When it comes to aspects of the current gender-swapping madness towards which I am most adamantly opposed, the spectacle of teen and twentyish born males putting on a dress, calling themselves Loretta and demanding to compete as a female athlete tops the list, because of the inherent unfairness of it. Human sexual dimorphism is a stone-cold reality: the mature male of our species tends to be taller, heavier, faster and more muscular than the female. Personally, the last time I was ever able to hold my own, physically, against my brother and his friends was at the age of twelve or thirteen – right before puberty set in. I will concede that there are outliers and variances; I am fairly sure that Ronda Rousey could smack the tar out of that skinny little twerp Dylan Mulvaney every day before breakfast and twice on Sunday.
I will also acknowledge that there have been a tiny handful of female competitors in sports events who were sexually indeterminate from birth, due to a chromosomal oddity. But neither of these exceptions changes the size/strength imbalance by a single degree. It is simply not fair for post-pubertal genuine, original XX, girls and women to compete in a contest of physical strength and endurance against an XY person calling themselves Loretta and putting on a dress or a female swimsuit.
Aside from that, it can and has been dangerous, to the point of causing injuries. And as for why indifferent male athletes are allowed to cosplay as women on school sports teams? One reason might be that coaches and schools are all out for winning at any cost, never mind the safety and security of the genuine XX original-issue-lady-parts girls on their teams. Probably the high-decibel screaming of the trans-enthusiasts across all aspects of our public life, and their perceived social power, has a lot to do with this unfairness being allowed. The wish to be seen as an ally and champion of the so-called marginalized is overwhelmingly powerful among progressives, stronger than any sense of fairness or even concern for the safety of women. Allowing and encouraging male sex-pests to claim sudden-onset gender switcheroo so that they can demand placement or access to prisons, hospital wards, battered-women shelters, female-only gyms and spas goes beyond obscene. And threatening insane degrees of violence against women who object to this invasion of female-only spaces by thinly-disguised male perverts … say, oh champions-of-the-trans, do you listen to yourselves? Do you believe for a hot second that this line of discourse is persuasive?
By the way, such indulgent championship really doesn’t appear to do anything good in the long run for those individuals and groups taken up as totems for the progressive legions. Can anyone insist with a straight face that people of color, or the poor, or the homeless are really better off for being nominated as the cherished totems of progressive affirmative-action over the last couple of decades. Routinely prioritizing the wants of spurious trans-women over the actual safety and well-being of genuine women will guarantee a backlash. It’s been said often enough before and I will say it again – it’s a social contagion, as much as anything written about by Charles Mackay in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The enthusiasm for matters trans will eventually be seen as much a disgrace and a fraud as the recovered-memory, or satanic day care abuse trials of decades past. Alas – it is said that people go mad in crowds, but recover sanity only one by one.
Discuss as you wish – and how much longer do you think this trans madness will last?
Somebody suggested that if a biological male is competing with actual women in swimming, put a dolphin in and see how he like *that* for competition.
Could do the same with track and a gazelle.
However positive the original aims of feminism may have been, there is no denying that “Feminism” with a capital F has become a disaster for the great majority of women … much worse than the so-called “patriarchy” ever was. Take a look at England — women are below Muslims (in every sense one may put on the word), and “Feminists” are not complaining … just as “Feminists” in the US don’t seem to be complaining about biological males competing in female sports.
Well said.
I would very much like to see a reframing of the whole “trans” argument.
As I see it there are at least three groups being lumped in here:
People with genetic anomalies, for example: XXY, Kleinfelter Syndrome; XXX, Trisomy X, or androgen insensitivity in males, genotypically male (XX) but phenotypically female;
People struggling with gender dysphoria, convince (with a great deal of outside help) that they are trapped in a body of the wrong sex;
People with autogynephilia (wikipedia, sorry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanchard%27s_transsexualism_typology)
I’d like to see the reframing because a lot of the force behind the transitioning argument seems to be coming from the last group, and I think it would be harder for progressive advocate to persist in their arguments if it were pointed out that there efforts are aimed in part at assisting fetishists in getting their jollies in female spaces.
I’ve no idea what might be done to assist the one truly tragic class of true believers: parents who have “followed the science” and assisted a child in transitioning.
Sorry for the typos at 5:30am above:
“convinced” for convince;
“advocates” for advocate;
“their” for there;
All that’s needed is a simple NCAA rule that requires a groin check. If Mr Sausage shows up, Mr/Ms/Mrs can’ compete with the ladies
I think the madness is already over, or at least in great decline. Future historians will look back upon 2024 as the high watermark of the crazy that went into overdrive back around 2014: the last gasp of the 20th century.
The left is a cult. The cult members drink the Kool-Aid because they fear being excommunicated. Most cult members are unhappy, mentally ill people seeking a sense of meaning and belonging. They “believe” whatever the cult tells them.
If the cult, and its bizarre matrix of victimhood, changes the hierarchy of victim status, the cult members will effortlessly and instantaneously change their purported beliefs to conform. They are like a school of fish which changes direction in simultaneous uniformity.
The cult provides a sense of moral superiority and entitlement, but members are actually unfeeling for the most part. They don’t actually care about the homeless, the millions who die each year of climate policies, the hundreds of thousands of children sex-trafficked in the US, the working class which gets abused by the invasion of illegals, or the innocent people whose lives were destroyed by the BLM/Antifa riots. Or the millions of victims of the covid hoax and jab.
That the cultists have zero sympathy for girls injured by boys or deprived of success is not at all surprising. They are moral and intellectual zombies. With apologies to Zager and Evans — everything they think, do or say, is in the Kool-Aid they drink today.
the so-called marginalized
Yes, the one thing you cannot honestly say about the “trans” folk is that they are silenced or somehow not speaking out. Oy vey.
Also, stan is right: Progressivism is a religion. I prefer to use “cult” in the less pejorative manner, usually, as a sect within a religion. So, just as there is a “cult of Mary” within Roman Catholicism, so there are trans cults and climate cults within Progressivism. (Note, there is a “cult of Mary” within Roman Catholicism, but not all Roman Catholics are in a cult of Mary. And that was merely the handiest example to come to mind.)
As someone with a female relative who competed in male sports (she was that good, not pretending to be male), I don’t understand this at all. This is as much a bureaucracy/rules issue as anything else. What’s wrong with judging these things on a case-by-case basis?
If one insists on rules and objective measurements (other than length of dangly bits), strength/speed can be measured. Instead of male/female sports, have “strong” and “weak” teams (with better names), much like varsity and junior-varsity or fighting weight classes. Does “separate locker rooms” really need to be said? These days, I suppose that it does.
There are cultural issues with mixed sex competition – both as opponents and team members – but shouting victim is not the way to resolve those. It may be a horrible idea culturally, but I think that ship has sailed. For example, I no longer follow any of the “gentlemanly” rules I learned growing up (holding doors, giving up a seat, etc…) because I’ve been hectored about equality for so many years.
The first clue was when feminists didn’t side with Paula Jones. Set aside Monica Lewinsky; she was the daughter of a big donor. Paula Jones was a state employee and Bill Clinton was the governor. The power imbalance was a stark as it gets. But the feminists turned on her, castigated her, excoriated her, and Hillary led the charge. Writer Nina Burleigh (who still got to have a career) said she would have given Clinton oral sex just for keeping abortion legal.
Once it became about the movement instead of individual women, all moral high ground was ceded. It probably happened before that, like the first time a woman chose being a homemaker and was chided for it, but when the movement said it was ready to cast out a woman in the name of “women,” the movement became just another constituency. And now it’s reaping the whirlwind, because other constituencies elbowed them aside.
And the “smash in the mouth” realization that capital-F Establishment Feminism wasn’t really about women achieving and succeeding at whatever they chose to do — was when Sarah Palin was rubbished politically. Here we had a woman who had achieved on her own, without being the spouse or spawn of a prominent politician, being trashed by the big-name Feminists. It was a particularly ugly display of class snobbery.
I comment on blogs very infrequently, and so don’t remember if I’ve mentioned this here already, but everyone who seeks to understand the last 30-40 years of encroaching Leftism/collectivism and the current rending of the social fabric, should read “The True Believer,” by Eric Hoffer.
It was first published way back in 1951, but Hoffer’s explanations and conclusions regarding the psychology of mass movements can be seen playing out even today, in real time: the manipulating leaders, the cultish followers, the ever-changing “goal posts.”
The summaries in the first few 5-star reviews, here, are excellent:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15916.The_True_Believer
I think most of us at Chicagoboyz have read The True Believer, CC – I know that I did in college, and it was truly a revelation to understanding the lunatic fringe, then and now. I guess that the best we can hope for at present, is that the fringes have all become so loud, and have merged into one useless, fighting-each-other insane blob…
Another reference:
Daniel Greenfield has a post, now more than 20 years old, that seems to capture a taste of the “fringe” problem you mention: the historical re-ordering of its sub-sects’ value(s) to the progressive movement, …to arrive at where we are now: the “fighting-each-other insane blob.”
https://www.danielgreenfield.org/2012/08/the-minority-victim-value-index.html
If you have not read it, it’s quite good.
I remember years ago suddenly seeing stories about people convinced that they had a leg, arm or other appendage too many and the lengths some of them went to to have them removed. Because, in those benighted times, someone that went to a doctor wanting an perfectly healthy body part amputated was simply referred to the nearest headshrinker. Some would try to thread the needle between an injury requiring amputation and mortality. And just as suddenly, the stories disappeared.
At the time, this medical reticence was presented as a clear case of ethics. It now appears that it was simply a lack of reimbursement. Funny how Obamacare keeps on giving.
The Left is always looking for “noble causes” that enable them to imagine themselves as “saviors” of the “oppressed.” That explains why the oppressed are never actually saved. That would spoil the game. In this case they thought they could play the game with trannys the same as they did with gay people. As with gays, they would gain a point here and a point there, gays in the military here and gay marriage there. It worked for gays because they always were in the military regardless, the arguments against gay marriage were mainly religious and the majority religion in the US, Christianity, had already long been coopted by the Left, etc. In other words, no one cared enough to seriously resist the trend.
Apparently, in the case of transsexuals, they assumed the process would play out much the same. It looks like this time they’ve tried to cross a bridge too far. Forcing people to agree that it’s not only OK for men to wear summer dresses and pretend to be women, but also to swallow the palpable lie that they can actually physically transform themselves into women by an act of will, and chromosomes be damned, is not only idiotic, but it causes a great deal of obvious harm. Most people don’t consider it OK to poison and mutilate children in the interests of “sex reassignment.” They don’t consider it OK that, in incident after incident, talented young women are being barred from success in sports by males competing as women, nor do they consider it OK that academic scholarships in women’s sports should be awarded to men. They don’t consider sexual assault by “transsexual” males on women in spaces reserved for women are OK either. I doubt that most sane people will ever consider these things OK. That’s why the Trump Administration’s insistence on the obvious facts of biological sex and its drawing the obvious conclusions therefrom in such cases as women’s sports, poisoning of children without parental knowledge or consent, etc., are meeting with so little resistance.
Under the circumstances, I doubt that such antics as Democrats in Congress voting unanimously in favor of men competing in women’s sports will help them in the long run. On the contrary, assuming that any of them are capable of rational thought to begin with, they are likely to rue the day. People may not care to much about drastic shifts in the culture that don’t affect them personally, but they care a lot more when they personally experience harm from these shifts. That’s why this latest “noble cause” is ostensibly running out of steam.
Madness is rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule. – Friedrich Nietzsche
A sex impersonator (I have decided to stop using their language) is a mentally ill person.
A sex impersonator forcing his way into sports is a mentally ill person and a cheater.
As if we really needed more in the way of gender insanity:
https://nypost.com/2025/03/15/us-news/new-jersey-law-ask-parents-to-choose-babys-gender-sexual-orientation/
Who could make this up?
The trans-in-sports issue was obvious 50 years ago, when Richard Rasking, a male strong amateur tennis player (won the US Navy championship), became Renée Richards, a female internationally ranked professional tennis player, competing against women 20 years younger. This was in spite of the loss of upper body strength from absence of testosterone and administration of estrogen.
Intractable gender dysphoria can happen, though it’s very rare. I’m willing to to let such an unfortunate “present” as the other sex, provided the person understands that that is a courtesy, not a right, and doesn’t insist on violating necessary boundaries (e.g. sports).
I have no use whatever for the fetishists and sex radicals who exploit this issue to épater les bourgeois. Nor for the legion of idiot liberals whose fashionable virtue-signaling has driven a pandemic of overdiagnosis causing terrible harm to thousands of people.
MCS:At the time, this medical reticence was presented as a clear case of ethics. It now appears that it was simply a lack of reimbursement. Funny how Obamacare keeps on giving.
It seems that sometime in the future, when the legal beagles realize the possible revenue, lawsuits based on permanent harm will be brought for those in the medical profession/field who performed surgerys and administered drugs to youths. They may be sued for refusing access to such ‘care’, and then refused for denying access in the exact same manner.
Children who would not be allowed to choose their diet should not be allowed to “choose” their gender, especially without being realized of the permanent consequences of what may be to them ‘trivial surgery’.
A surgeon or hospital that allows such practice are setting them self up for future retribution for their failure to act as adult protectors demanded by their profession rather than seekers of lucre.
IOW, failure to act prudently now may lead to futre economic ruin. Deservedly so.