Gender Heads To The Deep End Of The Pool

Many saw last week’s controversial performance by transgendered University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas as simply a swimming contest. In reality it was yet another political show trial for progressive corporate, media and political overlords who now want to add sports to their quiver.  There are lessons to be learned. Just not the ones you think.

If you read the captive media radicals are well on their way. The paper of Woke record, the New York Times, gushed over Thomas “whose record-threatening times on the University of Pennsylvania's swim team made her a star of college athletics.” A star? Guess they forgot to ask the women athletes getting big-footed to satisfy someone’s dysphoria.

CNN lovingly described Thomas’ “nearly 6-foot-4 frame pushing her head past the top of the Ivy League's green photo backdrop… Her hair nestled alongside the medal around her neck as a blue University of Pennsylvania jacket hung from her broad swimmer's shoulders.” Be still my restless heart.

Still others contended that Thomas really didn’t have that great an advantage. After failing to achieve stardom as a male swimmer at Penn Thomas hopped the tracks to begin competing in the NCAA as a woman. No one doubts her sincerity if that’s what she feels. Chromosomes notwithstanding, she says she feels like “a woman, so I belong on the women’s team. Trans people deserve that same respect every other athlete gets.” How an unequal competition (see photo above) confers respect has yet to be explained. 

The entire point of the exercise is Soviet: to grind absurdity into the face of cultural traditions. Or as Solzhenitsyn observed. ““We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.” 

Those who see transgenderism as a new frontier and who engineered this Thomas “learning moment” are dug in. (Twitter just suspended The Babylon Bee site for pointing out that USA Today’s Woman of the Year is a biological man.)  They feel they have momentum. And the weight of Obama World behind them.

There is a simple solution, of course. Have transgendered competitions, like-on-like. But that wouldn’t achieve the One World goals of Disney or ESPN or Silicon Valley. As we saw in the aftermath of Thomas’ controversial win, many still defy this push for the “new normal”.

President Biden’s executive order effectively removing funding for girls’ sports if they don’t allow transgender athletes is deeply unpopular. Polls suggest that having mature 6-foot-4 former men competing against women has the support of only a third of those polled when asked about restrictions on transgendered athletes in women’s competitions.

All of this dumping on 51 percent of population to satisfy fewer than one percent of the population (and, it must be admitted, 98 percent of the corporate crowd) has come as a shock to feminist women who thought they’d achieved equality in the 70s. ˆRoe v. Wade and all that. As we explained last July in Why Trans Athletes Spells Bad News For Your Grandma's Feminism, the old rules of “you’ve come as long way, baby” are gone.

“The current fetish for pretending trans men can menstruate or bear children— previously the sacred domain of women— is an inviting challenge to the women who transported radical gender politics from higher education into the public sphere. The blurring of this line— adopted by the same liberals who once supported feminists in establishing their laws— leaves women as just one of myriad grievance groups scrambling for government and (gasp) corporate friends… … having joined Team Victim, women have discovered that while they may gain equality with men, they have been placed behind other grievance groups in the Woke hit parade.””  

There is no room on the modern gender bandwagon for Old Think. So get with Team Victim. This letter from parents of swimmers now relegated to second place don’t seem to know that old-school feminism is dead. “Athletic associations are cautiously asking: How do we balance fairness and inclusion? And they ask scientists to tell them the precise level to which a male body needs to be impaired to compete fairly against women.

But they are asking the wrong questions. These questions are misogynistic, degrading, and dehumanizing for women. There is no balance of fairness to assess. Women deserve fairness without caveat, and they should not be asked to shoulder the mental health of others at their own expense. A male body cannot become a female body. A woman is not a disadvantaged man.”  

Imagine. Having boosted their fellow radicals for decades, First Wave feminists now find themselves victims of some cruel political calculus: radicals have moved on to toxic transgender politics. Where men can have babies or use women’s washrooms or, like Lia Thomas, compete against physically disadvantaged women in the pool. What’s a woman anymore? Ruth Bader Ginsberg took that feminism when she died last year.

Worse, progressive media don’t find them compelling. Only FOX TV  broadcasts the bitterness of prominent feminists now left in the cold. The radical tactics of transforming society—that they used to raise awareness— are now being used against them. Two and two can now be five. Men can swim as women.

Orwell predicted much of this current obliteration of fact in 1984, “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author was nominated for the BBN Business Book award of 2020 for Personal Account with Tony Comper. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book with his son Evan Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx