Commentary
Our passions are often raised by questions of slight numerical importance. Even people who would not claim to be intellectual—who indeed would angrily reject any such designation, or accusation, as they would quite likely see it—will sometimes get sucked into furious abstract arguments.
One of these is over the question of whether man-to-woman transgender athletes should compete in women’s sports as if they were women simpliciter—that is to say, were just women like any other. Clearly, the answer anyone gives to this question depends on the answer he or she gives to the subsidiary question of whether certain medical procedures or treatments can really change a man into a woman, or merely change him in certain ways, without altering his fundamental sex.
I know what answer I would give to that question, though perhaps one day it will be possible people’s chromosomes eradicate completely the effects of their biological pasts, etc. If this were ever to become possible, we can be certain that it will be put into effect, because humans are not prepared to put limits on the exercise of their own ingenuity. What we can do, we will do.
In numerical terms, the question is a small one. For example, according to an article in the Washington Post, a survey in the state of Mississippi in 2023 found that there were no transgender students participating in sports there. But symbolically or ideologically, even philosophically, it is very large question.
The recent ruling by the Supreme Court, permitting but not mandating states to forbid the participation of men-to-women athletes from competing in women’s sports is surely consistent with the Constitution. In a way, the response of the governor of Wisconsin, Timothy Walz, was an endorsement of the Court’s ruling.
He said: “The Supreme Court has allowed states to be as cruel as they want to be to transgender people. They’ve also allowed states like Minnesota to be as kind and welcoming as they can.”
These statements are worthy of more analysis than I can give them here. For example, the idea that you are being cruel to an entire group of people because you restrict the activity of a tiny proportion of them is at least disputable. And to me it is alarming that it seems not even to have crossed the mind of an important public figure that perhaps, where cruelty is concerned, the boot is on the other foot: that it might be cruel to women to force them to consort intimately with men who claim to be women.
There is surely a very simple solution to the problem: let men-to-women transgender athletes compete in a category of their own.
But there is another significant aspect to the controversy that is scarcely, if ever, mentioned—a dog that did not bark in the nighttime, as it were: for while there is an immense controversy over the question of whether men-to-women transgender athletes should be allowed to compete in women’s sport, there is none whatsoever over whether women-to-men transgender athletes should be allowed to compete in men’s sports.
The reasons for this absence of equivalent controversy are obvious: no such transgender athletes, if they existed, would wish to compete with biological—I would add, real—men. If success in competitive sport were really of vital importance to a woman, the last thing she would do would be to try to change her sex, whatever her feelings about her “gender identity.” Thus, there is thus no question of permissibility here to be answered.
But the disparity between the existence of a controversy on the one hand, and a complete absence of controversy on the other, is very revealing, and philosophically important. The fact is that no case will ever come before the Supreme Court, or any other court, demanding that states should be allowed to prohibit women-to-men athletes from competing in men’s sports, except perhaps prohibition on the grounds of health and safety, protection of the vulnerable, and prevention of genuine and obvious cruelty such as that involved in bear-baiting.
No one in his right mind would expect a woman-to-man transgender person to compete in men’s sport, for the most obvious of reasons: no one would believe, or does believe, that such an athlete is a man simpliciter—that is to say, a man just like any other.
Yet the supposed complete equivalence of a man-to-woman transgender athlete with a woman athlete is the grounds upon which some believe that such an athlete ought to be allowed to compete in women’s sport.
I suppose sophists might argue that the transition from man to woman is complete, such that the man who makes it is a woman, whereas the transition in the other direction is not complete, such that a woman who makes it is not a man; but this argument, were anyone to make it, smacks very strongly of intellectual dishonesty, of a conclusion coming before an argument rather than of an argument coming before a conclusion. Sentence first, verdict afterwards: a common enough failing.
But the asymmetry between men-to-women and women-to-men sports exposes something that is perfectly obvious: that the whole ideology of transgenderism—that a man can become a woman and vice versa—is a lie, or at any rate so obviously false that intelligent people who subscribe to it must indulge in tortuous mental acrobatics to persuade themselves of its truth. Whatever a man or a woman changes into under the influence of hormone treatment and surgical operation, it is not a person of the opposite sex.
This, incidentally, is not a call to cruelty to or the humiliation of individuals, but it is a demand for intellectual clarity or honesty, and a demand that obvious untruths should not be enforced as truths. That is precisely what communist (and not only communist) regimes did: for a population that must subscribe to evident falsehood is one that loses its sense of probity, so that it can no longer protest at whatever is visited upon it in the name of lies.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
