Opinion
Female athletes are turning against gender-confused men dominating women’s sports
From LifeSiteNews
If female athletes came together and demanded, with one voice, that female sports be protected, they would be pushing at an open door.
What happens when obvious truths about the differences between the sexes are denied by the elites at the behest of the transgender movement? And what happens when female athletes discover that their rights mean less than the newly invented “rights” of trans-identifying men to invade their spaces?
We’ve seen the answer to that play out over the past few years. This month alone, a trans-identifying male beat his female competitors at an Oregon track meet by a full six seconds, with the video of him zipping across the finish line sparking outrage; a trans-identifying marathon runner announced that he will be competing in the full set of six marathon majors in Boston in the male, female and “non-binary” categories; and courts in West Virginia and Ohio ruled that trans-identifying males can compete on female sports teams.
In the meantime, U.K. culture secretary Lucy Frazer called for a ban on males in female sports after meeting with representatives of a number of female sports leagues, writing:
In competitive sport, biology matters. And where male strength, size and body shape gives athletes an indisputable edge, this should not be ignored. By protecting the female category, they can keep women’s competitive sport safe and fair and keep the dream alive for the young girls who dream of one day being elite sportswomen.
She concluded, “We must get back to giving women a level playing field to compete. We need to give women a sporting chance.” Refreshingly, she called on sporting bodies to take an “unambiguous position” on the matter.
That, of course, is common sense. What makes Frazer’s statements significant is that she does not, like most politicians trying to thread the needle by accepting transgender ideology but rejecting the inevitable conclusions thereof, make multiple references to “transgender women.” She instead refers to keeping male bodies out of female sports, much to the outrage of trans activists, who insist that males who identify as females are females, and thus have female bodies, because they said so.
Over the past several years, it has fallen largely to the few female sportswomen who dared to risk the opprobrium of the LGBT movement to speak for the majority and point out the unfairness of allowing males to invade their sporting domains; now, an increasing number are willing to speak out. A recent study conducted by Manchester Metropolitan and Swansea universities, published April 17 in the Journal of Sports Sciences, indicates that the majority of female athletes want women’s sports to be categorized by sex rather than “gender identity.”
Fifty-eight percent of respondents in the study of elite female athletes wanted categorization by biological sex; that rose to 77 percent among those classified as “world-class athletes” who had competed in Olympic or world championship finals. Researchers surveyed 175 “national, elite and world class female athletes – current and retired – from a range of sports and countries” and included “26 world champions, 22 Olympians and six Paralympians,” making it the largest study of its kind conducted thus far. A BBC Sports study last month found that over 100 elite U.K. female athletes “would be uncomfortable” with trans-identifying males competing in the female categories of their sports.
According to the study, there is one exception to the rule: the “majority of athletes competing in non-Olympic sports believe changing category should be allowed, with the highest rate of 74% among those in ‘precision’ sports such as archery.”
In short, the higher female athletes climb, the more likely they are to object to trans-identifying males competing in their categories. Most of these athletes, of course, remain unnamed. Imagine if they came out together and demanded, with one voice, that female sports be protected. It would constitute a cultural sea change – and I suspect the moment is right for them to do so. If they pushed, they would be pushing at an open door.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
What are we to do about it?
In the late eighteenth century, a group of unusually enlightened men gathered to plot rebellion against the most powerful military power of the day. Their grievances were many, set down in the Declaration of Independence. This storied document was many things, but above all it was a cry of rebellion against tyranny: against the arbitrary, capricious and unwelcome rule of the English over the colonies. It was a cry for liberty.
Against all odds, their rebellion succeeded and, a few years later, they met once again to devise a form of government that would be strong enough to see to those things that only government can do, such as military defense and the enablement of trade between the states. They were, however, leery of the dangers of tyranny, and so they crafted a unique form of government: a federal republic, with power dispersed among the several states, and numerous checks and balances to prevent abuse.
It was a noble experiment, and it served us well for centuries, but it is essential that we understand that this experiment has now failed in its primary purpose: to secure our liberties and to forestall tyrannical rule.
The evidence of this failure is indisputable to anyone with eyes to see. Unelected bureaucrats can impose their will on the citizenry in a way that so far exceeds the arbitrary and capricious rule of the English as to stagger the imagination.
They are imposing upon us regulations to all but outlaw vehicles powered by fossil fuels. They have decreed that a woman can become a man, and a man can become a woman, with utter disregard for biological reality.
They have colluded with the internet oligarchs to censor dissent and to silence their political opponents. They are using the mechanisms of law enforcement to protect their friends and to persecute their enemies.
The intelligence services are spying on Americans, and the FBI looks more and more like the secret police with every passing day. I am afraid of my government; I fear the knock on the door in the middle of the night. The grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence look trifling by comparison.
If the Democrats get their way, it will get even worse. They have made it clear that they intend to undo the system of checks and balances that have kept tyrants at bay for centuries. They will eliminate the Senate filibuster.
They will pack the Supreme Court and turn it into something like the Soviet Politburo, an organ of political power unaccountable to the people with absolute authority over every aspect of life. They will continue to push for non-citizen voting rights, allowing millions of illegal immigrants to vote in key local and state elections.
And, perhaps worst of all, power will be further centralized in Washington under the Democrats, who will willingly crackdown on local and state governments that don’t adopt their left-wing vision. In short, a form of absolute tyranny will be established.
Our constitution was designed to prevent this from happening. It is time for us to recognize that our experiment in self-rule has failed, and that we must do something about it before it is too late.
How did we get here? It all starts with federal money. Money is, and always has been, a profoundly corrupting influence in government. This has been true throughout history, going back to the Romans and even before.
Money is power. Money is control. Money gives you the ability to reward your friends and punish your enemies. Federal money has become a lever used by the bureaucrats to impose their will on state and local government, emasculating the federal system.
The Biden administration is giving away trillions of dollars in public funds to support its allies and to buy votes with the money they’ve taken from us. But no matter how many trillions of dollars they fritter away, it’s never enough, and they are on the verge of spending the country into bankruptcy. The system they have constructed will inevitably collapse, and take us down with it.
What then shall we do? How can we reclaim our lost freedom and save ourselves from the coming tyranny?
To do this, we need to be as bold as our opposition. They have stated that the American system is to be burned to the ground and replaced with something new. I agree, in part. Yes, burn it to the ground — but replace it instead with something old: the Federal Republic the founders intended us to have. This will require a massive — and I mean massive — reduction in the size and the scope of the government, and a return to its stated purpose, as eloquently laid out in the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States:
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
This, and no more.
Craig W. Stanfill (@craigwstanfill) is a computer scientist, software entrepreneur, and the author of the AI Dystopia science fiction series.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
From the Fraser Institute
By Matthew Lau
The latest news of slowing demand for electric vehicles highlight the profound hazards of the federal government’s Soviet-style mandate that 100 per cent of new light-duty vehicles sold must be electric or plug-in hybrid by 2035 (with interim targets of 20 per cent by 2026 and 60 per cent by 2030, with steep penalties for dealers missing these targets).
The targets were wild to begin with—as Manhattan Institute senior fellow Mark P. Mills observed, bans on conventional vehicles and mandated switches to electric mean, in jurisdictions such as Canada, “consumers will need to adopt EVs at a scale and velocity 10 times greater and faster than the introduction of any new model of car in history.”
Indeed, when the Trudeau government announced its mandate last December, conventional vehicles accounted for 87 per cent of the market, and today the mandated switch to electric looks even more at odds with actual consumer preferences. According to reports, Tesla will cut its global workforce by more than 10 per cent (or more than 14,000 employees) due to slowing electric vehicle demand.
In Canada, a Financial Post headline reads, “‘Tall order to ask the average Canadian’: EVs are twice as hard to sell today.” Not only has Tesla’s quarterly sales declined, Ford Motor Co. announced in April it will delay the start of electric vehicle production at its Oakville plant by two years, from 2025 to 2027.
According to research from global data and analytics firm J.D. Power, it now takes 55 days to sell an electric vehicle in Canada, up from 22 days in the first quarter of 2023 and longer than the 51 days it takes a gasoline-powered car to sell. This is the result, some analysts suggest, of a lack of desirable models and high consumer prices—and despite federal subsidies to car buyers of up to $5,000 per electric vehicle and additional government subsidies in six provinces, as high as $7,000 in Quebec.
Similarly in the United States, the Wall Street Journal reports that on average, electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids sit in dealer lots longer than gasoline-powered cars and hybrids. Again, that’s despite heavy government pressure to switch to electric—the Biden administration mandated two-thirds of new vehicles sold must be electric by 2032.
In both Canada and the U.S., politicians banning consumers from buying vehicles they want and instead forcing them to buy the types of vehicles that run contrary to their preferences, call to mind famed philosopher Adam Smith’s “man of system,” described in his 1759 book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
The man of system, Smith explained, “is apt to be very wise in his own conceit” and “seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess–board.” But people are not chess pieces to be moved around by a hand from above; they have their own agency and if pushed by the “man of system” in a direction opposite to where they want to go, the result will be misery and “society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.”
That nicely sums up the current government effort to mandate electric vehicles contrary to consumer preferences. The vehicle market is in a state of disorder as the government tries to force people to buy the types of cars many of them do not want, and the outcomes are miserable all around.
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