One of the most imbecile topics that has occupied the public debate in recent years is transgenderism, or more precisely, gender ideology. Men who feel better acting and living like women, and vice versa, are nothing new. And this is all what transgenderism is, something that has always occurred to a tiny percentage of individuals in all human societies, as the writings of early civilizations and the studies of anthropologists show. When discussing the sexual division of labor of pre-Columbian peoples, Alexander Goldenweiser notes that:
Numerous reports attest the presence in various tribes of effeminate men who avoid male occupations and disregard masculine astir; they dress as women and participate in feminine activities. Not infrequently such men function as magicians and seers” (Alexander Goldenweiser, “Sex and primitive society”, in Sex and civilization, ed. by Calverton e Schmalhausen, London, 1929).
In other words, the recognition and particularization of transgender people is a common fact of humanity. These individuals are treated differently at each time and place. For example, in the autochthonous cultures mentioned above, “it is probable that [the shamans] were of the kind of effeminate or inverted men whom most of the Indians of America once respected and feared rather than despised or abhorred.”[1] Currently, homosexuality is considered a crime in about 70 countries, and in some it can be punished with the death penalty, as in Iran, but there the transgender person is blessed by the theocratic state and encouraged to undergo sex reassignment surgery (which in reality is just a mutilation surgery, since nothing is capable of changing the sex of an animal) and the state guarantees documentation with the sex changed. Iran is second only to Thailand in the number of such surgeries, while Russia bans them altogether.
But it is in Western countries – where there is no criminalization against transgenders – that transgenderism has been a source of controversy, because of the gender ideology that has recently embroiled it. And the controversy has nothing to do with acceptance or discrimination of these individuals. The reason is that postmodernists want the whole society to consider that a man who wants to be a woman is a woman, for the simple fact that he wants to. As if the manifestation of the desire to have a different sex had the power to alter matter and be fulfilled. Everyone must now accept that a person is not what he is, but what he wishes to be. This is such an idiotic proposition that I feel sorrow to have to tackle it. In fact, this is best dealt with by stand-up comedians such as Dave Chappelle, Rick Gervais, Bill Burr, and Chris Rock or the animated series South Park, who have refuted and ridiculed it in the most insightful ways possible.
Nevertheless, the one who made the most scathing refutation of this delusional postmodernist presumption was the conservative commentator Matt Walsh when he asked its proponents a simple question: What is a woman? Walsh asked this question to activists, “experts” and transgender people and absolutely no one has been able to answer it. That’s because it’s a checkmate to all this stupidity. The correct answer is, “a woman is a female human being,” but gender ideologues cannot admit this truth because it would destroy the foundations of their belief. Those who try to give a different answer fall into circular reasoning saying that “a woman is someone who identifies as a woman.” A psychologist interviewed by Walsh says she doesn’t know what a woman is because she’s not a woman; But for her to say she’s not a woman, she also needs to know what a woman is. This nonsense went so far that even a U.S. Supreme Court nominee replied that she didn’t know what a woman was. Another standard response involves discussing a supposed difference between sex and gender, which is also circular, because when they say that an individual with a male biological sex identifies as a woman, what does he identify with anyway?
In fact, “gender” has always been a grammatical category until when, in 1955, sexologist John Money introduced the idea of gender as a social construct. In addition to his theory incurring the fallacy of circular reasoning cited above, it was also empirically tested in a monstrous experiment with a catastrophic result that ended with the suicide of his subjects: two brothers, one killed himself with an overdose of antidepressants and the other with a shotgun blast to the head. Nevertheless, gender ideology is based on the unsuccessful cruel studies of the infamous Money.
The question that remains is how does something as execrable, stupid and easily refutable as gender ideology remain for so many years filling vast spaces of public debate? In a clip from early 2023 that went viral again last week, Dave Smith gives a compelling explanation for this phenomenon. The discussion of such an imbecile topic did not arise organically, but was implanted from the top down by the ruling elite to divert the public’s attention from really important topics that, if discussed, could mean a serious threat to caste power. In 2012, both the left, with the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the right, with the Tea Party movement, began to question things like the Central Bank, the bailouts, and the massive public debt, and that’s when the media controlled by the big corporations that profit from these extortionate schemes began to dump on the public terms like racism, transgenderism, white privilege, social justice, etc. This flood is proven by graphs that gather data on mentions in major publications. In other words, it was not the people who woke up one day with the desire to have a national conversation on whether men can get pregnant and whether women can have dicks, but these discussions were artificially imposed.
And it worked. Right and Left spend years arguing about whether a transvestite should be allowed to use the women’s bathrooms while completely ignoring the systematic assault they suffer from the Fed one can be considered right-wing just for saying that men are different from women. On this, Dave Smith cites Piers Morgan, a guy who advocated for lockdowns, disarming the population, arresting people for expressing themselves contrary to the official narrative, taking away the rights of the unvaccinated, the U.S proxy war against Russia in. Ukraine, but….. he brought a “trans woman” on his show and told on her face that she wasn’t a real woman. And because of that, he came to be considered a right-winger!
The transgenderism distraction comes with serious consequences with real victims, among them, girls who were raped by ” girls with dicks” who were allowed to use the girls’ locker room in schools and confused children who were subjected to sex reassignment treatments and mutilations. But one of the alleged victims of gender ideology is not a victim of anything but a reality check: women athletes.
Allowing men in women’s competitions is perhaps the loudest controversy in transgenderism – right and left have clashed over this, proving the success of the strategy of deflecting important issues. But the theme is so obtuse that the roles have been reversed: it is the right that is defending Girl Power, the “empowerment of women”, the feminist struggle for equality between men and women, the maxim “a woman’s place is wherever she wants to be” and the left that is on the realist side defending that there are things that women really are not able to do right. But both sides are in it inadvertently. For example, at a U.S. Senate hearing, conservative Senator Ted Cruz questioned the far-left activist Kelley Robinson about the participation of transvestites in women’s sports. Being an adherent of gender ideology, Robinson could not admit that there are differences between men and women, and repeatedly refused to answer. Cruz pressed:
Let me ask you this question then: Why do women’s sports exist? If you can’t define a difference between women and men, why not abolish women’s sports and just tell little girls to swim with little boys and see who wins?
Robinson doesn’t answer. Cruz insists:
Why have a separate category for women? If there’s no difference between women and men, why to have women sports?
Robinson keeps avoiding the question. So Cruz gives up and responds himself by citing
an article from Duke Law called “Comparing Athletic Performances for the Best Elite Women to Boys and Men”, and it goes through examining in 2017 the top records for women in the world in various track and field events. So, for example, in the hundred meter the top record for women in the world was 10.71 seconds. Now that record for the number one woman in the world in 2017 was, in the year 2017, broken by 124 boys under 18. In that same year the record for the number one competing woman in the 100 yard 100 meter dash in the world was broken by a total of 2474 men. If the radical Democrat agenda to destroy girls sports and women’s sports succeeds, little girls will not have a chance to compete.
So, the answer that Ted Cruz sought and didn’t get is clear: women’s sports exist because women are bad at sports. Sports competitions are a man’s thing. Women don’t have the slightest capacity to compete with men. In order for women to be able to compete in sports competitions, the women’s categories were created, which are like a newbie category. When I was a child, in plays or physical games boys could not use all the force against the girls. Same for smaller children. The women’s category is where newbies can compete with each other, without anyone having to retrench theirs abilities.
Women’s sport is like sport for the disabled. A blind man is not in any condition to play a soccer match against sighted men, so soccer for the blind was created, where only blind people can play. The same thing applies to women’s soccer. Women are not in any condition to play a soccer match against men, so women’s soccer was created, where only women can play. Compared to men, both blind and women are handicapped for soccer. And women’s soccer is just as horrible, if not more horrible, to watch than blind soccer. The women’s Olympic Games are in fact a category of the Paralympics. Just as run categories for one-legged, basketball for cripples and swimming for those without arms were created, women’s sports were created for those who do not have the Y chromosome, which is an undeniable deficiency for the practice of most sports.
In fact, there are rare sports in which women are not disabled, such as Equestrian, where there is no female category. Women compete against men at a high level. Some categories of Olympic gymnastics can also be included in these sports where femininity is not a disability, but Olympic gymnastics is more of a dance competition, where judges give grades based on artistic criteria. But women are unable to compete with men in virtually every other sport. So we can rephrase Ted Cruz’s question; Since women are deficient in sports, why are there women’s sports competitions? Or, in other words, why are there sports competitions for the disabled? If someone is bad at something, why would they dedicate themselves to it, instead of dedicating themselves to something that he is good? No one has uncovered this issue better than Carlos Ramalhete. He says:
Well, we are all, in some respect, worse than average. In the same way, we are all better than average in some other way. This is how averages work: virtually no one is average in an isolated aspect, and almost everyone is mediocre in the average of their talents, with deficiencies being counterbalanced by excellencies and vice versa. What Olympic athletes do is… take what by nature you are already better at than average and train… until they are extraordinarily better than the rest at it.
On the other hand, the physically handicapped, in the strict sense of the term that qualifies for participation in the “Paralympics”, is someone who, for some reason, is completely outside the parameters of normality, and for the worse. A one legged, blind, amputee, whatever…. For them, given the severity of their injury or disorder, it is impossible even to achieve normality with any effort. Someone who doesn’t have one foot will never grow another, no matter how well they get around with a prosthesis.
These cripples, however, as with any human deficiency or excellence, are localized. It is not because the subject is one legged that he becomes incapable of developing tremendously in another aspect, in which he has no deficiency at all, and becoming part of a performative elite in that other area. A mute, for example, can still be an Olympic swimmer if he has the necessary body and trains as he should. A one legged person can, like the singer Roberto Carlos, develop to the maximum in music or in any other field that does not depend on the leg that one does not have, and thus live healthily with his problem. No one knows Roberto Carlos as one legged, nor is he the “King” of one legged. On the contrary: he tries his best to avoid attracting attention to his disability, and it is as a singer that he has developed to perfection.
As his example proves, one legged people can be excellent singers, just as mutes or stutterers can be excellent athletes. The “Paralympics”, however, are like a contest of singers who are stammering or mute…: a bad taste joke, in which all attention is drawn to the very thing in which perfectly capable people are deficient in everything else. A one legged race is a macabre parody of athletic overcoming, in which disability, absence, incompleteness, and imperfection become the center of attention. In them, it is not a question of overcoming the limits of the human body, but of denying the disability that one actually has, instead of accepting it in an orderly manner and dedicating oneself to something that one can effectively do well, something in which it makes no difference if one has all one’s little fingers. It is an almost freak show of inadaptation to the condition of being disabled, pathetic and sad like a dwarf who picks fights in bars when he drinks too much.
What if Ray Charles, Steve Wonder and Andrea Bocelli, instead of dedicating themselves to music, were soccer players! Vision is essential for a soccer player. To use hearing to try to locate the position of a ball with bells and try to kick it into a goal, the direction of which the blind can only know because a guide is behind him to guide them also by sounds, is really pathetic and sad. Ramalhete, who himself is physically disabled and an author with a brilliant mind, aptly called the Paralympics a “macabre parody of the Olympics.” In them, he says, “instead of celebrating health, disability and illness are celebrated.”
The narrative is that one would be celebrating the “overcoming”. Lie. Overcoming is what makes an Olympic athlete, who goes beyond what an ordinary human being is capable of. A disabled person lives with his disability and tries to make it the best he can, but he will not “overcome” it. If he does, he will no longer be deficient, and the extraordinary effort he put into it will serve to make he a person like everyone else in that respect.
The same goes for women. To try to overcome their deficiencies, they masculinize themselves. If this overcoming were possible, they would cease to be deficient, becoming a man equal to others in that aspect. An impossible goal to achieve, but some come close. At the same Senate hearing mentioned above, Ted Cruz asked swimmer Riley Gaines – who had tied with transvestite swimmer Lia Thomas and the tournament organizers decided to give him the trophy – if there is a difference between men and women. Unlike the leftist gender ideologue, Gaines didn’t shy away from the question and answered:
Of course [there’s a difference between women and men]. I think we learned this at a very young age, watching even 12 and unders going through puberty causes irreversible advantage that no matter the training, no matter the diet, no matter any alterable change you can make, will overcome that male advantage. Especially in sports like swimming, where lung capacity matters so much, even something as silly as throat size, men have on average a 40 larger throat, which sounds like it’s nothing, but when you’re grasping for air, that 40 percent larger throat makes a huge difference in athletic success, not to mention height. You guys know the differences
An example of an athlete who tried to overcome her female disability was swimmer Rebeca Gusmão, who from so many male hormones she injected was left with the physique of a male athlete, until she was caught in the anti-doping test and was banned from the sport. In fact, Gusmao has managed to get more muscular than Lia Thomas, the guy who is competing in the women’s disabled category and is winning almost everything and breaking the records for the disabled. Rebeca Gusmão was banned for raising her testosterone, but now, men who were born with the highest level of testosterone are being allowed to compete with women deficient in testosterone (and other superior physical characteristics of men).
The masculinization of women is so bizarre that in 2015 the Ms. Olympia contest was discontinued. An increasing number of male athletes who identify as female are competing against women and breaking records along the way. But this idea is not new. In the 1960s, the USSR enrolled two men to compete in women’s athletics, the “sisters” Irina and Tamara Press. Both broke many records and won several gold medals. And both end their careers abruptly, coincidentally at the moment when started the requirement of proof of sex at international championships. It is also speculated that they could be hermaphrodites; Women with vaginas, although with a man’s body. In Brazil we had such an athlete once, the intersex judoka Edinanci Silva, who, from birth, had characteristics of both sexes, but with a masculine physique and levels of testosterone. With a male genetic, Edinanci underwent surgery on her double genitalia, removing her testicles, and passed a femininity test. And her physical complexion as a man did not make her stand out from the athletes of her category; Edinanci faced women who were true brutes, who often defeated her. Nonethemless, what drives so many women to play sports suitable for men?
100 years ago, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset inferred that each epoch was qualified by the dominance of old age or youth and masculinity or femininity. His own time (writing in 1927) he defined as ascendant by the “youth” quadrant, and to affiliate the sex of an epoch it was necessary to analyze how one defines a sex according to its behavior in relation to the other sex. Thus, “the dominant type of man in 1890” who defined himself “first of all by his longing for women reveals, by itself, that in that time [before his own time] the values of femininity predominated.” In his time, this had been reversed, and it was that woman could not “be defined without referring to the man,” who then had the privilege of being “completely independent of whether woman exists or not. Science, technology, war, politics, sport, etc., are things in which the man occupies himself with the vital center of his person, without the woman having any substantive intervention.” Ortega y Gasset points out how masculinism culminated in the Athens of Pericles:
A century for men only. You live in public: agora, gymnasium, camp, trireme. The mature man watches the games of the naked ephebes and becomes accustomed to discern the finest qualities of manly beauty, which the sculptor will comment on in the marble…. The woman?… Yes, at the last minute, at the manly banquet, she appears under the species of flutists and dancers who perform their humble skills in the background, very much in the background of the scene, as a support and pause to the languishing conversation. Sometimes, the woman gets a little ahead of herself: Aspasia. Why? Because she learned the knowledge of men, because she became masculinized. Although the Greek knew how to sculpt famous women’s bodies, his interpretation of female beauty could not detach itself from the preference he felt for the beauty of the man. The Venus de Milo is a masculine-feminine figure, a kind of athlete with breasts.
Going back to his time, Ortega y Gasset notes that “the woman of 1927 stopped coining values for herself and accepts the point of view of men who at that date feel, in fact, enthusiasm for the splendid figure of the athlete. We can see, therefore, in this a symptom of the first category, which reveals the predominance of the manly point of view.” In a masculine age, women emulate the tastes and values of men. She “strives in physical sports” and “accepts in conversation the topics of preference of young men and talks of sports and automobiles” for one reason: “assimilation to man.” A century later, today in 2024, it seems to me that we have returned to a masculinized era, but not without the help of the state. At the beginning of its questioning, Senator Ted Cruz quoted a legislation from 50 years ago:
Title IX was a landmark civil rights law. It helped create the incredible breadth of women’s sports and girls sports that we see across the country. I believe in girls sports. I believe in women’s sports. I’m the proud father of two daughters who are both athletes. I think participating in competitive sports is a wonderful thing for a young girl. I think it is a wonderful thing for a woman and I think unfortunately today’s Democrat Party has decided that women’s sports and girls sports no longer matters, and they are willing to push radical legislation designed to destroy girls sports and women’s sports.
But what is Title IX? It is a bill signed by Ricard Nixon that prohibited sex discrimination by sports entities that received government subsidies. Thus, sports that used to be a man’s thing stopped barring these foreign elements and began to accept and encourage the participation of women. Thanks to a state subsidy, women’s sport has ascended:
Title IX came into effect during the second wave of feminism, a time when women were fighting for equal work, equal opportunities, and extended childcare services. Women’s involvement in sport was limited, mostly to participation at the collegiate level. Before the introduction of Title IX, some efforts were made to encourage inter-collegiate sport among women. This included appointing a Commission on Intercollegiate Sports for Women in 1966 and in 1969, along with the announcement of several national championships for women.
However, post the implementation of Title IX, the participation of women in sports in the US significantly increased in high school and college athletics. Data from 2010-11 suggests that 41% of the high school athletes in the US were female as compared to the participation before the implementation of Title IX, which was only 7%. Similarly, in college athletics, female participation went up by 456% from 29,972 in 1971-72 to 166,728 in 2007-08.
Ted Cruz is showing himself to be a true conservative, in the sense of defending the status quo, whatever it may be – whether it’s progressive subsidies, feminist legislation, and anti-discrimination laws: if something has been around for a while, it must be preserved. He prefers to maintain his two daughters’ delusion that they are competitive athletes, shielding them from the real world, where men would shatter their childish efforts.[2] If Cruz truly supports his athlete daughters, he wants to see them masculinized to the fullest. He is right that leftists will destroy women’s competitions by allowing men to compete against women, but that would only reveal women’s true inferior capabilities and put them in their place. The left, in a devious and thoughtless way, is committed to showing the reality that a woman’s place is not wherever she wants to be. Women can compete on an equal footing and outperform men in many areas of life; Sports is not one of them.
As a libertarian, I support that all forms of discrimination should be permitted, and if, without subsidy and statist and quasi-statist protections from the big fascist corporations, women-only private competitions flourish, so be it. Personally, I couldn’t care less if the nonsense of gender ideology extinguished women’s sports competitions. Trannies in in women’s sports, whatever; can we change the subject and talk about put an end on the Fed and the warfare/welfare industrial complex?
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[1] The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, Gilberto Freyre.
[2] The Daily Wire has produced a comedy to champion women’s competitions (Lady Ballers , featuring Walsh, Ben Shapiro and cameos from Ted Cruz and swimmer Riley Gaines). At the movie climax, a professional male basketball team plays against a team of 8-year-old girls and let them win out of pity. This perfectly translates the chimera of women’s sport that they want to protect.
