Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them. George Orwell

Or, in the case of Olympic legend Simone Biles, only gymnasts believe in the incendiary issue of trans men competing in women’s sports. Biles, who has made a secondary career as an object of pity, took exception when former swimmer Riley Gaines, an opponent of trans men competing against women, sent a picture of Minnesota softball team that recently won a state title with a pitcher who is reported to be transgender.

“Comments off lol,’ Gaines wrote in response to the post which wasn’t permitting any comments from the public. “To be expected when your star player is a boy.”

That brought Biles into the fray. ‘You’re truly sick, all of this campaigning because you lost a race. Straight up sore loser. ‘You should be uplifting the trans community and perhaps finding a way to make sports inclusive OR creating a new avenue where trans feel safe in sports. Maybe a transgender category IN ALL sports!! ‘But instead… You bully them… One things for sure is no one in sports is safe with you around!!!!!’

She then poked Gaines again, saying: ‘Bully someone your own size, which would ironically be a male.” (Gaines husband is 6-foot-4)

The loser reference was to Gaines having lost to a trans swimmer in an NCAA race. Since then Gaines has launched a campaign to outlaw biological males from competing with cisgendered girls and women. She has testified in the U.S. Congress and has appeared in numerous interviews espousing a position supported by the vast majority of Americans.

One might think the proof of this position— unquestioned as recently as a decade ago— would be obvious. But Biles and  gender radicals who’ve tried to make trans into the Emancipation Proclamation of the 21st century are not giving up the fight.

Here’s someone named Nancy Armour in USA Today. “There is no scientific evidence that transgender women athletes have a physical advantage over cisgender women athletes, but that hasn’t stopped Gaines from claiming they do..” When legislation banning trans men in girls/ women sports was presented in the U.S. Congress 106 Democrats voted against the motion. The chattering class on CBC, MSNBC and CNN likewise have a cohort of those opposing the ban.

But it was the outburst from Biles that most appalled fans who’d worshipped her as the GOAT of Olympic gymnastics and then sympathized with her victimization by Dr. Larry Nasser. Even when she bailed on her teammates at the 2024 Games they cut her slack. But suddenly a woman who’s preached against body shaming and intolerance was deriding a fellow athlete’s body and mocking her complaints.

Critics were quick to post Biles’ hypocrisy about compassion, citing her own tear-stained testimony about how she was taken advantage by a doctor. Here’s how we described her psychological distress last August during the Olympics. “Prominent among them was gymnast Simone Biles who described the abuse she’d suffered from a male trainer and on social media as the greatest female gymnast in history. Even as she added more golds to her mantle she’d seemed unable to find peace in her accomplishments.

“Due to mental blocks, she’d had to step away from the sport for a time to get her head straight. She had a lot of company from fellow competitors who described sexual harassment and intimidation on social media for their unhappiness. (Hence the constant mental health commercials on the TV broadcasts.)”

Now the same role model is mocking Gaines? It seems unthinkable. As for the claims that men have no advantage against women, it was pointed out that there are zero women who try to reverse the equation, going into men’s sports. They show the hard truths about competitive records of men versus women in a range of sports. They describe the physical risks for women playing against larger, stronger men. Here. Here. And here.

It’s still stunning to see Biles toeing the radical LGBTQ line while asking for traditional pity of a victimized woman herself. Or the amount of support that the cause has garnered from progressives throughout society. When did people became so obtuse about the growth this societal contagion?

We wrote earlier this year about how such notions take hold. MacDonald Laurier Institute fellow Mia Hughes charted a history of similar social contagions such as bulimia and multiple-personality disorder. “In 1972, British psychologist Gerald Russell treated a woman with an unusual eating disorder involving binging and purging. Over the next seven years, he saw a further 30 woman presenting with the same condition. In 1979, he wrote a paper published in Psychological Medicine, in which he gave it the name bulimia nervosa….

“Then something remarkable happened. The illness swept the globe like wildfire… affecting an estimated 30 million people by the mid-1990s, the majority of whom were teenage girls and young women. The explanation for this rapid spread is what philosopher Ian Hacking calls ‘semantic contagion’ – how the process of naming and describing a condition creates the means by which the condition spreads. The epidemic of multiple-personality disorder in the 90s was spread this same way… Multiple studies demonstrate the media’s culpability in the spread of social contagions.”

The new contagion is trans athletes. USA Today is just one example of how influencers try to legitimize campaigns to boost their own self esteem. As the battle to reverse the trans incursion shows, there are only too many willing to play politics in the gender debate. Like the pro-Palestinian movement in North America the trans athlete hoax exists is a bubble where reality and fiction can co-exist, knowing they’ll never be put to the test.

Orwell called it doublethink “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” Biles and the liberal elites have it mastered. Nursing their grievance while finding it a fault in others.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, Bruce is regular media contributor. The new book from there team of Evan & Bruce Dowbiggin is Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL & Changed Hockey. From Espo to Boston in 1967 to Gretz in L.A. in 1988 to Patrick Roy leaving Montreal in 1995, the stories behind the story. In paperback and Kindle on #Amazon. Destined to be a hockey best seller. https://www.amazon.ca/Deal-Trades-Stunned-Changed-Hockey-ebook/dp/B0D236NB35/

This is Pride Month, but for segments of the LGBTQ community the enthusiasm for a united front has gone sour. Back in the heady days when the gay movement ruled the Left with its parades and show trials for bakers, it blithely added the Trans designation to its marquee.

But that decision is coming back at the veterans of the Gay movement, and they don’t like it. “@spiralmoney The T has only destroyed the hard won acceptance LGB people fought for. They contribute nothing and wreck everything. The LGB only asked for equality, nothing more.” The protocols of accepting trans athletes as women and radical surgery to assume a different gender have startled longterm members of the Pride movement.

Suddenly, they have become victims of their own victim mentality. Pride parades are cancelled or downplayed to avoid conflicts in the movement.  “FredSargeant  Considering how hard the queer activists have been coming at gays and lesbians to convert into Ts, anyone could have seen this coming.  It turns out that it wasn’t the straights who were coming for us after all.” Yeah. Not happy.

Tennis legend Martina Navratilova is likewise pissed that men are being allowed to beat biological women in sports competitions or having surgery to transform their bodies into women.  And ordinary women don’t want passengers on their float. “Making a mockery of women who really suffer with so many different things, just pisses me off. Be who you want to be. But some should NOT pretend they have these problems, when they can’t.”

As we wrote in May of 2024 there are few better examples of the victim polka than J.K. Rowling, the feminist creator of the immensely successful Harry Potter books and movies. “Normally that would be enough notoriety for one lifetime. But Rowling, a committed Labourite,  has endured a second notoriety, that as critic of trans people gaining admission into the lives of women.

“Let’s just say this iteration has not been as pleasant for her as her Harry Potter success. The forces of the gender jumble have crucified her for saying things such as: “Telling women and girls they must accept increased risk to themselves to appease male feelings is the very definition of the patriarchy you claim to stand against. Vulnerable women are paying the price for a fashionable fallacy that has serious, real world consequences.”

So who’s the victim here? At the heart of the conflict is the progressive cult of victimhood that dictates identity in today’s society. Since the early days of feminism and the LGBTQ movement victimization has defined their space. Sample: “Invasive? You know what is invasive? Having men take from us. Threaten our safe spaces. That’s invasive.”

The latest TV instalment of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian feminist tract The Handmaid’s Tale illustrates the evolution of victimhood from access to contraception in the 1960s to today’s safe spaces. With its gothic premise of women in red gowns being herded like cattle by the patriarchy, Handmaid’s Tale has been Victimhood 101 for impressionable young women since its 1985 publication.

In their sense of victimization secular women— who’ve had every opportunity that their grandmothers wanted— now quake in fear at constructs created for them in universities and colleges. Crisis is used to produce a panic response. Psychiatric (bulimia) and physical (Covid) panics have robbed them of their self esteem and self control.

In this they are exploited by elected officials, bureaucrats and the health industry. They are helpless pawns in a crisis mentality created for them the past 50 years. The culture industry, too, exploits their vulnerabilities by blurring the definitions of women into a maze of pronouns and accepted behaviours.

If you believe the polls the put-upon narrative has isolated young unmarried women. During the recent U.S. election polling in the Washington Examiner suggested that married men are 59 percent Republican. Married women are 55 percent Republican. Unmarried men are 52 percent Republican But a whopping 68 percent of unmarried women were backing Kamala.

And they are fragile. New polling from Nate Silver shows that conservatives are up 31 points among those with self-described excellent mental health, and down 26 among those with poor mental health. Meanwhile the party of neuroses and vulnerability reports that 45 percent of liberals self diagnose themselves as having poor mental health.

Women are hardly alone. The DEI movement— which began as a correction against a lack of opportunity for certain groups— has morphed into a steamroller allowing a marriage of militants and guilty liberals to redefine society.

Nowhere is the unlikely marriage of victimhood more bizarre— and dangerous— than the Hamas infatuation. “Terrorists, criminals, psychopaths, and fantasists from every part of the globe have grafted themselves on to the Palestinian cause, because the most basic laws of nature have been revised to accommodate it,” wrote Lee Smith in Tablet. “The Palestinian cause gives hope to each of these groups—hope that their own nihilistic and murderous ambitions could win world favour as well. And they have.”

Former actor Russell Brand, who’s currently undergoing the J.K. Rowling treatment for adopting God over godlessness, points out the true nature of this vulnerability craze: “… The crisis is always used to legitimize certain solutions, and a docile or terrified public is willing to participate in this. Proposed solutions that usually involve giving up their freedom. We are continually being invited to give up our freedom in exchange for safety or convenience. And it seems that this process is radically escalating.”

Until we run out of victims expect to surrender your freedom.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, Bruce is regular media contributor. The new book from there team of Evan & Bruce Dowbiggin is Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL & Changed Hockey. From Espo to Boston in 1967 to Gretz in L.A. in 1988 to Patrick Roy leaving Montreal in 1995, the stories behind the story. In paperback and Kindle on #Amazon. Destined to be a hockey best seller. https://www.amazon.ca/Deal-Trades-Stunned-Changed-Hockey-ebook/dp/B0D236NB35/