
We’re now past that point, though. People aren’t just unfamiliar with violence. They are now unable to grasp the basic realities of embodied experience. We’ve become so convinced that material reality is inconsequential that it’s now verboten to suggest that male bodies and female bodies have different planes of athletic potential.
Girl’s sports are a social good. They’ve saved far more lives than all trans suicide hotlines and bottom surgery gofundme’s combined. This is something that even the vampires within the GOP recognize, and so while cutting women’s sports might be an easy cost saving measure as we enter into a presidential administration that will bring about unprecedented austerity, few programs will get cut.
But some will. And they will happen almost exclusively in blue states and cities, under the auspices of leadership who consider themselves progressive. Anyone who argues against this cruel austerity will be labeled a terf, told to kill themselves, and potentially lose their job. Those who enact it will celebrate and be given even more influence and power. And, most importantly, the people will continue to atomize, the hope of a decent future will become even more dim, and the trans denizens of the internet will latch on to something new–public parks, perhaps? toilet paper? QWERTY keyboards?–and claim that the very existence of this thing constitutes an act of genocide against them. There’s no placating them. There never will be.