It is woke culture presenting itself not as a serious social issue but more like an old Jerry Seinfeld episode of “bizarro world,” – this idea that men have some right to compete in women’s sports because they want the world to see them as women.
Actually it’s not about sexuality at all. For the new woke world bullies insistent on forcing the mainstream majority to accept their every fringe oddity, it’s about power.
But states with basic gumption – not to mention a commitment to women and the concept of fair competition – are putting a stop to such nonsense, like the Kansas Legislature’s upcoming consideration of a bill that would make it illegal for a biological man to compete in any women’s sports at the high school or college level in the Sunflower State.
Lawmakers should make this bill into law, and they should do so post haste.
It’s hard to imagine reasoning for such a garish injustice in places like Connecticut, which have assailed women’s sports with such an overpowering invasion of clandestine ‘Y’ chromosome. The extremist liberals now pushing for the sublimation of straight culture in favor of blanket acceptance of all manner of alternate sexuality used to be, in their former not-quite-so hyper woke days, fierce advocates for women’s rights. The rabid effort among these types to force the world to embrace alt-sex lifestyles through the co-opting of media, culture and entertainment has finally turned its guns on those whose claims for equity were wholly legitimate.
Now, those same women and their daughters are under attack by a Frankenstein alt-sex culture which shames them as bigots and genderphobes for the audacity of seeking to preserve a competitive strata that allows them to succeed within clearly defined categories of biological science.
It is indeed science, not bias or hatefulness, that separates women and men and their degrees of competition. The simple facts that have sufficed as explanation for thousands of years of human culture must apparently now be revisited for the benefit of modern woke-oids: Women are women; men are not.
And not just physically – with obvious differences in size, weight, muscle and tendon strength, flexibility and other finite comparisons. Research from Stanford School of Medicine reveals a host of behavioral differences as well that predate hormone therapies but which play into psychological aspects of competition. Stanford’s “Sex, Gender & Medicine” from 2017 illustrates that “women excel in several measures of verbal ability — pretty much all of them, except for verbal analogies. Women’s reading comprehension and writing ability consistently exceed that of men, on average. They outperform men in tests of fine-motor coordination and perceptual speed. They’re more adept at retrieving information from long-term memory.”
“Men, on average, can more easily juggle items in working memory. They have superior visuospatial skills: They’re better at visualizing what happens when a complicated two- or three-dimensional shape is rotated in space, at correctly determining angles from the horizontal, at tracking moving objects and at aiming projectiles.”
In reality debates about competitive factors aren’t even so central to the argument. It is instead the desire by those on the extreme left to expand their footprint in modern society – to force mainstream culture to accept and adapt to values it deems unacceptable – which powers the transgender sports issue and so many others. Forcing the culture to acquiesce has nothing to do with the virtues of unity, fairness and getting along together to avoid animus; it’s about the power to force that change. One need only look at the venomous juggernaut of social media cancel culture – the left’s weapon du jour – to see how it attempts to destroy those of any profile who try to speak against their gospel.
With no defense of women’s sports to be expected from the federal level under the Biden administration, the only line of defense will be state legislatures. States have to confront this cultural effort from the political left, which is willing to sacrifice women on the altar of woke alt-sex acceptance. Women, it seems, must stand up for themselves all over again.
-Dane Hicks is publisher of The Anderson County Review in Garnett, Kan.