Enough already of the question-begging reports asserting that politicians are interested in “banning transgender girls and women from competing on women’s sports teams,” as if motivated by nothing but rank bigotry. Quite the contrary. They are merely trying to uphold sex-exclusive sports in the interest of safety and fairness for half the population (Yes, hello, it’s us again — females).
But try telling that to CNN’s Devan Cole, who takes issue with National Review’s recent editorial criticizing Governor Kristi Noem’s capitulation on the matter, and indeed with Noem’s subsequent change in course. He writes that:
Though the two executive orders signed by Noem do not explicitly mention transgender athletes, they reference the supposed harms of the participation of “males” in women’s athletics — an echo of the transphobic claim, cited in other similar legislative initiatives, that transgender women are not women. The orders also reference “biological sex,” a disputed term that refers to the sex as listed on students’ original birth certificates.
Biological sex is a “disputed term,” is it? You are quite confident, are you, in dismissing thousands of years of evolutionary influence and scientific precedent with a single hyperlink to a meandering blog?
Mr. Cole, in the interest of clarity, let me spell this out for you. The people you refer to as transgender women are, biologically speaking, males and in large part indistinguishable from other men. Even after chemical or surgical alterations, transgender women — who are self-evidently as equal in dignity and rights as the rest of us, and who has ever said otherwise? — retain their male physiological advantages.
Since males already have their own sports teams, and what’s more, since there are additional co-ed options, as well as generous and good-faith suggestions of how to make transgender-identifying team members feel more at ease (e.g., private changing rooms, facilities, etc.), there is absolutely no justification at all for allowing male athletes to join female athletics.
Again, for clarity’s sake, to say so is not to disparage males, nor those who (for whatever reason) would rather not be males (or would rather not be called boys or men: hence the term, “transgender women”). The point is that, whether we like it or not, males are — objectively and categorically — larger, stronger, and faster than females. This is not stereotyping. This is not “an echo” of a “transphobic claim.” This is basic biology, observable by any sentient adult walking down a busy street on any given day. Perhaps Mr. Cole should try it sometime.