Transgender: When Ideology Crushes Common Sense

True Story

A female acquaintance of mine was sharing stories with me about growing up with her younger brother.  She was a few years older than him and always seemed to have gotten the best of him during the fights that were typical of sibling rivalries.  

That changed one summer.  A round of teasing escalated into a more physical confrontation that entailed some shoving, wrestling and a few punches to shoulders being thrown.  Her little brother was approaching puberty and started to physically mature.  Seemingly overnight, he was able to best his older sister in their physical confrontations.  The rivalry never stopped at that point but it was restricted to arguing.  Partly, because of the deterrent effect that strength grants a person in confrontations and also because their parents decided to lay down the law before somebody got seriously hurt.

To this day, my female acquaintance marvels over how hard a guy can hit.  It was a genuine shock to have experienced the physical capabilities of a man so suddenly and viscerally .  He was able to push her to the ground like a rag doll and she was utterly immobilized in his grip.  She couldn't do anything about it.  

I had replied that it's likely that she was only experiencing a fraction of the strength and power her brother was was capable of.  She was skeptical.  I told her that a man fighting a woman is only going to use enough force to fend her off or subdue her depending on the circumstances.  That would be far less force than what he is capable of.  A man beating up on a women is just bad optics, even if she started the fight.  It goes against a man's chivalrous nature--or this used to be the case, at least.

Another True Story

Much like my acquaintance, a female MMA fighter named Taika Brents was soundly defeated in 2014 by Fallon Fox, a male MMA fighter.  However, unlike my acquaintance, Brents sustained a broken skull and a concussion as a result of her match with Fox.  In an interview after the match Brents expresses similar thoughts about the match that my acquaintance had about her brother many years ago.  Brents had this to say:

I've fought a lot of women and have never felt the strength that I felt in a fight as I did that night.[...]  I can only say, I've never felt so overpowered ever in my life and I am an abnormally strong female in my own right.

That's because Brents was fighting a man pretending to be a woman.  It almost killed her!

Naturally, critics came out of the woodwork to question how such a ridiculous match-up was allowed to be booked in the first place.  Fox had this to say:

I don't understand the problem.  I'm constantly told that men and women are equal and that gender is a social construct.  I'm constantly shown "badass women" on TV and in the movies that can beat up men easily.  I'm told a woman can do anything a man can do.  DOVE commercials show that girls can run, punch, and jump just as well as men.  So...why shouldn't men fight vs. women?  

Okay, they're all idiots.  Not just Fox, but Brents and everybody else who should have called this idea ridiculous--patently ridiculous.  Where were the men who knew that this event was needlessly endangering a woman's life?  Yes, women are adults.  But they can be foolish about these matters.  It's true.  They rarely have full comprehension of how dangerous the real world can be. Oh, they have an inkling that some bad stuff can happen.  But men continue to be nature and mankind's primary victims. But what about everybody else who indulged in this nonsense?  Much like how the chivalrous nature of a man will prevent his sister from experiencing his full capability for delivering harm to someone in a fight, someone should have prevented this fight before it even started.

The femme fatale is a popular trope in movies today.  Watching somebody like Atomic Blonde or Black Widow take down a group of guys two or three times their size is entertaining to watch.  But it isn't real.  Black Widow wins because it's in the script and it probably took several takes to get it right.  And those Dove commercials trying to inspire women to do what men do?  That's a corporation trying to sell you a product.

We've seen emergency rooms and battered women shelters full of women that have been on the losing side of a confrontation with men.  We lower physical standards so women can enlist in the armed forces or join police departments.  Why would anyone with a brain think that a woman can hold her own against a man in mixed martial arts?  Do we let flyweights compete with heavy weights, even if they're both men?  No!  You put them in separate leagues.

[flipping pages]  Let's skip forward a few lessons, shall we?

When we say that men and women are equal, it implies to mean equality under the law !  It was never meant to be taken literally.  There was a time when this didn't need to be said.  There was a time when we knew that women were the weaker sex and letting her fight a man, even a weak man, would be inconceivable.

It's only when we lied to ourselves, and believed the lies, that this absurdity took place.

Segregation as a Social Good

What seems to be getting some social justice warriors worked up on these types of issues is the fact that some of our institutions are still segregated by gender.  We used to segregate by race and this was considered bad, right?  So why shouldn't segregation by gender be just as bad?

In addition, Congress is discussing the Equality Act, a bill that intends to prohibit discrimination against people based on sexual orientation or sexual identity.  So it's not just private organizations such as the MMA circuit that are indulging this.  When the government is starting to take this seriously then I know that we've gone off the rails and into some absurd places.

The only explanation I can think of is that people are interpreting the legal concept of gender equality too literally and suggesting that man and woman are interchangeable.  And instead of questioning the premises that led us to such bizarre conclusions, we just went with it as if logic is the only determinant to truth without regard to empirical observation.

When I say that we should question our premises, I don't only mean the concept that the genders are equal in a physical sense (they're not), but whether segregation is as bad as we think it is.

Let's consider why segregation is considered bad in the first place; In the past, entire classes of people were excluded from participating politically or economically in our society based on immutable characteristics that they all shared.  This was eventually considered an anathema because such people had little hope of improving their lot in life and changing their circumstances based on their talents and merits.

This social injustice was fixed by passing a series of equal rights legislation mandating equal opportunities for all people.  Equal opportunities is the term we need to keep in mind.

There's no question that sports are segregated according to sex.  But does such segregation suppress anyone?  Does it marginalize anyone?  Is it violating anybody's rights?  No, not in the slightest.  In fact, the whole reason why sports were segregated by sex in the first place is so women can participate!  Because as the MMA contest between Fox and Brents clearly illustrates, men cannot be competing in the same league as women.  Fox didn't get lucky.  He is simply too strong to compete in that league.  Allowing other men to do so means that women wouldn't be able to participate in that league in any meaningful way.  The Equity Act would effectively marginalize women in the area of competitive sports.

So in the case of competitive sports, segregation makes opportunities available to certain segments of the population that they wouldn't normally have. So the act of segregation can produce positive results. In practice this means the men stay out of women's sports and women stay out of men's sports. Period.

And, no.  Whatever gender they think that they are is irrelevant.  It doesn't matter if they transitioned.  It doesn't matter if they are on testosterone blockers.  Or they got used to wearing dresses.  A person's biological sex determines what league he or she can compete in.

The whole discussion about gender identity is a red herring.  For one thing, Fox's statement that I quoted gives me a clear impression that he still thinks he's a man and that his female opponent was an even match.  This discussion wouldn't have taken place a couple decades ago because most people still believed in an objective reality, and if one person didn't, then it was considered their problem.

Private organizations will learn fairly quickly that it isn't a good idea to mix leagues like this; not without the results being completely meaningless, or even disastrous.  It's our political leaders advancing the Equity Act that worry me.  I hope that it's just virtue signaling and that interest in it will die, but I doubt it.  If we can no longer employ our common sense and say "no" to absurd ideas like setting up a match between a man and a woman in mixed martial arts, then we won't end up anywhere good as a society.