The modern history of transgender activism has relied on a fundamental axiom: that one’s biological sex does not necessarily define their gender. But the new Left seems keen on blowing up about a century’s worth of progress and demanding society dissolve the line between gender and sex.
Progressives have advanced to the literal arena in the transgender TERF war, demanding that transgender women be treated as biologically equal to cisgender women in athletics.
While stories of trans women beating out their cis counterparts in athletic events have trickled through the news cycles over the past few years, the issue catapulted into the mainstream after tennis superstar and longtime gay rights activist Martina Navratilova faced charges of transphobia for recent comments denouncing the push for trans women to compete against biological females — or in Navratilova’s words, “cheat.”
Naturally, Athlete Ally, an LGBT nonprofit group, severed ties with Navratilova, reigniting the intersectional battle of our generation: the TERF war.
The TERF, or trans-exclusionary radical feminist, insult has been lobbed at radical feminists who have excoriated trans women for supposedly capitalizing on the historical and persistent inequities faced by women across the world. But Navratilova wasn’t denouncing the dignity and rights of trans people in any single social sphere except for the one where the differences between biological men and women are immutable.
While men and women may differ in certain emotional nuances, modern liberal consensus has roughly concluded that in terms of social, legal, and opportunistic rights, men and women are equal. What it hasn’t historically called for is a complete and flagrant disregard for basic human biology. But the Left now insists that trans people shouldn’t just be respected as the gender they identify as but treated as biologically equivalent to their cis counterparts.
Don’t take my word for it. Just ask Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. America’s most anti-Semitic congresswoman recently called on her predecessor in seat and in most anti-Semitic title, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, to investigate USA Powerlifting for refusing to allow trans women (read: biological males) to compete in women’s divisions.
Omar deemed the scientific fact that the average biological man has a “direct competitive advantage” over the average biological women a “myth.”
The party of science, y’all.
In all seriousness, you can be the most ardent rainbow-flag waving trans ally, advocate for every form of social equality from bathroom rights to legal ones, and still acknowledge that social constructs and norms cannot unmake biology. No matter how morally, intellectually, and emotionally equal you believe men and women to be, men just have more physical strength than women.
Acknowledging that biological sex may differ from gender isn’t transphobic. In any sane reality, it’s the opposite. The entire apparatus of transgender rights relies on the stark division of the two and the existence of the gender binary not always aligning with the biological one.
Progressives pretending otherwise aren’t just anti-science. They’re anti-women.
