The word police are out in full force.
The latest offensive word to trigger an online mob and a groveling corporate apology is “male.”
Chelsea Mitchell, a college track star, wrote an op-ed in USA Today about how male runners competing as girls robbed her of an opportunity for high school glory. “I’ll never know how my own college recruitment was impacted by losing those four state championship titles to a male,” she wrote, noting that “males have massive physical advantages.”
It’s the truth, plain and simple, that by high school age, the male body, thanks to testosterone, muscle tone, hip shape, and more, is better optimized than the female body for almost all athletic feats, including running.
Star female runners such as Mitchell could, of course, beat most high school boys in the 55-meter dash (and would smoke every man or woman writing commentary for the Washington Examiner). But the best boys are far better than the best girls.
This is obvious to anyone grounded in either science or common sense, much though it is debated. What’s also debated, vociferously, is what we call the runners who were born boys, who have male DNA, who have male sexual organs, who naturally have male hormones, and who, as a result, have male speed and athleticism but identify as girls.
A small but highly vocal group that wields terrible cultural power says you may not call these male athletes male athletes. You cannot mention “biological sex,” which it claims is a myth. These culture warriors led a woke online mob against USA Today for running Mitchell’s words. In the end, USA Today caved and removed the word “male” throughout the piece.
Culture warriors pushing transgender ideology play a couple of tricks.
They note the demands of good manners — no decent person would lecture a random transgender high school student that he or she was using the wrong pronouns — and leverage this to demand that society as a whole toss aside the notion of biological sex. They say that we may not call biological males “males” if they identify as girls.
The culture warriors don’t want to let Mitchell voice her objection to being cheated out of success by boys competing as girls. Instead, they bully newspapers to describe male athletes as “transgender athletes.”
This distorts the argument by muddying the waters. Mitchell is made to look petty for complaining about people with an alternative sexual identity, which, of course, is not her objection. Refusing to allow discussion of biological sex leaves us with nothing but identity politics, and that’s where the culture warriors have the upper hand.
They bulldoze people and alternative ideas and turn their own scientifically unfounded ideology into the defining parameters of discussion. They hijack the language of civil rights. If a runner refused to race against a gay competitor or black competitor, he or she would reveal his or her own bigotry. Transgender ideologues want to steal that moral weight for their own purposes.
So if we want to have a real discussion about youth sports — youth sports is the most visible but not the most important matter affected by transgender ideology — we must not let culture warriors set the terms of debate.
Newspapers especially should not. USA Today is supposed to be in the truth business, as the Washington Examiner is. We owe courtesy to the subjects of our stories. But, more than anything, news organizations owe readers accuracy and forthrightness. That means telling the reader who is who and who is what.
We are not here to capitulate to ideological bullying and woke propaganda.
