On March 3, Iowa became the 11th state over the past two years to enact legislation barring biological males from participating in school athletic competitions designated for students who are biologically female. On the evening of March 4, the Utah state legislature passed a bill that would make Utah the 12th state—except that Utah Gov. Spencer Cox has vowed to veto this effort to protect girl athletes from having their scores and records trounced by bigger and stronger boys who identify as transgender.
It’s likely, also, that Cox’s veto will stand. Utah is an overwhelmingly Republican state, and it’s Republican-dominated states such as Iowa, Florida, South Dakota, and Texas that have successfully enacted what opponents call “anti-transgender legislation” on a number of issues, including, besides girls’ sports, access to opposite-sex school bathrooms, and administering puberty blockers to preadolescent children.
No matter that Cox’s post was immediately flooded with negative comments, overwhelmingly from biological women, mainly mothers, concerned that the entire category of “girls’ sports” would be essentially obliterated if their daughters were forced to compete against boys. One of them—who scarcely sounded like a political conservative—wrote: “The majority of LGBTQ+ teens are definitely hurting and disadvantaged, for sure ... but how do we solve that? By diminishing the potential of another group of humans, who have a history both past and present, of having to fight for their own rights to equality?” She got 150 “likes.”
What does all of this mean? What it means is a triumph of rhetoric over reality. Or rather, a triumph of rhetoric supported by overwhelming political and economic power. The reality is clear and biological: Study after study shows that human males and females are physically different—a difference that shows up after seven weeks in the womb, when male fetuses start producing the testosterone and its derivatives that not only govern their development of primary and secondary sex characteristics but drive them to be generally taller, stronger, and superior in respiratory and cardiovascular capacity than females. Generally speaking, men can simply run (and swim) faster, jump higher, and punch harder than women. The differences aren’t so evident among young children, who can play successfully in coed softball and soccer leagues, but by puberty they are dramatic, which is why there are such separate entities as the NBA and the WNBA.
But it’s not reality but rhetoric that prevails. And the rhetoric centers not on objective biological differences between the sexes that have been exhaustively measured, but upon subjective feelings about one’s own “gender identity.”
Thus, we have the 6-foot-4-inch Lia Thomas phenomenon: Swimming on the men’s team for the University of Pennsylvania for three years and ranking No. 462 among male competitors, then switching to the women’s team in 2021 after a year of testosterone suppression and breaking records—records that will stand until the next Lia Thomas emerges to break those and make it even more unlikely that even the best-trained, hardest-working biologically female swimmer will ever be able to best a biological male. It’s doom for women’s swimming.
At the high-school level, there were the two transgender sprinters, Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood, who consistently won girls’ races in Connecticut in 2019 without being obliged to take any testosterone suppressants at all. Runners who were biological girls and complained were simply told to train harder.
The progressives who defend such intrusions—and this means nearly all of the media—like to point to the rarity of such incidents to assert that the problems critics cite are purely imaginary. And, fortunately for women athletes, males who identify as transgender are statistically rare in the general population. Rare and non-threatening, that is, until a Lia Thomas emerges to shatter women’s swimming records, perhaps for good.
Transgender advocates like to make abstract historical analogies, comparing bans on transgender participation in girls’ school sports to Jim Crow racial segregation. They avoid any mention of biological sex as something determined scientifically by chromosomes and hormones; rather, sex is merely a superficial classification “assigned at birth.” But most of all, they talk about subjective feelings: the “hurting” and other emotions.
As a guilt-appealing trump card, advocates cite transgender people’s high suicide rates.
All of this would be what rhetoric actually is—mere talk—if it weren’t for what clearly bothers the Republicans in Utah: the political and economic reprisals that will inevitably follow if the state doesn’t align itself with the prevailing progressive ethos.
Gov. Cox and his fellow Republicans who voted against the proposed Utah ban on male participation in girls’ sports may simply fear their state becoming yet another pariah of progressives.
