Gender and Track Meets

In the current odd political year that 2016 has been, and surely will continue to be, we find that transgender individuals appear to have a curious lock on the headlines as they try to get us to rewrite rules for everyday living.

And, as if on cue, here we go with the story of a high-school student who was born a male and has all the male parts, but "identifies as female" and was allowed to compete in the Alaska state girls' track championships, placing third in the event the student (pronouns fail me a tad here) entered.

Here is my all-too-familiar disclaimer: I know and am close friends with such individuals, and certainly am sympathetic to the difficulty that they have navigating daily life with an affliction that complicates some percentage of their existence.  They are not innately "bad", or "evil"; they are fellow Americans with a medical/psychological issue to deal with.

I also believe that the psychological community has generally failed them, as it has with others with issues of sexual and gender abnormalities, by starting from a point of trying to regard it as some type of "normal" rather than attempting to treat it.  End of disclaimer.

What is relevant here is something else entirely.  At some point, people who are born with one set of chromosomes but "identify" with the other set, stop being able to operate in their gender of choice, as it were, and begin to affect others.

Here is one of those cases.

Males and females are different from birth.  Aside from the differing body parts and other distinctions, for the purpose of this specific case, males are bigger and stronger as a gender, with greater muscle mass and its attendant strength.  This becomes quite distinctive in athletics, and we can see it quite evidently at the extremes of performance.

Can you imagine, for example, if a 55-year-old retired female tennis pro were to take on any of the leading 25-30-year-old men who are touring pros now?  There would be no contest at all.  Yet Bobby Riggs, at 55, easily defeated Margaret Smith Court, at the time the #1-ranked female player, in two lopsided sets in such a challenge in 1973.

There are a lot of things that transgender females (born male) can do that no one really cares about, live and let live, what happens here stays here, that kind of thing.  Where there is no impact on anyone else, well, heck, it's America -- have at it.

But this high-school track competition is a horse of a whole different color.  This doesn't just affect the transgender runner; it affects everyone running against the transgender runner.  Males and females are not the same, and if you strip away the part about how the person "feels like a female", which doesn't negate their innate male strength, you are left with a boy competing in an athletic event against a field of only girls.

Had this specific individual been a better athlete, or competed in an event more biased toward the genetic strengths of males, we would be looking at first place, and an even bigger issue.

In a competition where physical gender distinctions don't really matter (i.e., muscles are not involved), it's not a big deal.  Academic competition?  Have at it.

Athletics?  Whoa, folks.  That is a very different playing field.

When boys start competing with girls in girls' athletic events, we eventually have to acknowledge that the physical differences introduce an immense unfairness to those actually born female.  I'm perfectly willing to support transgender people portraying themselves as the opposite sex in a certain set of situations, sure.  But once you start depriving genetic females of fair competition among themselves to accommodate stronger, faster and larger people with a psychological disorder, you have simply gone too far.

I think it's ironic that Hillary Clinton is beginning her "glass ceiling" tour trying to become president, if she is not in prison by then, celebrating that a woman is actually running for the office.  How do you think she feels about this issue and the specific track meet?

Ask yourself two questions:
(1) What would Hillary say to the transgender person who ran the meet as a girl, although actually male, and finished third and got whatever award was given for third place in the state?
(2) What would Hillary then say to the girl who finished fourth, and was deprived of that bronze medal, or whatever they give you in Alaska for third, because a boy entered the meet effectively disguised as a girl?

Hillary Clinton has plenty to say about jobs that have been exclusively the province of males forever, and how great it is when a woman does that job.  Why in God's name would she look at a competition that is initially made fair by constraining it to girls, and then introducing a right of boys to compete in it?  It is essentially reintroducing a glass ceiling where none had existed.  I can't fathom how she would answer those questions to the two girls above -- one real, one not a girl -- with them sitting together, and somehow not drip hypocrisy all over the stage.

You keep pushing the envelope, friends, and eventually it rips.  I think it did here.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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