Megan Rapinoe is recognized as one of the best women’s soccer players in the world. Yet lately, she has committed herself to being a political activist, and it isn’t going so well.
Rapinoe led the U.S. Women’s National Team in turning its 2019 World Cup run into a conversation about “equal pay.” With the help of sympathetic media, Rapinoe helped drown the excitement for every game in politics, turning every dominant victory into a political prop for a fictional gendered disparity in pay and performative protests against the American flag.
And it was indeed fictional. In May 2020, a federal judge dismissed the USWNT lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation, writing, “Defendant [U.S. Soccer] has presented evidence that the [USWNT] was paid more on both a cumulative and an average per-game basis than the [men’s team].”
Sure enough, U.S. Soccer paid more in women’s salaries and game bonuses than men’s between 2010 and 2018. On top of this, members of USWNT had negotiated for more stability: Women’s players earned a base salary with added performance-based bonuses, while members of the men’s team could only earn bonuses.
Rapinoe apparently wasn’t content with making a fool of herself just once. After putting her economic illiteracy on display, she has now fully embraced the scientific illiteracy of progressive gender ideology. Rapinoe, who was part of the USWNT that lost 5-2 to an under-15 boys’ club team in a scrimmage, maintains that there are no biological differences between male and female athletes.
It is not a problem, Rapinoe asserts, that some girls will lose spots on teams, scholarships, or playing opportunities to biological men. Even now, she still can’t give up that imagined equal pay gap, which she places right alongside sexual harassment as real threats to women’s sports. Biological men using their natural athletic advantages to deny opportunities to female athletes? That’s a “problem that doesn’t even exist.”
Never mind that all serious scientific evidence shows that even after “transitioning” to female, biological males retain very significant athletic advantages over biological females.
So Rapinoe now spends her time joining lawsuits such as the one filed against Idaho for moving to preserve opportunities for female athletes. Rapinoe, such as fellow activist athlete NBA star LeBron James, either seems to have no clue what she’s talking about whenever she enters political waters or has fully embraced a partisan ideology that is detached from reality.
Perhaps Rapinoe should reconsider her view that politics “is engaging with you whether you’re engaging with it or not, all the time, no matter what.” She constantly misrepresents left-wing talking points as if they are economic or scientific reality, in ways so absurd that they overshadow just how good she is at her craft.
