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The report from United Kingdom's sports bodies makes some unambiguous statements about trying to shoehorn transgender people into general sporting activity. Of course, it has been the attempts of transgender biological males to enter female sports have aroused the greatest amount of noise. But there's no escaping reality - males are different from females.
The Sports Councils’ Equality Group's guidance for transgender inclusion in domestic sport states:
The inclusion of transgender people into female sport cannot be balanced regarding transgender inclusion, fairness and safety in gender-affected sport where there is meaningful competition.
This is due to retained differences in strength, stamina and physique between the average woman compared with the average transgender woman or non-binary person assigned male at birth, with or without testosterone suppression.
The review group said its findings after an 18-month investigation proved that the current approach to the inclusion of trans athletes in sport "requires a reset and fresh thinking". To quote further from the Inside the Games sports website:
Evidence gathered suggested it is "fair and safe for transgender people to be included within the male category in most sports", but that "competitive fairness cannot be reconciled with self-identification into the female category in gender-affected sport".
Also, it was found that suppression of the male hormone testosterone is "unlikely to guarantee fairness between transgender women and natal females."
The International Olympic Committee allows transgender athletes to compete in women's competitions if their testosterone levels are under the 10 nanomoles per litre limit for at least 12 months.
However, the SCEG said this is "unlikely to result in the achievable minimisation of physical capacity."
The Olympic Committee said after the Tokyo Games that there would have to be a review of this aspect of international sport.
To continue using the summary from Inside the Games:
The report said that a "case-by-case" judgement would be "unlikely to be practical nor verifiable", and that "categorisation by sex is lawful".
Governing bodies needed to decide whether their top priority is inclusion, fairness or safety, and use this to inform their policies.
The new guidance offers three options for consideration:
The first was the option of prioritising the inclusion of transgender people into the sport's existing sex categories, which it recommended for sports that have "determined that inclusion rather than fairness is the objective of the category".
For such sports, it recommended that a five nanomoles per litre limit rather than the IOC's 10 would be more suitable for including transgender women, non-binary or gender fluid people recorded male at birth in its female categories.
An alternative approach suggested was running a "female" and "open" competition, with competitors in the former having to declare themselves as recorded female at birth and the latter open to anyone.
The third possibility was additional competitions including "universal admission" being created which are not dependent on sex or gender, which could lead to adaptations such as non-contact versions of team sports, the introduction of handicaps or the use of non-traditional formats or distances.
Additional guidance includes:
That sports should try to find new formats and “innovative and creative ways to ensure nobody is left out” to allow greater inclusion.
“In order to survive and thrive in the future, sport must adapt to reflect modern society, and that often, it is too slow to do so,” the guidelines state.
“Sport must be a place where everyone can be themselves, where everyone can take part and where everyone is treated with kindness, dignity and respect.”
This guidance for sports administrators was issued after a review of international research literature.
So that is one element of the effort to focus the attention of all parties involved in settling transgender people into a suitable sporting environment As the guidance points out, biological males cannot just thrust themselves into female sport. Reality reigns over perceived rights. [*]
Free speech and the transgender world
The second breath of fresh air relating to this significant social issue is the defence of reality given in the first instance by Dave Chappelle, a leading African American comedian, who used a Netflix show to comment on the woke attempt to control what can be said - and laughed about - with regard a whole area of human experience, the ever-expanding homosexual and transgender world.
There was a torrid rush of condemnation in the reviews from the usual media outlets but Chappelle's work was applauded by Andrew Sullivan, who has been until recently at the vanguard of the homosexual rights movement. His moderate voice has been welcome in a sphere where craziness is not unusual.
Sullivan devoted his latest "Weekly Dish" column on Substack (behind paywall) to Chappelle's show and the hyper-reaction from some woke quarters. The point he wants to convey is made in this subhead: "The comedian defends reality. Which is currently under siege."
Because Sullivan has gained a certain status as a leader through his long campaigning for the needs of homosexuals, and for his forthright participation in public intellectual discourse, his views are worthy of respect.
Sullivan starts his column this way:
There’s an understandable tendency to view the debate about transgender ideology today as a marginal issue, affecting a minuscule number of people, and at most, a trivial matter in the larger culture wars. And I can see why. It does seem on the surface to be about maybe 0.2 percent of humanity. And if you venture an opinion on it, the consequences are intense — so why bother?
And, overwhelmingly, the elite media in the United States prevents readers from knowing that a debate is even happening, let alone what it is really about. If the argument about gender theory is mentioned at all, it is dismissed as a bunch of “anti-trans” bigots [...] hurting a beleaguered and tiny minority, for some inconceivable, but surely awful, reason.
Chappelle's content in the show - The Closer - was "alternately hilarious and humane, brutal and true".
It is extremely funny, a bit meta, monumentally mischievous, and I sat with another homo through the whole thing, stoned, laughing our asses off — especially when he made fun of us.
The way the elite media portrays us, you’d think every member of the BLT community is so fragile we cannot laugh at ourselves. It doesn’t occur to them that, for many of us, Chappelle is a breath of honest air, doing what every comic should do: take aim at every suffocating piety of the powers that be — including the increasingly weird 2SLGBTQQIA+ mafia — and detonating them all.
As well as being funny, the show was in convicting the anti-reality of the woke narrative. Sullivan says:
The Closer is, in fact, a humanely brilliant indictment of elite culture at this moment in time: a brutal exposure of its identitarian monomania, its denial of reality, and its ruthless tactics of personal and public destruction. It marks a real moment: a punching up against the powerful, especially those who pretend they aren’t.
Anyone who can watch this special and think Chappelle is homophobic or transphobic is either stupendously dumb or a touchy fanatic. He is no more transphobic than J.K. Rowling, i.e. not at all, and the full set masterfully proves it to anyone with eyes and ears.
Assuming that marginalized people cannot tolerate humor at their own expense is as dehumanizing as assuming they have no agency in their lives. It is a form of bigotry — of the left.
We laugh, above all, at the absurdity of our reality. And yes, that’s the second point Chappelle makes: there is something called reality. We can deny it; or we can accept it. Comedy’s key role is that it helps us accept it.
[...] Like Rowling, Chappelle supports every law protecting trans people from discrimination; and believes in the dignity and equality of trans people, as he insisted in the show. But he also believes that it is absurd — absurd — to say that a trans woman is in every way indistinguishable from a woman. Because she isn’t.
The debate, rather, is about whether a tiny group of fanatics, empowered by every major cultural institution, can compel or emotionally blackmail other people into saying things that are not true. This, in Chappelle’s words, is what they are trying to force people to deny:
Gender is a fact. Every human being in this room, every human being on Earth, had to pass through the legs of a woman to be on Earth. That is a fact. Now, I am not saying that to say trans women aren’t women, I am just saying that those pussies that they got … you know what I mean? I’m not saying it’s not pussy, but it’s Beyond Pussy or Impossible Pussy. It tastes like pussy, but that’s not quite what it is, is it? That’s not blood, that’s beet juice.
Yes this is shocking, funny, wild. But not wrong. And this seems to me to be exactly what a comic is supposed to do: point out that the current emperor has no clothes. A transwoman cannot give birth as a woman gives birth. She does not ovulate. Her vagina, if it exists, is a simulacrum of one, created by a multiple array of surgeries. Sex in humans is binary, with those few exceptions at the margins — mixtures of the two — proving rather than disproving the rule. Until five minutes ago, this was too obvious to be stated. Now, this objective fact is actually deemed a form of “hate.” Hate. [Sullivan's emphasis]
This means that the debate is no longer about 0.2 percent of humanity. It’s about imposing an anti-scientific falsehood on 99.8 percent of humanity. It means that we have to strip all women of their unique biological experience, to deny any physical differences between men and women in sports, to tell all boys and girls that they can choose their sex, to erase any places reserved exclusively for biological women, like shelters for those who have been abused by men, and to come up with terms like “pregnant people” to describe mothers. Yes — mothers. The misogyny buried in this is gob-smacking. Is Mothers’ Day next for the trans chopping block?
The question of trans rights has been settled by the Supreme Court. I’m delighted it has. What we’re dealing with now is something very different. It’s an assault on science; it’s an assault on reality; it’s an attempt not to defend trans people but to cynically use them as pawns in a broader effort to dismantle the concept of binary sex altogether, to remove any distinctions between men and women, so that a gender-free utopia/dystopia can be forced into being.
In previous columns Sullivan has decried how trans activists have, by "literally falsifying history", linked their appeal for support with the appeals of truly marginalised groups, thereby capturing the social elite, and in the process "re-making the English language to make it conform to their ideology". He continues:
The weapons deployed in pursuit of this fantasy are those that are always used by those seeking to impose utopia on free people: the brutal hounding of dissent, the capture and control of every single cultural institution, the indoctrination of the young, cancellations, bullying. The costs are mounting. Across the West, people are being fired, targeted, prosecuted, even jailed, for stating biological facts.
The trans movement is now, tragically, the vanguard of the postmodern left’s goal of dismantling science itself because they believe that science is, in fact, merely an instrument of “white supremacy”.
In this battle, Chappelle is on the front lines. Not of bigotry. But of objective reality. Remember Orwell’s critical insight into totalitarian thought: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” Who else, one wonders, has the courage to disobey?
That's Sullivan's guarded conclusion as to where we stand in the global effort to protect reality as the narrative of the elite dispenses with science and respect for the variety of human experience.
(For more important commentary on how transgenderism has become a driving force behind the warping of medical care, and the undermining the status of the family, go to the Substack column of Bari Weiss for a report by a leading researcher Abigail Shrier. The column can be found here, and a summary and associated commentary here.)
[*] See reaction to the sports guidance report here.
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