The Outrage over Men in Women’s Sports Is Justified

By Madeleine Kearns

Friday, June 14, 2024

 

The Washington Post has a piece by Jerry Brewer titled “The Panic Over Trans Sports Inclusion.”

 

Here’s an excerpt discussing Sadie Schreiner, a male track runner who finished first in three women’s events at the Liberty League championship meet (Division III) last month:

 

Over the past few years, there has been no better way to fuel division in sports than to target the few Sadies and characterize them as nefarious gender interlopers. Schreiner prepared for it as best she could. For months, she had feared two outcomes. She would either run slow, which she could not bear, or she would become the unbearably fast impostor. She knew she was about to live a dilemma, no middle ground. She became herself, and at the same time, she rediscovered herself. Now Schreiner, a sophomore at Rochester Institute of Technology in Upstate New York, is forced to defend herself.

 

For an illustration of why pronouns matter in these debates, consider the paragraph reworded to reflect sex (which is the issue here) instead of “gender identity”:

 

Over the past few years, there has been no better way to fuel division in sports than to target the few Sadies and characterize them as nefarious gender interlopers. Schreiner prepared for it as best he could. For months, he had feared two outcomes. He would either run slow, which he could not bear, or he would become the unbearably fast impostor. He knew he was about to live a dilemma, no middle ground. He became himself, and at the same time, he rediscovered himself. Now Schreiner, a sophomore at Rochester Institute of Technology in Upstate New York, is forced to defend himself.

 

Yes, when you, a male, are permitted to compete in an ostensibly all-female competition, then you will find yourself on the defensive. . . . Is that surprising?

 

The “dilemma” the male athlete faces is to run to the best of his ability, thus drawing attention to his sex-based advantages. Or else to deliberately run slower than the best of his ability, thus diverting attention from his sex-based advantages but in an unrewarding way.

 

Brewer suggests the athlete is in an impossible situation when really, the solution is obvious: The athlete should compete against his sex or else in a mixed-sex team.

 

Brewer argues that “the level of indignation is disproportionate to the minuscule number of known trans athletes at all levels of sport.”

 

What he doesn’t appreciate is that it takes the inclusion of only one male athlete to displace and deprive multiple females of hard-earned titles and opportunities. (If a male athlete is awarded first place, then the female second-place title holder is deprived of first place; the female third-place title holder of second place, and so on until people who should have qualified fail to do so because of the male athlete’s participation.)

 

As I explained in 2019 for the Wall Street Journal when writing about the two male high school athletes allowed to participate in state competitions: “Since Connecticut’s athletic conference enacted its liberal gender-identity policy, two men have won 15 women’s state championships—titles that were held by 10 different Connecticut girls the previous year.”

 

All of this is to say nothing of the wider, demoralizing effect that forcing females to compete against males has on young women.