The extent to which institutions will bend to accommodate the fictional worldview of transgender activists is absurd, and recent weeks show that it isn’t likely to fade anytime soon.
Belgian weightlifter Anna Vanbellinghen said that it feels like a “bad joke” that she and her fellow female weightlifters would have to compete against a biological man at the Tokyo Olympics. Laurel Hubbard, a biological man who did not identify as a woman until the age of 35, will likely become the first transgender athlete to compete in the Olympics this year.
The International Olympic Committee bases the eligibility for biological men in women’s sports on the unscientific, arbitrary time period of one year of testosterone suppression, even though it is clear that men retain their biological advantages for at least two years after beginning testosterone suppression. This doesn’t count the advantages of male puberty on the human body that can’t be undone with just chemical alterations.
Meanwhile, USA Today went from taking a bold stance against the activists to cowardly caving before them and altering arguments against transgender athletes competing in women’s sports. The decision to run a piece by a female college athlete with the headline, “I Was the Fastest Girl in Connecticut. But Transgender Athletes Made it an Unfair Fight,” would have been laudable. Instead, the paper undercut her argument by erasing the differences she highlighted between biological men and female athletes, with an apologetic note tacked on to the piece for good measure.
The United States Golf Association has already committed itself to this same denial of reality, and the Ladies Professional Golf Association is likely to follow. The NCAA has also caved, as prominent activist athletes have pushed this issue incessantly. And USA Today isn’t the only media outlet to buy into the idea that reality (or the English language) is whatever activists say it is. Nor is it the only one censoring content that transgender activists object to, as Amazon has shown.
But biological men will always be biological men, whether they change their names or they physically or chemically alter their bodies. In most areas of life, this is fine: They are free to live as whatever they want. But sports is not one of those areas. Science and the medical field is another, where dumbing down future generations by pretending biological reality doesn’t exist should be unacceptable, as should suing Catholic hospitals for not treating someone as the gender he or she claims to be.
The institutional rot of social justice is most evident when it comes to this issue, where dissent is silenced and biology is warped to fit the ideological view of whatever activists demand. These institutions sacrifice their dignity and their independence to please angry ideologues, and it will only get worse before it gets better.
