How identity politics drove the world mad

By Roger Scruton
https://unherd.com/2019/09/how-identity-politics-drove-the-world-mad/
September 2019



We thrive on disagreement, but only if we do not also feel threatened by it. In every period of history, therefore, there have been opinions and customs that are dangerous to question, since they provide the firm foundations on which our disagreements rest. Whether religious or political, these established ways of thinking and acting have been protected by law, and embedded in the educational curriculum and the daily customs of the people.

But our situation in Western democracies today is a novel one. There is no shared religion, and the old customs have been torn asunder by a culture of repudiation, which encourages people to shape their lives according to an “identity” of their own. Socialisation no longer means joining or obeying, but “becoming who you are”, regardless of the surrounding norms. This novel situation, which advertises itself as a kind of liberation, has instead produced in my lifetime a totally new kind of censorship and intimidation.

Thirty years ago I naively assumed that, with the collapse of communism, we would no longer see the persecution of dissidents or the imposition of official doctrines, and so I have been as astonished as everyone else by the mass denunciations and targeted character assassinations that enforce prevailing orthodoxies today. They seem as frequent and comprehensive here in Britain as they ever were in the world of totalitarian government.

True, you don’t go to the Gulag for your opinions; nor are there show-trials of “deviationists”, Zionists or the running dogs of capitalism. Nevertheless, you have to be careful what you say, and the punishments for saying, thinking or implying the wrong thing, even if administered by private enterprise and social media rather than by the state, are real, serious and largely impossible to deflect.

The archive of your crimes is stored in cyberspace, and however much you may have confessed to them and sworn to change, they will pursue you for the rest of your life, just as long as someone has an interest in drawing attention to them. And when the mob turns on you, it is with a pitiless intensity that bears no relation to the objective seriousness of your fault. A word out of place, a hasty judgment, a slip of the tongue — whatever the fault might be, it is sufficient, once picked upon, to put you beyond the pale of human sympathy.

As Douglas Murray shows in his impressive and lively survey, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, the emerging world of censorship is a world without forgiveness, in which people are condemned for what they are rather than what they do, and in which the real virtues and vices that govern our conduct are ignored altogether as irrelevant.

The crimes for which we are judged are existential crimes: through speaking in the wrong way you display one of the phobias or isms that show you to be beyond acceptable humanity. You are a homophobe, an Islamophobe, a white supremacist or a racist, and no argument can refute these accusations once they have been made.

You might, in your private life, have worked for the integration and acceptance of your local Muslim community, or for a wider understanding of the roots of Islamic philosophy. This will be irrelevant when it comes to rebutting a charge of Islamophobia, just as your record in promoting minorities in the workplace will do nothing to clear you of the charge of racism, once the crucial words are out.

For your accusers are not interested in your deeds; they are interested in you, and in the crucial fact about you, which is whether or not you are “one of us”. Your faults cannot be overcome by voluntary action, since they adhere to the kind of thing that you are. And you reveal what you are in the words that define you.

These words may be taken out of context, even doctored to mean the opposite of what you said — as happened recently to me in an interview given to the New Statesman — but this will not affect the verdict, since there is no objective trial, no “case for the defence”, no due process. You are accused by the mob, examined by the mob and condemned by the mob, and if you have brought this on yourself, then you have only yourself to blame. For the mob is by nature innocent: it washes its own conscience in a flow of collective indignation, and by joining it you make yourself safe.

Such is the situation that the brave Murray confronts in his latest book, the title of which (taken from a previous anatomy of human folly by Charles Mackay) implies that it is crowd hysteria, rather than ignorance, that is largely to blame. But, as Murray goes on to show, that suggestion is also too simple. With admirable attention to detail he explores the ways in which the spirit of the mob has entered not only the language of public debate but also the sources of information and the institutions of decision making.

Censorship begins in the media themselves, with the silicon valley elite introducing “machine learning fairness” designed to eliminate “hate speech”, and programmed to recognise as “hate” all those expressions of opinion that violate some norm of political correctness. What Orwell so vividly foresaw — the manipulation of language so as to make heresy inexpressible — is now routine practice.

The result, however, is not a culture of gentle conformity, in which “niceness” is the norm. On the contrary, the clamour for recognition involves a constant assault on those who are assumed to be preventing it. These purveyors of “hate” are given no leeway on social media, and the practice of mass denunciation on grounds of race, tribe, class or social milieu is now an accepted weapon in the identity wars.

Murray gives riveting examples of the way in which whiteness has become a moral fault in the eyes of identity warriors on the American campus. It is, for example, now legitimate to condemn people for the colour of their skin, leading some to try to apologise for being white.

Various devices facilitate the emergence of the censorship culture. Three in particular come to the surface in Murray’s carefully constructed argument. First, there is the art of taking offence. Whole sections of the university curriculum are devoted to explaining to students that words, arguments, comparisons, even questions, are “offensive”, regardless of the intention with which they are used.

Invariably, the offence is given by the old majority culture, and is taken on behalf of some privileged minority. Current concerns about Islamophobia are relevant here: it is offensive, for example, to make jokes about the burqa, but not offensive to appear in public with your face entirely covered, even though the face-to-face encounter is at the root of our shared way of life, as important in showing respect as taking off your shoes when entering a mosque.

More important, from the intellectual point of view, is the attempt to rewrite hardware as software. As Murray shows, identity politics, which insists that everything relevant to our sense of self lies within our power, so that nothing can be imposed on us without our consent, is at odds with the facts of biology. To get round this problem, sex has been re-written as gender, and gender defined as a social construct. In this way, hardware becomes software, and fate becomes choice.

And the result is the “trans” lobby, determined to make all those areas where one sex was hitherto privileged (for example, female sports or female bathrooms) available to whoever wishes to appropriate that sex as his own. The hardware/software confusion has now penetrated the culture, and Murray shows the devastating effect that it has had on our understanding of human difference.

Finally there is the new scourge of “intersectionality”, which encourages people to explore all the ways in which they have lost out in the pursuit of advantage, and to construct their identity accordingly. A kind of reverse hierarchy of privilege emerges, as you come to see that you are disadvantaged as gay man, and then as a black man, and then as a Muslim man, and so on. The result of this scramble for “virtuous disadvantages” occupies Murray over many partly amusing, partly distressing pages.

As he abundantly shows, the attempt to derive a positive philosophy from this assemblage of negatives leads to absurdity and contradiction at every turn. The problem, however, is that contradiction is not regarded by the mob as an obstacle, but merely as further proof of the great conspiracy by which we are surrounded — the conspiracy enshrined in the old majority culture, which told us that we must accept human nature, find our fulfilment within its bounds, and not engage in a futile metaphysical rebellion.

Murray’s comprehensive survey of the prevailing madness will not persuade every reader. But it raises the real questions of our times, which are these: can we reject the idea of a benevolent God and still hold on to our inherited morality, founded on respect for the other and the absolute authority of truth? Can we adopt the posture of forgiveness that Murray is so keen to advocate, without turning to the supreme example that was once given to us?

Can we re-learn the habits of polite disagreement, and address each other as rational beings, capable of forming real communities in which differences are respected and decencies honoured? I want to answer yes to those questions. But as someone who has suffered more than most from the prevailing madness I have my doubts.

My own solution — which is to ignore social media and to address, in my writings, only the interest in the true and the false, rather than in the permitted and the offensive — confines me within a circle that is considerably narrower than the Twittersphere. But here and there in this circle, there are people who do not merely see the point of truthful discourse, but who are also eager to engage with it. And I cling to the view that that is enough, as it was for the Irish monks who kept the lamp of learning alight during the Dark Ages. They may have thought they were losing, but they won in the end.

Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity is published by Bloomsbury Continuum

Woke Doctors

By Rod Dreher
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/woke-doctors/
September 16, 2019

You might remember the post here about “Moralistic Therapeutic Med School,” in which medical schools are starting to remove or relocate images of white men affiliated with the school who accomplished great things. This is about something related, but much more serious.

A reader who is a physician sent me this WSJ op-ed column the other day. He said that this is bad news for the medical profession. The author is Stanley Goldfarb, a former administrator at Penn’s medical school. Excerpts:

A new wave of educational specialists is increasingly influencing medical education. They emphasize “social justice” that relates to health care only tangentially. This approach is the result of a progressive mind-set that abhors hierarchy of any kind and the social elitism associated with the medical profession in particular.

These educators focus on eliminating health disparities and ensuring that the next generation of physicians is well-equipped to deal with cultural diversity, which are worthwhile goals. But teaching these issues is coming at the expense of rigorous training in medical science. The prospect of this “new,” politicized medical education should worry all Americans.

More:

The zeitgeist of sociology and social work have become the driving force in medical education. The goal of today’s educators is to produce legions of primary care physicians who engage in what is termed “population health.”

This fits perfectly with the current administrator-rich, policy-heavy, form-over-function approach at every level of American education. Theories of learning with virtually no experimental basis for their impact on society and professions now prevail. Students are taught in the tradition of educational theorist Étienne Wenger, who emphasized “communal learning” rather than individual mastery of crucial information.

Where will all this lead? Medical school bureaucracies have become bloated, as they have in every other sphere of education. Curricula will increasingly focus on climate change, social inequities, gun violence, bias and other progressive causes only tangentially related to treating illness. And so will many of your doctors in coming years.

Read the whole thing. At some point, reality will take its revenge, and the woke will be banished. But how much suffering will innocent people have to endure before it does? And how many people of faith will be deterred from seeking a medical career because the militant left has placed absurd barriers to keep out the politically incorrect.

This morning, on the drive to the airport (I’m on my way to New York City now), I heard a radio piece talking about the need for transgender health care, and how medical educators in Oregon are meeting it. There’s not yet a transcript available for the broadcast, but I can tell you that it begins with the reporter framing transgender surgery in a politically correct way — something like, “the patient had surgery to realign her body with her gender identity.” This, by the way, is an example of how the media re-engineers society by changing language. Later in the piece, a doctor says that in years past, people with gender dysphoria would typically have been referred for mental health treatment. Today, though, they get surgical intervention.

This is massively important! What if psychiatric treatment, or some adjacent treatment, is what is better for them than gender reassignment? What if that is what would restore them to health?

Here’s a little personal story that came to mind as I was listening to this piece.

The transgender person in the story says that he (a biological male presenting as female) always felt uncomfortable in his body. No doubt this is true. I think this accounts for the disproportionate number of autistic people among gender dysphorics. Autism is often accompanied by something called “sensory processing disorder.” Nobody knows why this is, but it is common.

As I learned about autism and sensory processing disorder in my own family, a number of things about myself became clear. I am confident that I would not meet the threshold for a formal autism spectrum diagnosis, but I am equally confident that I have many of the traits of people who are (and that includes a member of my family). In fact, the sensory stuff is fairly widespread in my family.

As a child, I had very strong legs. My father recalls me doing 400 deep knee bends when I was nine years old; he stopped me because he thought I would hurt myself. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not strengthen my upper body. I had poor muscle tone, and nothing could fix that. Decades later, I learned that this is something that people on the spectrum sometimes have.

I have never felt comfortable in my body, though I thought for most of my life this was simply neurosis. No, I have never had the faintest thought of gender dysphoria, but it manifested itself in something feeling … not right. Something hard to define. To be frank, one reason I drank so much in college — aside from the fact that LSU in the 1980s had a massive binge-drinking culture — was to overcome that sense of not-rightness, so I could talk to girls. The point is, when I read about officially-diagnosed autistic young people seeking sex changes because they say they don’t feel right in their bodies, I get that. I can’t pretend to know about that from a sexualized point of view, but that sense that things aren’t right is quite familiar to me. And it never goes away. You just have to learn how to cope with it. For me, it got better as I grew older.

I can remember in my childhood, how my mom had a big heart (still does), but was not particular physically affectionate. I couldn’t understand that at all, especially when our father was physically demonstrative. Once I started learning about autism and sensory processing a decade or so ago, and began to understand things about myself, and why I could be so prickly about ordinary bodily things, I understood her in a new way. This was almost certainly not an emotional disposition for her, but a neurological-sensory disorder. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but my mom and I are so much alike in so many ways that I think this is what was going on. It’s how it is with me. I can see this trait — sensory processing disorder — manifesting to some degree in most of my mom’s six grandchildren too.

I bring this up only to say that at least some of these young spectrum people who seek gender dysphoria treatment, including radical, irreversible steps (e.g., mastectomies, hormone treatment that arrests sexual maturity) could surely benefit from ordinary therapies to help them cope with their sensory issues. If I had known as a teenager and a young adult that what I was feeling in and about my body was due not to a character or psychological flaw, but probably due to neurobiology, it would have been much easier to manage it, and to learn how to live with it.

I’ve come to see, for example, the fact that I have unusual superpowers when it comes to taste and smell to be an advantage. This is why I love food and wine so much: I can experience aromas and flavors more intensely than most people. And I’ve stopped feeling so bad about my inability to tone my upper body, though I am also sure that I will never feel quite at home in my body (I have always been terrible at dancing and athletics; I can be a graceful writer, but in the flesh, am a shambling galoot). Fortunately for me, this is all relatively minor — discomforting, not tormenting. I wouldn’t judge the subjective experiences of spectrum people suffering from gender dysphoria.

My point here is simply this: for whatever cultural reasons, young people who report a serious disjunction between themselves and their bodies are being encouraged to express  and to affirm that disjunction in sexual ways — and now the medical profession is eager to confirm that concept. Often this results in permanent surgical or hormone-driven alteration to the body. Dr. Goldfarb’s column makes me afraid for those young people and their families, being driven by the popular culture and the culture of medicine into asking for life-changing procedures that will not actually cure them of their sense of alienation from their bodies, because it may not really be about gender.

It’s masculinity to the rescue

By Miranda Devine
https://nypost.com/2019/08/14/its-masculinity-to-the-rescue/
August 14, 2019


Mert Ney is held down by passersby after his stabbing spree in Sydney, Australia

When a knife-wielding killer went on a bloody rampage through the streets of Sydney, Australia,this week, he was stopped in his tracks by a group of courageous men using just a milk crate and a chair.

Brandishing a butcher’s knife and yelling “Allahu Akbar,” 21-year-old Mert Ney already had allegedly murdered one woman and stabbed another in the back when six men armed themselves with weapons, ranging from a café chair to a firefighter’s ax, and chased him down.

With the killer pinned to the ground, one of the men yelled at him in outrage over his violence against women: “You’re a piece of . . . You stabbed a chick, mate.”

In every story of bloodshed and mayhem, it’s the same. Tales of selfless male heroism and chivalry emerge in the face of mortal danger.

These are men who rush toward danger, risking their lives and even dying in the noble cause of protecting women and children.

We saw it in the El Paso and Dayton massacres. There was David Johnson, 63, who pushed his wife and 9-year-old granddaughter to safety under a counter at the El Paso Walmart before he was fatally shot.

There was bar bouncer Jeremy Ganger, who stood his ground at the front door of the Dayton bar Ned Peppers, reportedly pulling people inside as they fled from the shooter who was firing an AR-15 and wearing body armor. Ganger suffered a shrapnel leg wound.

And, of course, there was the extraordinary bravery and competence of the Dayton cops. We saw them in footage released this week, running toward the shooter when the logical response was to race in the opposite direction. Guns drawn, they shot the killer dead in all of 32 seconds.

Or take 21-year-old Riley Howell, who charged at a gunman shooting up his classroom at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, in April and managed to knock him to the ground. Howell was killed but his heroic act saved the lives of up to 30 classmates.

We always are quick to point to the dark side of masculinity when violence is committed, but too often we overlook the feats of bravery by men who combat it.

Call it the chivalry instinct, it is what inspires men to run toward danger to protect the weak.

This is the noble side of masculinity that we once would perpetuate in folklore and stories passed down from father to son about what it means to be a real man.

But in the new era of “toxic masculinity,” young men are taught to ignore their heroic instincts and learn to be weak. They are instructed always to be on guard against the monster within.

Shaving-products company Gillette’s “toxic masculinity” campaign is a case in point. Whereas the razor maker used to celebrate the bond between fathers and sons, its new woke advertising is all about showcasing bad male behavior — such travesties as men standing behind BBQs or little boys roughhousing.

This demonization of intrinsic maleness is part of a feminist movement to rewrite human history as the tale of tyrannical patriarchy. It quickly mutated out of the #MeToo campaign, which began as a reasonable get-square with powerful men who preyed on women but since has taken on a frighteningly punitive air.

Now masculinity itself is the enemy and must be crushed from its earliest manifestations.

Boys and young men are bombarded with messages pathologizing their DNA. If they look at a woman, they’re accused of leering. If they open a door for a woman, they’re sexist. Even the way they sit on the subway has been criminalized as “manspreading.”

The American Psychological Association formalized the new pathology earlier this year by declaring “traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful.”

The male attributes it fingered as most worrisome were: stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, aggression, anti-femininity, achievement, “eschewal of the appearance of weakness,” adventure, risk and violence.

Gimme a break! Without any of that, all you’re left with is a soy boy with whom no self-respecting woman would want to mate.

This is the paradox of human attraction. Evolutionary psychologists have found that women instinctively desire a mate who can protect her and their offspring. “Modern women” look for “ancestral cues of a man’s fighting ability,” in the words of a 2017 study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

This is the very masculinity that is being damned as the toxic seed of the patriarchy. Courage and derring-do is the essence of maleness and is what has allowed western civilization to prosper.

Equality Act could create major problems for women’s sports

By John Steigerwald
https://triblive.com/sports/john-steigerwald-equality-act-could-create-major-problems-for-womens-sports/
July 28, 2019


Andraya Yearwood claimed gold in the 100m and 200m in the 2017 Connecticut state championships

Do you have a daughter, granddaughter or niece who plays a sport in high school or college?

If so, you might want to think about contacting your congressperson and ask about the Equality Act. Especially if that congressperson is a Democrat. That party voted unanimously to pass the Equality Act in May. Only eight Republicans voted for it.

The law would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other civil rights laws to include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected characteristics.

That means public schools would be forced to allow biological males, who identify as females, to play for female sports teams.

That’s dumb enough, but the people who voted for the bill, when asked about its affect on women in sports, dismissed it as an issue.

Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar said, “The myth that trans women have a direct competitive advantage is not supported by science, and it continues to stoke fear and violence at one of the most at-risk communities in the world.”

You would think nobody with a brain or who has ever paid attention to sports would believe that, but here’s Jerry Nadler from New York: “Arguments about transgender athletes participating in sports in accordance with their gender identity having competitive advantages have not been borne out.”

You’ve probably heard about the many cases of biological males breaking women’s records in high school and college track and other sports.

No honest person who knows anything about sports would deny biological males have an advantage.

And you wouldn’t think it would take a scientific study to prove it to any honest person, but a pretty impressive one was just published by The Journal of Medical Ethics.

“Trans women in Elite Sport: Scientific and Ethical Considerations” didn’t just conclude that biological males, who identify as women, have an advantage over females. It says they have an “intolerable” advantage.

Kind of interesting that the Equality Act, which is supposed to be all about tolerance, would create something intolerable for women, isn’t it?

And suppressing the testosterone in the men doesn’t help.

The NCAA and the International Olympic Committee have rules in place to allow biological males to compete against women if they suppress their testosterone levels through hormone therapy over a period of time.

The study says nice try.

“… Hormone therapy will not alter bone structure, lung volume or heart size of the trans woman athlete, especially if she transitions post puberty, so natural advantages including joint articulation, stroke volume and maximal oxygen uptake will be maintained.”

In other words, what has always been a dumb idea has now been declared a dumb idea, and it won’t be made any smarter by enforcing the stupidity with a law.

I’ve tried repeatedly to contact local Democrat Congressmen Conor Lamb and Mike Doyle to get them to justify their support of a law that would force the daughters of their constituents to compete against men. Neither would agree to an interview.

When I asked for a written statement on the issue, there was no response from Lamb. Doyle’s assistant responded by saying Doyle has no statement.

Gutsy, eh?

You know what’s scary?

The study, which was conducted by two bioethics professors and a physiology professor — all women — concluded the solution is to eliminate the concept of men’s and women’s sports instead of excluding biological males who identify as women.

That, of course, would lead to what many, who have acknowledged the insanity of men competing against women from the beginning, have warned against: the ruination, if not the end of women’s sports.

Insane?

So was the idea of men competing against women, not that long ago.

John Steigerwald is a Tribune-Review contributing writer.

Categories: Sports | US-World | John Steigerwald Columns

Forcing Congenital Females to Compete Against 'Trans-Women' Will Destroy Women's Sports and Everyone Knows It

BY MARK RIPPETOE
https://pjmedia.com/trending/forcing-congenital-females-to-compete-against-trans-women-will-destroy-womens-sports-and-everyone-knows-it/
May 13, 2019


Transgender powerlifter Mary Gregory (Instagram)

This topic has gotten a lot of attention recently. My recent podcast dealt with this, but nobody watches my podcast, and I seem to be the only one discussing it to my satisfaction, so I shall do it here. This time, the short version.

First, let's look at some facts. These are not my facts, they are the facts, and that means they are your facts too.

1. Humans are born either congenitally male or congenitally female, with a very small incidence of an intersex condition present at the rate of from 0.05% to 1.7% of live births, depending on who you talk to. The overwhelming majority of the human race is either congenitally male or congenitally female. This discussion does not involve intersex individuals like Castor Semenya, but rather congenital men who "identify" as women and wish to compete in the Women's division.
2. The differences between males and females are caused by the presence of testosterone in the developing fetus, the result of the chromosomal configuration of the fetus, starting at about 8 weeks after conception. In utero testosterone is powerful enough to cause the obvious primary sexual characteristics that differentiate males and females, as well as other very profound physiological and psychological characteristics of the two sexes. Among these differences are neuromuscular efficiency – the ability to quickly recruit muscle into contraction.
3. The Standing Vertical Jump (SVJ) test is a measure of the difference in height of the upraised hand between a standing position and at the top of a single countermovement jump with no foot movement and no step. It is regarded as the best indicator of the inherent capacity for power and explosive capacity. The men's record is 46” while the women's record is 31”. The averages, 22” for men and 14” for women, represent essentially the same ratio as the records. SVJ increases with age, from 10 years until it stabilizes from 21 to 30 and begins to degrade. It is a direct measurement of the ability to recruit muscle into contraction quickly – neuromuscular efficiency – and the differences between women and men have profound implications for both the performances and the training of women and men.
4. Puberty presents a new hormonal milieu to the landscape already primed for it in the womb. Testosterone surges to very high levels, and finishes the job already started in the male. Differences in skeletal proportion and density, pelvic shape, lung capacity, muscle size and strength, and the now-obvious secondary sexual characteristics are overwhelming in their remaking of the organism, from hands to feet, from jawbone to kneecaps. These changes are essentially permanent, and they are significant for physical performance, just like the in utero priming of the system.
5. Since performance (and every other physical characteristic) displays a range, with the averages and the records at the middle and the right-hand tails of the bell curves respectively, men's and women's performances will overlap to an extent. Record women's performances will overlap well into men's average performances, but women's average and record performances will never equal men's average and record performances in competitive athletics.
6. Testosterone administration does not significantly improve neuromuscular efficiency (power), and thus does not significantly improve the SVJ in either men or women. This means that SVJ performance and power is related to the pre-adolescent effects of testosterone on the fetus, and not to exogenous administration of testosterone for purposes of either performance enhancement or sexual transition. However, exogenous testosterone improves strength, as well as muscular endurance, a derivative of strength, and females given testosterone respond with increased strength, as do men.
7.  Globally, men and women have an average height difference ratio of about 1.08: for example, men's average height is 5'9.5” and women's average height is 5'4.5” in the USA. This ratio is pretty constant worldwide, with the closest ratio being 1.04 in a handful of African countries. Nowhere on earth is it 1.00.
8. Body composition of sedentary populations varies with sex, with men carrying an average of 4-6% lower bodyfat than women. For athletic populations, the total body fat is lower for both men and women, but the average differences remain 4-6% between the sexes.
9. Virtually all organized sports on earth that allow both sexes to compete have a Men's and a Women's division. Some sports allow mixed teams to compete, and if they do the teams are composed of both men and women. This is due to the obvious disparity in the performances of men and women. The data here are quite clear, and everyone on earth knows this whether they are prepared to admit it or not.
10. I looked very hard for this data recently, and I only found one instance of a female-to-male (FTM) transsexual athlete who entered the men's division, a boxer competing in a very light weight class. It appears that the vast majority of transsexual athletes who wish to participate in a division other than that of their congenital sex are MTF. I may have missed one – that does not alter the point here.

The point is that the International Olympic Committee and the International Association of Athletic Federations are wrong. Sometimes even large powerful organizations are wrong too – you've heard of that happening, I'm sure. Lowering the testosterone level of a congenital male to 5 nmol/l or any other arbitrary low number for one year does not remove the congenital advantage of having been born male. Neither does “sexual reassignment/affirmation” surgery. These organizations are participating in a lie for political purposes, to the detriment of women who want to compete in a separate Women's division. Proceeding as though congenital men are no different from women if their testosterone has been artificially lowered is merely agreeing upon the lie.

To my knowledge, the only organization that has this situation adequately covered is the US Strengthlifting Federation, with an Open and a Women's division. The Women's division is restricted to congenital females, while the Open division is available to anyone else under any circumstances. No one is excluded from competition, and congenital women compete against each other.

Sports competition has always been about a lack of “fairness,” if by that you mean an equality of outcome. Winners are always outliers, and this is especially true at the elite levels of all sports. Women have their own outliers, and women's competition finds these people – if it is allowed to do so.

Again, I am not concerned with Castor Semenya. I am concerned with our sisters and daughters and wives, and the women I train who just want to compete on the weekend to give their training a concrete purpose, or maybe even a scholarship to go to college. The Women's divisions of competitive sports are a rather recent phenomenon, one that I think has been an extremely positive development for the species as a whole. I'd hate to see it destroyed in the name of “Social Justice,” because justice will not have been served.

Blacklisting Chick-fil-A

Mark Pulliam

https://www.city-journal.org/san-antonio-progressive-crusade-chick-fil-a

March 26, 2019

No one is surprised when cities like San Francisco, New York City, and Seattle enact policies driven by the latest progressive imperatives. In Texas, where I live, observers have long believed that a statewide Republican majority would insulate the Lone Star State from such pressure. Capital city Austin’s traditionally liberal politics—its unofficial slogan is “Keep Austin Weird”—have usually seemed like an exception to the statewide rule. But now it appears that San Antonio, the state’s second-biggest city (and seventh-largest in the U.S.), has gotten “woke,” too, blacklisting a well-respected business because of its owners’ political contributions and religious beliefs.  

San Antonio’s left-leaning city council, backed by mayor Ron Nirenberg, recently banned Chick-fil-A from becoming a concessionaire at the city-operated international airport. City officials reportedly cited Chick-fil-A’s political positions as justification for its boycott of the company: “With this decision, the City Council reaffirmed the work our city has done to become a champion of equality and inclusion,” said councilman Roberto Treviño. “San Antonio is a city full of compassion, and we do not have room in our public facilities for a business with a legacy of anti-LGBTQ behavior.”

The city is targeting a company that is about as mainstream American as it gets. Chick-fil-A is wildly successful because it offers appealing fast food and courteous service at reasonable prices. The privately owned fast-food chain, based in Georgia, operates more than 2,100 restaurants in 46 states and the District of Columbia (including 32 outlets in the San Antonio area, employing more than 2,000 people). Founded in 1946 by a devout Christian, family-owned Chick-fil-A is famously closed on Sundays. Yet despite operating only six days a week, Chick-fil-A leads the fast-food industry in average sales per restaurant. The company has rapidly expanded, becoming the nation’s third-largest fast food chain, behind McDonald’s and Wendy’s.

The charge that Chick-fil-A is “anti-LGBTQ” is based on its owners’ private contributions (made through the WinShape Foundation) and statements in support of traditional marriage. The city does not claim that the company’s employment practices or business policies are illegal; Chick-fil-A’s personnel policies conform to federal employment law, and the company has issued a statement of respect for all people, regardless of sexual orientation, in an internal document called “Chick-fil-A: Who We Are.” Nonetheless, LGBT activists have targeted Chick-fil-A for years. In 2012, when LGBT groups organized a national campaign to boycott the chain for its owners’ opposition to same-sex marriage, a backlash by the company’s devoted customers—led by former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee—resulted in record-breaking sales. The public has demonstrated that it does not object to the owners’ allegedly objectionable positions. Yet the activists persist.

San Antonio’s airport boycott may have been influenced by a recent Think Progress report criticizing the company’s corporate donations to charitable groups described as “anti-LGBTQ,” including the Salvation Army, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and—prior to 2017—a program for at-risk young men called the Paul Anderson Youth Homes. What these organizations have in common is adherence to traditional Christian beliefs. The city’s blacklisting of Chick-fil-A seeks to punish the company for espousing mainstream beliefs shared by millions of Americans and an overwhelming majority of San Antonio’s residents, many of them Catholic. Prior to the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in the Obergefell case, Texas did not recognize same-sex marriage, so opposition to it was hardly extreme or improper—and in any case, maintaining that opposition does not amount to discrimination against LGBT employees or customers.

The San Antonio city council, as a government entity, cannot selectively punish constitutionally protected speech based on its content. Google fired engineer James Damore for expressing opinions deviating from progressive orthodoxy, and Mozilla sacked its CEO, Brendan Eich, in 2014 for having contributed $1,000 years earlier to California’s initiative in support of traditional marriage. But Google and Mozilla are not subject to the First Amendment, as a city government is. Government contracts cannot be withheld or withdrawn based on potential vendors’ political or religious views. A similar case arose in New York City, where officials unsuccessfully tried to cancel contracts with Donald Trump, whose company manages a municipal golf course and other franchises; the city backed down when the constitutional violation was demonstrated.

Like many progressive crusades, San Antonio’s campaign against Chick-fil-A is largely symbolic—but important for precisely that reason. When politics become a weapon in the culture war, the stakes quickly escalate. Winning emboldens bullies to become still more aggressive. A lawsuit by Chick-fil-A is almost certain; San Antonio taxpayers will foot the bill for their city council’s vindictive foolishness.

Mark Pulliam is a contributing editor at the Law and Liberty website and blogs at Misrule of Law. He writes from Austin, Texas.  

Women’s sports may one day soon consist entirely of men

Rod Liddle
https://spectator.us/womens-sports-consist-men/?fbclid=IwAR3ENzh5jYrYGlPNHP2W6YiHXaC07ufQotRh781nrN26BbBDPw-Khoynq7I
February 28, 2019

Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood

Congratulations to Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood for sweeping all before them in the Connecticut girls’ high school track races last week. Yes, of course they are men. There were some anguished complaints from the various girls these two speedy lads defeated, but these were of course brushed aside in a country where women’s sporting events may one day soon consist entirely of men.

Already a Democratic party representative, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, is insisting that the US powerlifting tournaments allow transgender women to compete, so that people who look very much like Geoff Capes, and have the same chromosomes as Geoff Capes, and the same bone structure and musculature, can compete against women. Meanwhile, the fastest female college sprinter in the US is CeCe Telfer, who, once again, is not what you or I or science would call a lady, and one of the world champions in women’s cycling is a chap called Rachel McKinnon, whom I have mentioned here before.

Writing in the Sunday Times of London, Martina Navratilova described it as ‘insane’ and ‘cheating’ that men who have transitioned should be allowed to compete against women, adding that ‘hundreds’ of trans athletes have ‘achieved honors as women which were beyond their capabilities as men’. The former tennis star added that few people were prepared to speak up about this issue because of the furore that would immediately descend upon them from the perpetually enraged trans lobby. Indeed, within a few hours of her article being published she was booted off the advisory board of a gay advocacy group and was being denounced left, right and center in the kind of furiously screeched terms that have become the hallmark of these perhaps not wholly balanced campaigners.

Those who support the rights of transgender women to compete in women’s sports often cite the only piece of research done on the issue which ‘proves’ that it is a myth that transgender women have an advantage over normal women. This study was published in 2015 and is cited every time the issue arises — but I have one or two problems with it, to tell you the truth. First, it concerned a total of just eight athletes, which is a smallish sample (no control group, either). Second, it was not carried out by a qualified geneticist or social scientist, but by a ‘medical physicist’ by the name of Joanna Harper. And third, Joanna Harper, once an athlete herself, was, um, how can I put this, not always called Joanna. She was raised as a boy and transitioned to being a fairly fast lady in her thirties. So she has skin in the game and we might surmise that she, or he, set out to prove a thesis, rather than, in good Popperian practice, trying to disprove it.

But none of these caveats cuts the remotest ice with the lobby groups or indeed the liberal media, who quote from her survey as if it were on a par with the work of Crick and Watson. And meanwhile, blokes keep winning everything. Sometimes they are blokes who have had some becoming breasts appended to them and put on a bit of lippy, sometimes they are blokes who seemingly make no effort at all to disguise the fact that they are blokes.

The question, then, is this: will women’s sports cease to exist before or after we’ve closed down Frankenstein’s castle, i.e. the Tavistock clinic’s gender identity development service? The Tavistock is an extremely well endowed, so to speak, institution in London and every year somewhere in the region of 2,000 children are referred to this service, a substantial number of whom go on to be interfered with chemically or surgically, and transferred from one sex to another.

An internal report on this god-awful place by Dr David Bell suggested that it was ‘not fit for purpose’ and that decisions were taken to transition young people without taking into account social and personal factors, such as whether they had suffered a bereavement or abuse.

I will bet there’s a whole bunch of other factors they don’t take into account as well, such as peer pressure at school, other underlying mental health issues, unhelpful interventions from parents or social workers, and a repulsive propaganda program which surrounds them at all times telling them how wonderful it is to transition.

Anyway, following Bell’s report a senior governor at the hospital, Marcus Evans, has resigned. Evans, who practices the pseudoscience of psychoanalysis, has said that decisions to transition the poor kids are taken ‘too quickly’. He added: ‘There is pressure from the child who is in a distressed state, there is pressure from the family and the peer group and from the pro-trans lobbies — and all of this puts pressure on the clinician who may want to help the individual to resolve their distressed state by going along with a quick solution.’ No kidding. The point being that these are largely adolescent children who are trying to come to terms with their own sexuality: it’s a confusing time.

The trans lobby doesn’t recognize any of this stuff, mind: if a kid, no matter how old he or she might be, wishes to change sex, then it should be allowed to do so. It is remarkable and a little chilling how all of those concerned with the wellbeing of our children — the government, the teachers, the doctors, the counsellors, the social workers, the Tavistock and in many cases even the parents — have bought into the extremist views of a pressure group which, at the very least, we might describe as ‘troubled’. But then, I suppose that they dare not.

My guess is that we will look back on this period of experimentation on our children with horror and deeply regret the day we decided that kids should be allowed to be shunted into whatever ghetto of victimization they so desire, given that our society today seems to value victimhood above all else. In the meantime, shouldn’t the Tavistock’s gender clinic be closed down?

This article was originally published in The Spectator magazine.