There’s probably nothing more indicative of the war between the Woke and the Pushbackers than the battle over trans athletes being allowed to compete in women’s sports. I’ve taken the side of the Pushbackers, but suppose it turns out we’re on the losing side of history. The world won’t come to an end, but what will?
A distinct possibility is women’s competitive sports. Or at least those that hang on muscle bulk, like shot-put or weight lifting or wrestling. In very short order trans women will so dominate the podium that women will simply cease to participate. So at the Olympics there’ll be the men’s lifting event and the trans lifting event, though it may take a few decades before we’ll be allowed to call it that.
Will this be any great loss? To me not one whit. But to women who’d have wanted to be lifters, yes. And to trans lifters even more. Why? Because there’s the very real possibility that (what amounts to) a trans event will be viewed as little more than a freak show. And that can’t be what any trans athlete would consider a great political victory for her kind.
Hey, I’m just sayin’.
Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy
Paulosophical Vimplications 
The corporate sponsors of sporting events know that no sports fan is going to pay to watch a partially (through the miracle of modern pharmacology) de-androgenized male athlete who never placed higher than 31st in international competition when he was lifting as a man crush the competition for gold at a women’s Olympic weightlifting event. Except as a freak show. (Maybe, to mark this historic victory for trans rights, they should give him silver and bronze, too.)
Everyone knows this, yet the sponsors are too fearful of the fury of the mob to say so. But capitalism and its marketers are nothing if not creative. Perhaps women’s athletics in the “faster, stronger, higher” events can be repositioned into the niche occupied by professional wrestling and “reality” TV. No one will notice the quiet exodus of athletics brands like Nike if they are replaced by Jack Daniels, Harley-Davidson, and the manufacturers of tattooing supplies, MAGA hats, and chewing tobacco.
This stuff casts a long shadow: an American hurdler has just been disqualified for, it seems, *not* taking his performance-altering drugs…
(More later, after some fact-checking.)
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Not much of a freak show, is it, when your prize freak gets eliminated in the first round — dropping the bar three times and not even lifting — instead of crushing the competition. Kind of a bummer, though, for the top-ranked New Zealand woman who got bumped aside so he could go to Tokyo.
What was interesting to me was the adulatory reaction from the trans advocates who say the battle isn’t over and our struggle will continue, yadda-yadda. I would expect to hear similar propaganda from the manufacturers of those little motors that you can hide inside a bicycle frame for high-tech cheating…when the first “openly motoring” bike racer crashes and burns (literally, if his battery catches fire) after strenuous lobbying allows them to be used in competition. After all, they’re safer for the riders than drugs, right?
Meanwhile, controversy swirls about who really counts as a woman anyway? Are we so sure that the blood level of something or other matters just because we can measure it easily? Are the testosterone-endowed women “cheating”, albeit with pure hearts? Or is this just sour grapes from the also-rans trying to take down some uncommonly gifted and unbeatable competitors? Careers are short and much money hangs on the outcome. The sponsors aren’t quite ready to go the freak-show route with women’s athletics.
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