We Allow Tall Women in Women's Basketball, Why Not Tall Men?
Genderwang in sports: Part I
“Women’s basketball has such an array of body types,” she said. “You consistently have a six-foot-five post playing against a five-foot-five point guard. It is not at all something that is unusual in basketball, so suddenly discriminating through that lens would make us hypocritical.” [An Australian newspaper on suddenly including male athletes in female sports]
No one is seeking to exclude tall women from basketball. People with at least half a gram of sense and compassion would like men to continue to be excluded from women’s basketball irrespective of gender-related feelings or undertakings. These men can compete in the men’s category—fairly and safely. The criteria for women’s sports is being—wait for it—an adult female human.
Ah, women. Such an array of female body types—all different, nothing in common. Except, you know, sex which dictates speed, strength, stamina, and endurance by shaping your physiology to produce one of two gametes and thus bear or father the next generation of human beings. But that’s the old science, haven’t you heard of the new science?
Even in basketball, 6’5” women are rare. (Oddly enough, the majority of the men’s players are over 6’5”, if only The Science™ could figure out why.) No one on the women’s national basketball team (playing in the 2022 FIBA) was shorter than 5’10”. Where, apart from in the author’s fevered imagination, are 5’5 women routinely versing 6’5” women? Perhaps local teams—the subject of the article—are on the shorter side, but then they’d also have fewer extraordinarily tall women than the Big Leagues, would they not?
If height’s just a number, why not allow grown men to play in children’s basketball? After all, there are children who are taller than adults. Children have an “array” of body types, characterised by absolutely nothing activists are sure to argue. (After all, if a man can be a woman, why can’t he be a little girl? Attracted to other little girls, naturally.)
It’s not possible to assemble a team of female basketball players who are stronger, faster, or taller than a team of the strongest, fastest, and tallest men. That’s the goal when assembling a competitive sports teams. Last I checked, men’s teams aren’t composed of the shallow end of the gene pool/bell curve.
Speaking of that bell curve, I want to 3D print it and then beat the “some women are taller than some men” brigade over their heads with it. Intragroup variation doesn’t negate intergroup variation; belabouring the point that not all women are the exact same height is awfully disingenuous when height is one of the many physiological differences between the visibly dimorphic sexes. (“The party asked you to reject the evidence before your own eyes and ears”.)
Two groups can have very little overlap with each other—such as profound, unbridgeable differences in sporting performance—despite being composed of non-identical individuals. You never hear “There’s intragroup variation!” as a refutation of an intervention working, do you?
Gender pushers are quite selective about dispensing with sanity.
If men and women are all the same, why have a separate category for women? Wait, I’ve heard the “answer” to this one: gendered norms. Purely arbitrary behavioural expectations that have nothing to do with fairness, safety, privacy, dignity, and the spirit of true inclusivity in public life—supposedly.
It’s as not if men are taller, faster, stronger, and have greater stamina, while women have better (ultra)endurance, meaning that male and female athletes are distinctly unalike.
It’s not as if spaces where girls and women are in a state of undress or vulnerability make them easy pickings for overwhelmingly-likely-to-be-male sexual predators. No, sex-segregated bathrooms and the like are merely gender-validation clubhouses, and their members merely human support animals and validation props for men who’d find themselves quite unhappy to be in the company of only other such men.
All of these provisions are as meaningless as slapping a pink bow on the tragically glabrous dome of a female infant—supposedly.
While there are certain social expectations, roles, and modes of dress that differ between the sexes, sex and gender are not separable concepts. If women are expected to wear dresses, then by wearing a dress a man does not become a woman as this was a personal choice and in no way dictated by society. If you’re a man you can be feminine, but you can’t be female.
There are people daft enough to argue “gender” in data collection has always referred to gender identity. Man and woman, male and female are—and have always been—labels for feelings, now complete with a “non-binary” category.
Woke folks’—should that be folx?—constant rejection of labels that accurately describe them reminds me of a Youtuber’s attempt to explain away her new boyfriend and sexual attraction to said boyfriend. She began with “an asexual person is defined as someone who experiences no sexual attraction” and ended with the absurd “…or who does not experience sexual attraction frequently enough to be comfortable with any other label”. Isn’t that why the label “demisexual” was invented, so that people could keep their pretensions to sexual specialness?
I love how words no longer have definitions that preclude their exact conceptual opposite. A serial killer is someone who has killed three or more people… unless they aren’t comfortable with the label which accurately and unambiguously describes them. Chicken is considered safe to eat after being cooked at 74°C (165°F) unless the cook is uncomfortable with reality. The defendant is “guilty” unless he or she is more comfortable with the label “not guilty”. That’s well and truly chaos.
I digress.
I was telling you about the particularly foolish. I once had a woman tell me “M” and “F” on paperwork have always referred to gender identity and not sex otherwise they’d ask for “chromosomal composition”. Chromosomes have nothing to do with whether you’re male or female—who knew? All this time, medical forms were asking me what collection of stereotypes I most fancied. I thought “M” and “F” referred to biology; to the bodily reality that enables us to distinguish between males and females and apply gendered expectations. More fool me. (“Eurasia has always been at war with Eastasia”.)
Is she to blame, this woman who knows not her chromosomal composition so has no way, by her own admission, of knowing whether she is “trans” or “cis”? A cursory Google search nets you tripe like: “But there are girls and women who have XY chromosomes. This can happen, for example, when a girl has androgen insensitivity syndrome.” Interestingly enough, when I do some further reading, I discover that in androgen insensitivity syndrome, “a penis does not form or is underdeveloped”. Truly, a tragic fate for a “girl”.
(I’m rather tired of pretending males are females if there’s something wrong with them. It’s the 21st Century, surely we’ve transcended viewing women as misshapen men?)
This is the sort of shameful nonsense that floods the internet—often courtesy of cowardly, grasping, or religiously zealous medical associations—enabling trans-activists to use people with medical conditions to legitimise their claims of being the opposite/neither sex based on some amorphous feelings swirling around in their otherwise empty skulls.
Fomenting confusion around sex in order to replace it with self-selected sex (gender identity) is the opening gambit in the game of pigeon chess that trans-activists are playing.
If you have more than two brain cells to rub together, you can see through the inconsistencies. If you rote-learn truths and lies in the same cognitively unengaged and uncritical manner, you’ll soon “learn” the manifold ways fantasists are the opposite or neither sex based on their deeply-held delusions.
The world has quite enough over-educated idiots who swallow any codswallop as long as it’s branded “complex”. (“Isn’t the Emperor in the nude?” “No, it’s much more nuanced than that, now agree with me or I’ll jeer at you instead of the naked man strutting about like the proverbial pigeon on the chess board I referenced earlier.)
Speaking of unfathomable stupidity, I recently read a tweet where the definition of sex was “refuted” with “that’s not sex, that’s the mechanism of reproduction”. I think, with 100% certainty, that the two sexes had sex with each other to create that particular fu—I mean—“mechanism-of-reproduction” idiot.
Back to sports.
Some proponents of gender identity twaddle say we ought to allow men to participate in women’s sports on a case-by-case basis. God forbid if we don’t do everything in our power to give men whatever their hearts desire. I say “men” because gender-special female athletes wish to remain in the female category. (Sex denial is something to drop like a nuclear potato whenever Cluster B personality types deem it disadvantageous.)
Perhaps a particular man is feeling poorly after taking wrong-sex hormones*? Or eating a large quesadilla? Or injecting meth? When I asked Wokeatron—i.e. ChatGPT—to explain “why a man weakened by the choice to take wrong-sex hormones has the right to compete in women's sports but a man who chooses to eat junk food all day or inject meth doesn't” it was stumped. (And it’s usually so good at regurgitating nonsense.)
To some men and handmaidens, it’s unthinkable that a man with (self-inflicted) health problems should lose in the appropriate sex category. No, he should win in the opposite-sex category—or at least get, like, bronze. This reminds me of this oh-so-equanimous (apathetic) response to a question I asked substituting transgenderism with transableism:
‘Should a swimmer with both arms be allowed to compete in amputee swimming?’
‘If he ties his arm behind his back, he should’.
Right, because that’s totally the level of handicapping we see from narcissistic, entitled, reality-deniers. Such an athlete would loosely tie his/her arm and still be able to use it as normal. But do you see the real issue? An amputee swimmer only has that one category, why flood it with imposters? Why should a person included in two categories—the category they reject and the category whose criteria they don’t meet—muscle someone out of their only category?
Supposedly, we should waste our time determining if every man who wants to play women’s sports is out-of-shape enough. As long as that lack of athletic prowess is coupled with delusions of being the opposite sex.
Moreover, no man would ever under-perform in the short term for a place, scholarship, or prize money in the long term, or for the thrill of being validated as “female”. I mean, how does one even run slower or swim slower by barely kicking one’s legs? How does one flub lifting a weight before coyly head-tilting for the cameras? As impossible as a male sex offender lying when he says “I feel like I’m a woman” shortly before being transferred to the female estate.
Proving a man has slightly—symbolically—lowered the levels of testosterone in his post-puberty body is not proof of losing a sex-based advantage. No study on wrong-sex hormone use in men has found this to be true—except a “study” of a handful of amateur male athletes including the trans-identified author, excluding one man who had improved his time, controlling neither for age nor the length of time on wrong-sex hormones, and featuring self-reported running times by men insane enough to also report being women.
We are constantly reassured our decision-makers include medical professionals but their identity hardly matters, only the process does. What does it matter if a group of medical professionals or a group of shamans or skateboarders decide men can be women if there’s no evidentiary basis to support such a decision? If medical professionals ignore biology, what business do they have calling themselves medical professionals?
Believe me, they don’t have access to studies that you don’t also have access to if you were to simply type “sports performance cross-sex hormones” into Google Scholar. (The linked paper tempers its men-continue-to-have-an-advantage finding with the statement that sporting performance depends on how nature endows individual athletes—funny how that individual endowment is sex-based, isn’t it?)
There’s no secret, inscrutable The Science™ that shows men can be transformed into women. Nor even evidence the advantages of male puberty can be sufficiently ameliorated—a claim that is a) not true and b) not relevant as immutable sex is the criterion. You need to be a woman to play in women’s sports—it’s in the name. (Though this does help explain the Theranos fraud—wishful thinking.)
Here’s the typical disingenuous argument:
Everyone is male or female, except intersex people. [Misnomer aside, all such people are either genetically male or female with sex-specific sexual development conditions underscoring the binary nature of sex.]
If we pretend that a genetic male with androgen insensitivity syndrome is a woman, we can pretend that women and men have overlapping testosterone levels. Further, we can state that women vary in testosterone levels, implying that everyone is a special snowflake and there’s no systematic difference between the sexes. We can further mislead by taking attention away from the musculoskeletal structure, heart size, and lung capacity by focusing on testosterone in men and its largely symbolic lowering. [Testosterone levels are a chasm apart: 15 and 70 ng/dL in blood serum in women versus 300 and 1,000 ng/dL in men.]
If we examine the research and find that wrong-sex hormone use weakens men, even minutely, we are supposed to ignore the profound male-female difference that persists. [This is what I call “NT;NR”. Not true; not relevant. Do wrong-sex hormones ameliorate male puberty? No. Obviously. But it doesn’t matter. If a man chooses to weaken himself, he’s still a man with his very own sports category. I suppose you could argue for inclusion in the Special Olympics. Polemically meant, of course.]
What kind of idiot do you have to be to fall for this morass of muddled thinking? This ratking of absolute stupidity? Is it the “biology is far more complex” line trotted out by trans-activists that causes people to pretend to agree in desperation to prove one’s intelligence and ability to grapple with complexity? Because all they end up proving is how much of a rube they are.
According to the newspaper article I quoted above—which doesn’t deserve your attention or ad revenue—the female team members are supposedly fine with their team cheating. Presumably, up until they’re watching a bunch of bewigged blokes from the sidelines and cursing their shortsightedness and/or lack of moral fibre. (Why wigs when men can grow their hair long? Well, what good is a costume if you can’t shirk it off the second it snags or chafes?)
These women feel comfortable playing alongside a transgender person—round of applause, maybe an inclusivity award—so if their opposition complains that it’s unfair and injurious, it just does to show that some women are simply bigoted. Naturally, such women are in dire need of disciplinary action or an outright sports ban—the kind never suffered by trans-identified men even if they’re barred, just like everyone else, from the opposite-sex category but include in the appropriate sex category.
It’s funny how when you’re not the one competing, you tend to care less about the fairness of the competition. The same goes for when you have an unfair advantage over the competition. But again, this is fiction. I doubt all of the female players derive such heady satisfaction from virtue signalling that they’re okay with exhibitionism and voyeurism—magically not sex crimes when committed by men with special feelings—while they’re showering and getting changed. (And as for other sex crimes, well, the burden of proof is now that much higher—he said, she said I was filming her in the women’s bathroom.)
Do the Woke believe any of this nonsense? Then I should literally be able to observe their brains dribbling out their ears, but I can’t. What gives? Do they truly believe men are a type of woman even though “female” is a biological category excluding all male individuals by definition?
Imagine thinking it wise to reduce half of humanity to an opt-in male identity, a collection of male feelings and stereotypes held about the opposite sex, and a fetish costume. What are women supposed to do? Stop calling themselves women unless they identify with stereotypes, many of which are man-made and porn-inspired?
Does the modern-day “progressive” believe gendered souls play sports rather than sexed bodies? Do they believe that The Science™ they’re always invoking has created some magical procedure that can reverse the musculoskeletal structure, larger heart, and great lung capacity conferred by male puberty? Do they think men can physically become women?
(All my questions are a plea for sanity to resume.)
They don’t think—that’s the crux of it. Any deviation from “transwomen are women” causes them to feel like they’re bad people. It’s a mental exclusion zone where their minds are indeed aptly described by the nuclear waste warning “this is not a place of honour” as they radiate stupidity.
It’s as though it’s an instantaneous trigger for lashing out against those they presume are ever-so-mean to the funny men in dresses who are only trying to live their most authentic lives by wearing clothes that don’t fit and pitching their voices artificially higher.
And if someone is a bad person, then, you have carte blanche to pleasurably bully them all you want, right?
Aside from the obvious profiteers (autogynephiles, sex offenders, the medical establishment, and pandering politicians), I can never tell if a peddler of gender twaddle was dropped on their head multiple times as a child, pig-ignorant, or a mealymouthed, spineless coward. Surely, pretending to be a good person in front of other vacuous, self-absorbed pretenders can’t be that satisfying—they’re too absorbed with their own goodness to fully appreciate yours. A real circle-jerk of jerks.
Everyone must speak out against cheating in sports. Expecting women to self-exclude from women’s sports is just hastening their exclusion. It’s not a solution. Men who cheat in women’s sports will be delighted by no-show victories much as they are with hollow victories peppered with insincere affirmations of their “womanness”. The destruction of women’s sports is no skin off these men’s backs; they can simply play in the men’s category or find another avenue of validation—the women’s dressing rooms or a lesbian-only dating app, for instance.
And now, instead of a conclusion, I will perform a magic trick. I will transform into a man, although I was simultaneously one all along. I will (socially) transition. Ready…. I’m a man. Okay, now I’m going to transition to a woman. I’m a woman. Ta-da! Now, had I legally—and almost as quickly changed my sex—I’d have to wait an entire year to change back here in the self-id state of Victoria.
Wait, one more laugh:
“Kilsyth Cobras boss Will van Poppel said he had not received any messages of concern from the club’s 10,000 members–including parents and players–in the near 24 hours since the news broke.”
A “near” 24 hours! And that no-negative-feedback-whatsoever necessitated a newspaper article calling for “patience” and “understanding”. (Another article called for “calm”—surprised they didn’t write “ an end to hysteria”.) Everyone supports it so please don’t say you don’t or we’ll look like liars. Well, everyone at the club supports it—and that’s all that matters. I don’t doubt that complaining would get you thrown out of the club—quite the Catch-22.
One more, one more:
“Victorian Sport Minister Steve Dimopoulos says sport should be “safe, welcoming and inclusive for all Victorians”
Except for women in their dedicated sports category—the only category in which they can safely and fairly compete.
I swear, one last one:
The Geelong Supercats were contacted on Tuesday, but declined to comment.
What can the Supercats say? “We look forward to versing the cheating Cobras, but could we possibly postpone until we fix the lack of bodily diversity on our team? We have too many female women on the team.”
Footnotes
*Sadly, I’ve come to realise people don’t believe that wrong-sex hormones adversely affect men’s health, weakening them. (The jump to “and therefore they ought to play in women’s sports” still doesn’t make sense.) Rather, they literally think a man has transformed himself into a woman. And, simultaneously, was one all along; your body does not determine if you are a woman, nevertheless, taxpayer dollars must be wasted making you look more like a woman.
It’s impossible to argue with someone whose “arguments” are so harebrained. If the totality of an opinion is a memorised slogan, there’s no underlying logic to contest, just the ever-shifting sands of stupidity.
Buy me a coffee if you’d like to support Knowledge is Power, France is Bacon. Finally finished my first Blender tutorial—look at that delicious doughnut rotate against a backdrop of equally delicious sprinkles.
Here in Victoria, trans-activists protested women’s right to free speech at the Let Women Speak rally where women’s voices were also drowned out by the fakest looking male “Nazis” decked out in matching black short-shorts (with almost nary a leg hair or tattoo to be seen).
A female MP was almost booted out of her party, but in the end—after crying and abasing herself for the gratification of misogynists as funded by the makers of puberty blockers—was only suspended with loss of pay. It’s not what she said, it’s how she said it and who she associated with (people who have referred to the existence of Nazis and are therefore Nazis, and here you thought “guilt by association” was a logical fallacy).
The Woke don’t mind if you “sin” as long as you make a meal of debasing yourself, grovelling for forgiveness, and claiming to be foolish and misguided enough to think male sex offenders in women’s prisons aren’t a good idea. In fact, those prigs prefer it.
For sure, there would have been a way for this woman—any woman—to speak publicly regarding the impact of pretending men are women without being penalised. That way is different to whichever way you tried with the reassurance that “Oh no, it’s not the beliefs that are the issue, it’s whatever nonsense we’ll accuse you of in order to prevent you from sharing your beliefs that’s the real issue”.
You said it publicly, you said it above a whisper, you used accurate language (case in point, a scientist who correctly called “transwomen” male is not allowed to conduct research into their sporting performance; only cultists need apply). It was the tone, the time, the place—who do they think they’re fooling?
When will this nonsense end? Isn’t it time for new nonsense? I say it’s high time aliens arrived and our politicians and various establishments extolled the virtues of chest-bursting birth—then we can all be “birthing people”.
Genderewang in sports: Part II to follow, where the mystery of “no messages of concern” regarding men in women’s sports is revealed.