Several years ago during some speaking engagements, I referenced a story that had gone viral at the time about a young man who had used Title IX sex-equality laws to worm his way onto a girl's high school swim team. The school he attended did not have enough boys to field a team, and so he was allowed to join the women's program. To say he won every one of his races would be an understatement.
I remember saying to the audiences at the time that sex distinctions matter, while also joking how a dude could look forward to the day he could belly up to the bar at the local tavern, order a cold one, and tell his buddies about the good old days when he set the state record in the girls' 100-meter butterfly.
Sometimes it amazes me how so many intentional exaggerations that many of us once joked about to illustrate a larger point ended up becoming reality in our ethically-rudderless society. The latest example? Sports and culture websites now abound with the stories of Lia Thomas, a biological male once known as Will Thomas, who has been tearing through the University of Pennsylvania swim season.
Thomas, who for the last 3 years has competed as a male collegiate swimmer, has joined the women's team this year, claiming to identify as female. Over the weekend, Thomas set three women's school records at the university in all three events that he competed against women: the 1650 free, 500 free, and 200 free.
Leave behind the wisecracks about how a male like Thomas could ever brag about setting female records and winning female medals. Unless he is pulling one of the greatest pranks in the history of NCAA athletics, it seems clear that Thomas suffers from serious dysphoria or confusion about his inherent gender identity. I'm not interested in joking about that; I'm interested in helping that – something that isn't done by facilitating the delusion or affirming the fantasy.
Yet upholding and deepening the error is precisely what the NCAA has done. Their specific response to the Thomas situation has been silence, but their policies relating to transgender participants in events has been anything but. The organization has crafted rules catering to and enabling these unfortunate circumstances, permitting hard-working and accomplished female athletes to be put at a competitive disadvantage for the sake of politics.
"A male-to-female transgender woman may be small and slight, even if she is not on hormone blockers or taking estrogen," the NCAA policy notes. "It is important not to overgeneralize. The assumption that all male-bodied people are taller, stronger, and more highly skilled in a sport than all female-bodied people is not accurate."
Talk about missing the forest for the trees. The ethical and physiological blind spot exhibited here by the NCAA is jaw-dropping and shameful. They have unwittingly undermined the entire premise behind global sex distinctions in athletics. If there is no natural, physiological advantage that men possess over women, then there is no justification for women's divisions in any athletics. There should be no WNBA, no women's Olympic competitions, no high school girls track – none of it. The moment you make what should be the obvious, logical case for all of those things, you put the lie to what the NCAA is immorally foisting upon female athletes this very hour.
Let's be clear the NCAA deserves condemnation not because they want to be sensitive and kind to young adults dealing with dysphoria or some other identity crisis. I'd consider that an admirable impulse. But because the noise of social media and the outrage mobs generated therein have blinded their sensitivities to the entire company of their female athletes, the NCAA has created an environment that diminishes the accomplishments and achievements of women who have invested their lives in becoming the best in their sports.
What is equally appalling is the silent complicity of the commentariat, and the legal support offered by political leaders who consistently campaign as champions of women. To be clear, there is one political party that counts on the electoral benefit of the gender gap. For decades, Democrats have marketed themselves as the party of, by, and for women. But unless you believe that the essence of womanhood can be singularly summed up in the bloody forceps of feticide, that marketing scheme has been nothing but smoke and mirrors.
How else do you describe a political movement that pretends men can understand and appreciate the wonders of childbirth, authors policy that reduces the grand mystique of femininity with a calloused descriptor "people who menstruate," writes laws allowing men to usurp scholarship opportunities and monetary performance awards by merely "identifying" as a woman, and creates conditions permitting men to trespass into women's cultural spaces as identically gifted?
Former NFL player Benjamin Watson puts it more bluntly:
The left-wing leadership of the NCAA, in partnership with progressive Democrat politicians, diminishes women with these policies. They own this, and when the dust settles on this absurd chapter of our civilizational rebellion against reason, there should be a heavy cultural and political price to pay for both.
