Let's Get Real

Gold medal misogyny and silver linings in 2024

Looking back at 2024, I feel that we’ve hit bottom with regard to men in women’s sports and are starting to climb out of that dark hole, back to the light and solid ground of reality. Maybe that’s the Three-Buck Chuck talking, but by squinting and freeing my mind from the confines of the literal, as one does when appreciating art, I’m getting hopeful vibes.

The thing about women’s sports, and women’s rights in general, is that getting back to where we were before gender ideology took hold and policies were changed to allow men in women’s sports is merely getting back to garden variety misogyny. A #MeToo level of misogyny, rather than the hyper-androgenized brand we’re reeling from now. So, when I say we’re climbing out of the hole to the solid ground of reality, that reality is that there is no time in history nor a significant culture anywhere (sorry, Bushmen don’t count) in which women were not, are not, second class citizens. I’m not saying that to claim victimhood but merely pointing out that women have no experience with full equality. We can’t say oh remember the 1990s or look at the culture of ancient Greece as a goal of equality to work toward because none exists. Okay sticklers, there is evidence of a prehistoric goddess culture but I think we can agree, that model did not outlast the invention of language and is not coming back, apocalypse or no. Here, I’m informed by my inspiration Gerda Lerner, feminist and author of The Creation of Patriarchy. Women can’t point to a time or place when they held equal power in society as men, they have no experience with it, can’t envision what that would look like, very much like a trans-identified man has no idea what it is to be a woman.

So, while it’s easy to paint those salad days before the ACLU and the National Women’s Sports Foundation and the NCAA and the International Olympic Committee decided men could turn into women as the height of women’s empowerment through sports, that is an illusion. Those were rights granted by a patriarchy, i.e. one that values men over women, and as we’ve seen, those rights are just as easily removed. Because women were never equally valued as men, never had the power, particularly in sports, that men do. The fact that the word woman, the word that describes half the world’s population as distinct from the other half, can be erased at the stroke of a pen (in the case of Title IX) is a stark reminder of the realities of being a woman in a patriarchal culture.

Well Happy Crappy New Year to you too, right? Hang on. Here’s where the optimism comes in.

High school boys have been self-identifying into girls’ sports for at least seven years, and this past June, five males won girls’ state titles just in track. Bad. These increasingly common instances have, up until this year, elicited hand wringing, shrugs, deflection, calls of bigotry, but nothing in the way of a solution. This year, in Oregon and Washington, the male winners were booed—in no way progress, BUT it did signal that the masses recognized that “being kind” was robbing girls of their rights. That’s progress. Later in the year, the Washington Interscholastic Athletic Association proposed a third open category, aside from boys’ and girls’, for students who want to participate in alignment with their gender identity. Good. That’s a real solution, one that recognizes that sex matters in sports, and that inclusion of trans-identified males cannot come at the expense of females. People went beyond slogans and nice-sounding words like inclusion, and educated themselves about why women’s sports exist in the first place, and administrators listened to their concerns and came up with a solution that protected female sports. And recognized that girls are indeed a separate class of humans from boys who deserve their own sports. Other than World Aquatics’ creation of an open category for elite athletes (not a single transgender swimmer registered), WIAA’s proposal is a historic first at the high school level. Reason for optimism.

Unfortunately, galvanizing public sentiment seems to require that women first suffer a grotesque public injustice. The Paris Olympics provided that on the world’s largest stage. By allowing two boxers who were known to have XY chromosomes to fight in the women’s category, absurdly claiming that there was no way of determining whether an athlete was a man or a woman, and eventually awarding them both a gold medal, the International Olympic Committee peaked more people than any women’s advocacy group could have reasonably hoped. Proving that given enough rope… The hopeful news that’s come out of this train wreck is that, again, livingroomsful of passive couch-warmers were moved to some level of brain activity, synapses firing to the tune of Hold on, XY? Doesn’t that spell dude? Why is that man punching women? And what kind of crazytalk is Thomas Bach spouting, can’t tell a man from a woman? In fact, Bach has done as much damage as he can and is stepping down as of March 2025. Two of the IOC presidential candidates, Seb Coe and Johan Eliasch, have made protection of the female category, surprisingly, a controversial stance, a non-negotiable feature of their candidacy. That’s optimistically real.

There were lots of glimmers of not just hope but action this year, one of the most unignorable (the craven New York Times even reported on it) was that female athletes, even those actively competing, started speaking up and standing up. I’m talking specifically about the women’s volleyball team at San Jose State University, and others in the Mountain West Conference. SJSU captain Brooke Slusser joined a lawsuit against the NCAA for engaging in false, deceptive, and misleading practices by marketing sporting events as women’s events when, in fact, they were mixed sex events. Following a well worn path of failing to inform female teammates that they were living, sharing locker room facilities, and competing with a male, Blaire Fleming, SJSU then moved on to threaten and silence Slusser and the rest of the team. This is fromU Penn’s playbook, but Slusser et al were not to be cowed. Six other teams in the conference refused to play against SJSU, though their forfeitures were recorded as losses. As a further indictment of SJSU’s abuse of women’s rights, seven SJSU players entered the transfer portal after the season. Refusal to compete against teams that rostered a male spread to high school sports, as did quiet protests like wearing XX-supporting t-shirts and wristbands. These straightforward pro-women’s sports protests were met with sledgehammer-like bans by school administrators, actions that rightly resulted in free speech lawsuits. Average people are speaking up for women’s sports. Good.

It’s part of the damage gender ideology has wrought that sport scientists have to spend their time debunking well-funded nonscience that enthralls lazy journalists with its amazing, and amazingly unsupported conclusions, and having to prove over and over again what we’ve all known since the dawn of time—that there are two sexes that are immutable, and sex matters in sports. The happy news is that we now have heaps of legitimate science, the kind that adheres to scientific methodology and can be reproduced, that males outperform females before puberty and despite testosterone reduction. Thanks to the Olympic boxing debacle and Thomas Bach’s poorly acted ignorance of sex determination, there’s been a renewed interest in cheek swabs as a new/old way of working out that thorny question of who is male and who is female. So, no one can say there is no science on this topic, or that it’s inconclusive.

And finally, women’s sex-based rights, sports among them, should not be a left-right political issue, but somehow Democrats were unable to see that supporting men who self-identify into women’s rights and spaces virtually eliminates the rights of women, and that this slavish commitment to a dangerous ideology would be gleefully leveraged by Republicans. Who could have predicted? Actually, many many people predicted that, but here we are. And while we’re surely not going to have to deal with Dylan Mulvaney wearing a Jackie jacket to a presidential meeting in celebration of his minutes of girlhood, we don’t really know what we’re going to get. Due to Trump’s staggering lie-to-truth ratio, it’s hard to tell if Title IX will be restored to its original sex-based protection (Day One!) or if the government has the authority, or bearing in mind Trump’s last tenure in the White House, the organizational skills to ring fence women’s sports in any lasting way. Cringingly, I can only imagine this new administration enacting anti-trans rather than pro-women legislation. This important distinction is the difference between yet another meaningless patriarchal gesture, and actual recognition of women as deserving of human rights, you know, as a different but equal category of humans. I dunno, maybe they’ll protect women’s sports by accident. That is absolutely the Three-Buck Chuck talking.

I am not given to pollyanna-ish turns but I do think the truth wins out eventually, reality is unsinkable, and there are enough people who know and care about women’s rights and women’s sports that we will at some point be able to really celebrate women’s achievements. Not because they were granted to us but because we deserve them. Thanks to my subscribers, and especially to my paid subscribers. Hollering into the void is certainly possible but not particularly satisfying, so it’s not an exaggeration to say The Female Category would not exist without you. Hearing from you makes all this ignorant reading and research worth it, and if I understand it correctly, you’re an integral part of my gray cell marathon training. Let’s do this for another year and see what happens.