The era of men in women’s sports will soon be over

The US House of Representatives has just passed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act. This is just the beginning.

Of all the absurdities of the culture war, perhaps the most egregious is the normalisation of the idea that men should be able to identify their way into women’s sports. We are living through a period of mania, so we cannot clearly see how this will look to future generations. But I have little doubt that all those photographs of hulking men towering over women on winners’ podiums will be the memes of the future. ‘Can you believe they let this happen?’ they’ll say, scratching their AI-enhanced cyborg heads.

Wherever one stands on Donald Trump, there can be little doubt that his imminent arrival at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will act as a corrective to this problem. Yesterday, the House of Representatives passed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act with its goal of preventing males who identify as female from participating in school sports. If passed into law, schools that attempt to defy the ban would have their federal funds withheld. The bill was introduced by Republican representative Greg Steube of Florida, and makes clear that it will be a violation of federal law ‘for a recipient of Federal financial assistance who operates, sponsors, or facilitates an athletic program or activity to permit a person whose sex is male to participate in an athletic program or activity that is designated for women or girls’.

One of the most astonishing aspects of the passing of this bill was the voting outcome. 216 Republicans and only 2 Democrats (Vicente Gonzales and Henry Cueller) voted for the motion. Is it really that controversial that sex, as the bill puts it, ‘shall be recognized based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth’? You will recall the outcry back in November when Democratic politician Seth Moulton admitted that he objected to mixed-sex contact sports in schools. ‘I have two little girls,’ he said, ‘I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete. But as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that’. For this he was branded a ‘transphobe’ and a ‘Nazi cooperator’, because we all know that one of the top priorities of the Third Reich was the preservation of women’s rights.

Moulton failed to retain his backbone for the latest vote (he called the bill “too extreme”), but his previous comment had been striking for its honesty. He was willing to openly state that fear was the key factor in the reticence of Democrats on this issue. It cannot be the case that only two Democratic members of the House take the view that there is no advantage in sports conferred by male puberty. Surely most of them must have glanced at a biology textbook from time to time. The charitable conclusion is that they have been browbeaten into voting ideologically, not that they genuinely don’t know that there exist anatomical differences between men and women.

Disturbingly, this vote would seem to suggest that the Democrats are not learning their lessons from the election, and instead are determined to double down on the very attitude that cost them the White House. Consider Titania McGrath’s response to Trump’s victory:

I now have a nagging sense that this was a little too near the truth of how the Democrats see the voting population. And when it comes to trans issues, they must be aware that the vast majority of their support base will never accept the sheer injustice of allowing boys to compete against girls on the playing field. Why is it so difficult for them to reflect on their failings and undertake a little basic course-correction?

We are continually told that gender identity ideology is a ‘fringe issue’, and that elections are all about the economy. We now know that the single most effective advertisement in the Trump campaign bore the tagline: ‘Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you’. It was a particular success with floating voters, generating a 2.7 point shift in Trump’s favour among those who saw it. People care about their children above all things, and the erosion of sex in school policy was only ever going to put them at risk.

The bill isn’t law just yet. It still has to pass the Senate, and this will require some Democrat defections to overcome the filibuster. But if nothing else, this development does suggest that this is the beginning of the end for men in women’s sports.

In addition, this vote has shown just how hopelessly divided the right and left in America remains on these issues. The culture war has had a fatally destabilising effect, and there is now very little room for compromise. The outcome here was so starkly defined according to tribal lines that it has confirmed beyond doubt that the political sphere is now characterised by this ‘with us or against us’ outlook. Nobody looking at that voting tally twenty years ago, from the left or the right, would have seen it as anything other than ludicrous. The same will doubtless be true in another twenty years. Sadly, for the time being, we are still in our drunken period. And the hangover will be intense.

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