The New Yorker prints the Exhaustive Collection of Lies About Women and Sports

Writer C.S. Cornell: "And we are not, I think, as scared of minor eligibility changes in women’s sports as we are of the prospect of freeing ourselves from the mandate of fixed, binary sex.”

As they’re wont to do when the author is singing to their choir, the New Yorker let writer S.C. Cornell go on for something like 4,500 fact-free words in her essay Who Gets To Play In Women’s Leagues? That eats at my vitals, partly because it was so awfully self-indulgent, which I’ve been taught is a hanging offense, but mostly because this is where all my liberal friends are getting their (mis)information about women and sports. Here, and the New York Times, and the Washington Post (et tu Brute) and CNN and Runner’s World and virtually every medium who speaks the lingua blue-is.

For those of you who waded through this bravely searching for some truth, or for those who tried and gave up, I’ll take the red pen to Cornell’s article, as the New Yorker should have done. Edited for clarity, as they say.

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Cornell spends the first couple paragraphs telling us that, as a kid, she was unusually good a running, though she never trained. This was all prior to 12 years old. As a teen and into adulthood, she had “disfiguring” acne which eventually led to a diagnosis of polycystic ovary syndrome and hyperandrogenism—her estrogen levels were that of a “pre-pubescent child” and her free testosterone levels were “well above the usual female range.”

Cornell doesn’t give exact figures for her testosterone levels, and she should have, because, while it probably exceeded the 2.4 nmol/liter that marks the high end of the normal female range, it’s likely it didn’t reach 10 nmol/liter, the low end of the normal male range. Right from the get-go, Cornell uses her hyperandrogenism to justify some sort of sex-as-a-spectrum stance. Not using scientific data and terminology is the hallmark of gender ideology pseudoscience.

Cornell was prescribed a dietary supplement, birth control containing drospirenone, and a pill called spironolactone, that she “happened to know” is prescribed to trans-identified men in the U.S. as a part of hormone therapy. She mentions that spironolactone was also used by “intersex” women who had to lower their T levels to compete in the women’s category. Here’s anther tell that Cornell has an agenda—”intersex” is incorrectly used by trans rights activists because it seems to support the sex-as-a-spectrum idea, that these people are between male and female. Differences of Sexual Development (DSD), the preferred term, actually proves the sex binary, as they only affect people of one sex or the other. Cornell is already trying to draw correlations between people with DSDs whose external genitalia may not match their chromosomal sex and trans-identified people, who in almost all cases have perfectly normal chromosomes and external traits for their sex.

She goes on: “I had viewed myself as a member of the putative victim group—sports-playing cis women who really like to win—even as I was not particularly afraid that increased gender diversity would destroy women’s sports as we know them. (Anyone who thinks that legions of men will declare themselves women only to compete in an easier division is, I think, missing something crucial about the nature of masculine pride.) After the blood tests, I was still sports-playing, still cisgender, and still tediously competitive. But now, in a sporting world that increasingly divided the sexes based on hormone levels, I was less sure about who was the threatened and who was the threat.”

Where to start with that paragraph. For one, the self-loathing is eye-watering. By her assessment, women who like to win are “tedious.” She uses the language of gender ideology to describe herself as a subset of women—the cis kind instead of the trans (male) kind. Again using ideological language, she says she’s not “afraid” (read: transphobic) of gender diversity. It would be much clearer, to her and to readers, if instead of mistakenly calling what’s happening gender diversity, she’d correctly called it sex diversity in women’s sports. Males in women’s sports. Those who oppose this are not afraid (transphobic), they simply support women’s boundaries, places that are for women only, like sports. In her parenthetic aside telling transphobes, oops, readers, that masculine pride would of course prevent men from flooding into women’s sports, it’s pretty clear the one who’s missing something crucial about trans-identified men, and cheating, is Cornell. There is not a cheater alive who thinks he’s cheating: mental contortions, the same kind Cornell employs to make gender identity seem sensible, made Lance Armstrong just a highly committed athlete.

The last fallacy in that paragraph—that sports are defining women (there’s never been any question at all as to what a man is) by hormone level—is a now out-of-date stance from the International Olympic Committee and lots of major sports governing bodies who communally lost their minds, or were likely paid handsomely to do so, such that they were driven to find a way to wedge males into female sports. They did this by trying to find evidence that you could make a man into a facsimile of a woman by lowering his testosterone. See also, my previous post, N=8. I’ll summarize by saying the IOC’s “science” behind “dividing sex by hormone levels” came from a trans-identified male, Joanna Harper, who wanted to compete in the female category finding seven other trans-identified males who said they slowed down after taking estrogen. Defining women by hormone level has been roundly debunked, and many large sports organizations like World Athletics have tossed out the whole idea of testosterone reduction as a female hack, instead protecting the women’s category from anyone who’s gone through any portion of male puberty. This history is widely available, and it’s either sloppy or intentionally misleading that Cornell presents hormone levels as the arbiter of who can participate in women’s sports. Again, she’s trying to blur the lines between sexes by steering well clear of facts.

She went on (why?) to reveal that she has, in fact, looked up the physiological differences between male and female athletes which provide the reason for sex-separated sports. For fairness. This paragraph was concise, documented, and simple. If she didn’t have an agenda, Cornell would have been wise to stop here. But she didn’t.

“The hard question for sports administrators, then, is not whether to have a sex line in élite sports but how, exactly, to distinguish between brawny but nevertheless “legitimate” women and dishonest male infiltrators.”

Here is a person who’s already declared her allegiance to gender ideology who is just dying to use every single talking point on the list that makes defining a woman seem ambiguous, confusing, arbitrary. A trans activist favorite is dragging up every misstep in the history of sports—nude parades, smarmy rumors from the 1930s, DSDs, and policing women who don’t look feminine enough. And she hit every one at length, though I’m not sure where she got her DSD data.

“All told, differences of sex development are rare but not vanishingly so. About one in every three hundred and fifty people has nonstandard sex chromosomes, and about one in every thousand has atypical genitalia. In élite sports, which select for many rare qualities, these rates can be much higher. At the 2011 World Athletics Championships, for example, women with XY chromosomes were overrepresented by a factor of a hundred and forty.”

It’s hard to know what Cornell is talking about when she says “nonstandard sex chromosomes” or “atypical genitalia” but the rate of DSDs in the general population is .018%. 1 in every 350 is .286%, and 1 in every 1000 is .10%—orders of magnitude greater than the actual occurrence of DSD. Cornell uses terms that are meaningless, and her data is way off. That last sentence about XY chromosomes being overrepresented by a factor of 140 in female athletes at the 2011 World Athletics is dead wrong. A study from that competition found that hyperandrogenism in elite female athletes was found at a rate 140 times greater than in the general population, not XY chromosomes. There are many causes of hyperandrogenism, polycystic ovary syndrome, that Cornell has, being one of them, but though its symptoms may include some virilization, it does not make a case for sex as a spectrum. Cornell and others who have the condition are females with hyperandrogenism.

Cornell did briefly mention cheek swabs, saying they were popular with female athletes, but that they were unreliable (they’re actually the best method we’ve ever had) and vetoed by the likes of Hillary Clinton and Benazir Bhutto. Wha? Are those two scientists? Honestly, Cornell just wears the reader down with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of circular words with no apparent point.

The fallacies are coming thick and fast now so I’m going to have to cut to the quick.

“More than a half century of testing in international women’s sports had not confirmed a single publicized case of a competitor who was considered male in both chromosomes and genitalia.”

First off, genitalia are not relevant to sport performance. Chromosomes drive the sex-based differences that are also relevant to sports performance. Stella Walsh, who Cornell yammered on about ad nauseum, was in fact male with testes. That darling of gender ideologists, Caster Semenya, is male. He has a DSD that only affects males, has fully functioning internal testes, and has fathered two children. Every legitimate sport scientist in the world agrees Semenya is male. Is she considered male by the BBC? By PinkNews? That might be Cornell’s loophole. While she might have thought she could use DSD athletes to blur that sex line, it surely falls apart when we bring up trans-identified males. Will (Lia) Thomas? Male in chromosomes and genitalia, as Riley Gaines and a whole swim team of women can attest. Tennis player Renee Richards? Check and check. Cyclist Emily Bridges? Balls and Y. Hurdler Cece Telfer? I could go on and on.

All trans activists eventually get around to Michael Phelps and his freakishly long arms:

“Past a certain level, all élite athletes are freaks of nature, genetic aberrations: they worked harder and wanted it more only compared with the very limited group of people who had the physical capacity to beat them.”

Michael Phelps is not a freak of nature, he is male competing against other males. They all had the “genetic aberration” of being born with XY chromosomes and being bathed in testosterone since they were in the womb. Sometimes Michael Phelps lost. Even when he won, it was by milliseconds. Katie Ledecky, equally a “genetic aberration,” did not benefit from the physiological advantages XY chromosomes confer. Had they raced, Phelps would have crushed Ledecky. That’s why we have sex-segregated sports. Will (Lia) Thomas is not a freak of nature, nor did he work harder than the women against whom he raced. He’s just male with the natural advantages being male confers, and now a “women’s” NCAA Champion.

“And if, in the case of intersex athletes, you believe that a person’s convictions about their sex can inform what league they play in, then it would be arbitrary not to extend such a belief to trans people.”

Ahh, now we get down to it. Because Semenya was able to gaslight the entire world for 15 years (and is still at it), Cornell reasons trans athletes should be able to do the same. Tens, hundreds, thousands of wrongs do not make a right.

“The problem with this is that many great female athletes have traits that approximate the athletic advantage of the average man. They may be taller and have broader shoulders, or have less body fat and more muscle, smaller breasts and thinner hips, greater lung and heart capacity and a higher hemoglobin count.”

Huh? “Approximate the athletic advantage of the average man?” Yes, Serena Williams has traits that would allow her to trounce an average male tennis player. That does not make her male. Nor does it support the notion that because there are some truly great female athletes, we should let average males into the female category. There is, of course, great variety in women’s bodies, and elite athletes tend to have traits that make them champions, but this does not make them male. Cornell is wrong here: no women have heart and lung capacity and hemoglobin count that “approximate the athletic advantage of the average man,” whatever that means. Even dominant elite women’s metrics in these areas are about 12% lower than men’s.

“If an athlete has traits that approximate the athletic advantage of a post-pubescent boy or man, the argument goes, then, regardless of her gender identity and sex, as both she and scientists may understand it, she should have to compete against men.”

No. No one has ever made the argument that because a woman is tall and has broad shoulders, she should have to compete with men. Cornell is blatantly manufacturing this crazy scenario. Again, what does the word salad “approximate the athletic advantage of a post-pubescent boy or man” mean? If, as I think, Cornell is saying elite women beat other elite women by the same difference between average men and average women, 10% to 30% (much higher in throwing and punching sports), that also is false. Female champions are winning over their female rivals by slivers, often less than 1%. Even marathon world record holder Tigist Assefa’s dominant 2:11 performance was only a 2.29% improvement over the previous world record. The most dominant female athlete will not be 10% to 30% better than other elite females, but if a talented enough trans-identified male (maybe even sub-elite) competed against women, he could possibly dominate by 10%. Up until now, the males who have competed in women’s sports simply haven’t been as elite as the women they’re competing against.

I just can’t keep up, my will to live is draining. Cornell compares trans teens getting radical double mastectomies with breast reduction. Jesus wept.

Cornell is trying, wearing readers down with verbiage and falsehoods, to make it seem like we can’t tell the difference between male and female, that sex is vague and confusing. That is not true. In 99.9% of cases, sex is perfectly clear and easily verified, both at birth, and in the routine physical exam kids have prior to participating in sports. She makes it seem that loads of women who are tall with broad shoulders and muscular builds are cruelly being shut out of women’s sports. Cornell argues that since we can’t tell who’s really female, we should also accept people who just think they’re females—trans-identified men.

Imagine, for a second, that you are the ruler of sports. How much success from intersex and transgender girls and women are you willing to accept? If your answer is little to none, are you willing to make rules that risk discriminating based on an athlete’s appearance? If not, how many “perfectly normal-looking young ladies” are you willing to sweep up in your ineligibility net? Would you accept it if trans women, who represent about one in three hundred American women, win one in three hundred women’s competitions? If they win one in a thousand?

Personally, I would not like to live in a world where a trans girl or woman never wins a women’s-division sporting event at any level. In twenty-four American states, however, legislators have attempted to do just that, by banning trans inclusion in school sports. Many of the laws passed in recent years extend to sports in elementary school, before most students have reached puberty, and to intramural sports at public colleges, which are often coed anyway.

Cornell wrote her fingers to the bone but failed to explain how 46 XY 5-ARD DSD athletes (like Caster Semenya) or trans-identified males became female. She apparently forgot that one paragraph waaaaay up there where she talked about the physiological differences that drove the whole idea of sex-segregated sports to begin with. And she slaloms, since we have absolutely no way of determining if women are women, we can A) just ban anyone who looks man-ish, or B) we can let in anyone who says they’re a woman. Those are our only two options.

Then she turns her brilliant powers of persuasion to wondering how many trans-identified athletes should win in all of the female competitions in the whole entire world, I guess. One? Two? A million? A gazillion? Honestly, my five-year-old granddaughter could craft a more cogent argument. In that spirit, I would say, I am rubber, Cornell is glue; whatever she asks bounces off me and sticks to, umm, her. How many trans-identified men does she think should win in women’s sports? And what if that number started to creep up to more than one in 300? And what of the totally male podium in the women’s 800 meters at the 2016 Olympics? What of the women whose place those trans-identified males took on the podium? Silence from Cornell.

Fortunately, Cornell gets to live in the world of her dreams, where trans-identified males regularly win women’s awards. It took her so many long driveling paragraphs but she finally got to that most tired of lies, that states are “banning trans inclusion in school sports.” For the love of god. No one is banned; everyone can participate in their sex class. And I guess I’m going to need a citation for Cornell’s claim that trans students are being banned from intramural coed sports in college. If it’s coed….?

After burying her readers in steaming heaps of words and insulting them with obvious falsehoods and disjointed swings through alternate universes, Cornell gets to what I think is her thesis statement:

“We are not scared of the medicine itself, its risks and irrevocability. We are scared that it might be used to subvert rather than enforce our sex as assigned at birth. And we are not, I think, as scared of minor eligibility changes in women’s sports as we are of the prospect of freeing ourselves from the mandate of fixed, binary sex.”

Cornell has been spending way too much time with very rich, very crazy, transhumanist Martine Rothblatt. “Minor eligibility changes in women’s sports” = men in women’s sports. That’s her notion of a minor change. From there, it’s a hop, skip, and a jump to “freeing ourselves” from the reality of binary sex. In much the same way that some of us are afraid of freeing ourselves from the mandate of gravity by stepping off the 163rd story of the Burj Khalifa.

Odder still, if that’s possible, Cornell chooses to end her novelette with a visit to the gynecologist. To check on her lady parts. Because after all this, absolutely no one is confused about her sex, nor which team she should play on.