The Slippery Gender Slope

I suppose it's old news now, since it happened like a week ago ("That's so six o'clock yesterday!"), but you still likely recall the story of the basketball team that was thrown out of a tournament when they played a girl, Kymora Johnson of Charlottesville,Virginia, on the team in violation of the rules.

If you forgot, didn't hear about it, or have learned not to rely on me for all the facts, you can read about it here.  But truth to tell, the details aren't all that important.

This is one of those "slippery slope" things.

Personally, I'm not really interested in this whole thing about putting girls on boys' teams.  Sure, I suppose the logistics of dressing rooms and the like can be handled, buy really, why go through all that?

Besides, in our accelerating gender-neutral society, locker rooms aren't really the point.  We have always treated the female as the "weaker sex", because they, well, are.  I don't think that's really to argue; certainly at the elite athlete level where people play professionally, you will not see women capable of competing with men.

Bobby Riggs, the tennis player, showed this quite well when even at age 55 he was still able to defeat Margaret Smith Court (bet you forgot that one!) and compete reasonably well with Billie Jean King, two female tennis pros still in their prime.  The female athletes competing in sports like football, the very few that they are, are pretty much kickers.

OK, we get it.  Men are taller, stronger and faster on the whole.  Whoopee.  Not the point.

No, this is the point:  If it is OK for  Kymora Johnson of Charlottesville, Virginia to play on a boys team, then why is it not equally OK for, say, Kevin Johnson of Charlottesville, Virginia to play on a girls team?

Now, I don't want the mythical Kevin Johnson to play on a girls team, mind you.  But whatever set of moral standards is supposed to apply to distinguish the two cases, without recognizing within it what the left doesn't want to say -- that males are stronger (and, therefore, different)?  Follow what I'm saying -- if you are to advocate that it is OK for a girl to play on a boys team but not the other way around, then you have to define that there is a difference between genders -- and live within that definition in things that have nothing to do with sports.

Further -- we now have this all-encompassing leftist mindset that gender is some kind of "choice."  We can discuss that at length elsewhere.  We can debate whether someone with an X and a Y chromosome but thinks they are female is normal, or whether they're in need of medical and psychological treatment (for the record -- I do not in any way regard such people as "bad" or "evil" or "sinful" in any way and would resent any such characterization of my views that suggests that).

So at what point is the old East German joke about their Olympic female athletes being males now the American reality?  If, say, the International Olympic Committee decides to be just as gender-neutral in attitude as the White House and The View and the State of California and the Kardashians, what happens when a healthy male athlete who says in a deep bass voice "I'm a woman" decides to compete on his country's women's team?

Is it OK for a girl to play on a boys basketball team but not the other way around?  If not, then why not?  And if there is a difference, and if there is some acceptable moral defining difference between the sexes that needs to get into our moral code, then how far is that difference allowed to go?

I fear this is simply one of those cases were the left wants to have it both ways.  "Oh, how wonderful that a girl is good enough to play on a boys team, oh, oh, oh."  Sure, that's great.  How wonderful will it be when the boy that's twice the athlete his female peers is -- or is no better at all -- says he's a girl and thus wants to play on the girls team?

For God's sake, will someone please just once look at the unintended consequences of decisions before they're made?  Because as Congress can tell you, there are always unintended consequences, and they will come back and bite you.

And where they bite you doesn't depend on your gender.

 Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
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