The Orwellian madness of letting boys on to girls’ sports teams

If any kid in the future asks me how nuts things were in the 21st century, I’ll tell them Sharron Davies once had to go to Washington, DC to explain what a woman is. Yes, a British Olympian, one of our national treasures, had to fly 3,700 miles to remind the world that people with penises are men. There she was, on the steps of the US Supreme Court, telling a crowd that people who’ve been through male puberty – ie, blokes – should not play in women’s sports. What a time to be alive!

Ms Davies – former champion swimmer turned warrior for women’s rights – was in DC with Tracy Edwards, the British sailor who likewise battles for the right of women to play fella-free sport. They were there for a Supreme Court hearing on two cases, one from Idaho and one from West Virginia, in which ‘trans’ students are arguing for the right to play on teams that accord with their presumed gender rather than their real sex. Both of those states have correctly decreed that sport should be separated by sex, but the students, repped by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), want to overturn that.

It looks likely the Supreme Court will uphold the right of Idaho and West Virginia to say only girls should play in girls’ sports and boys in boys’ sports – a position that would have been uncontroversial to every generation before our own. And yet these cases nonetheless shine a light on the lunacy of our times. How is it possible that the highest court in the American republic, a court charged with being the ultimate interpreter of the US Constitution, is now being asked to mull such sticklers as ‘how to define a woman’? The Founding Fathers will be turning in their graves.

Oral arguments were heard yesterday in two cases: Little v Hecox and West Virginia v BPJ. Both hinge on the question of whether, as one legal eagle put it, ‘laws that seek to protect women’s and girls’ sports by limiting participation to women and girls based on sex violate the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment’. Read that again. What the court is essentially being asked is whether it is unconstitutional to have girls’ sports. This is where gender ideology has dragged us: to the truly dystopic situation where we’re invited to think ‘Is this unjust?’ when we see some girls playing volleyball.

It is doublethink of the most diabolical kind to present girls’ sports – sports in which ‘participation is limited to girls based on sex’ – as some kind of outrage against equality. For the precise opposite is the case. The true crime against civil rights occurs when girls’ sports are thrown open to boys. That’s a massive violation of Title IX, America’s 1972 civil-rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, and more importantly of common sense. If you think girls playing sports together is somehow unfair, somehow anti-American, then I posit you have lost the plot.

It felt astonishing to hear politicians from Idaho and West Virginia plead with the court to recognise something even the Neanderthals knew – that boys are physically stronger than girls. ‘Sex is what matters in sports’, said Idaho’s solicitor-general Alan Hurst, ‘[because] it correlates strongly with athletic advantages, like size, muscle mass, bone mass, and heart and lung capacity’. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who once coached girls’ basketball teams, told the court that if a ‘transgender girl’ (boy) is included in a girls’ team, it is highly likely he will ‘bump’ an actual girl from the ‘starting line-up’. We talk about the ‘harm’ caused to ‘trans’ kids of not being allowed to play on the team of their choice but what about ‘the individual girl who does not make the team’, asked Kavanaugh? ‘There’s a harm there’, he said.

Absolutely there is. The harm of unfair exclusion, the harm of seeing your rights sacrificed at the altar of a boy’s feelings. You don’t need a PhD in Advanced Biology to know it is wrong to let lads compete against girls and women. You just need eyes in your head. You just need to have seen male swimmer Lia Thomas, with his big shoulders and massive hands, go up against Riley Gaines. Anyone who’s ever met a 15-year-old boy knows he should not be anywhere near a girls’ sports team, or a girls’ changing room.

These hearings have further confirmed the twisted, Orwellian nature of the trans ideology. It poses as a civil-rights movement but it is the polar opposite – it’s a movement singularly devoted to dismantling the hard-won rights of girls and women in order to validate the gender delusions of boys and men. That the case is literally being made that it is unconstitutional to limit girls’ sports to girls alone is all the proof we need: this crusade wears the drag of civil rights even as it trashes civil rights. In this case, the civil right of a girl to enjoy access to fair sport and the joy of competing with her peers.

The very language that swirls around cases like these is dishonest and corrupting. The students from Idaho and West Virginia are challenging ‘bans on transgender women and girls’, cries the BBC. They’re fighting against ‘bans on participation’. But they’re not banned from sports. No boy is. They have the perfect liberty to try out for the male team. It feels positively Kafkaesque to hear lawyers, activists and media people wang on about ‘participation’ even as they push an ideology that would devastate girls’ rights of participation by inviting bigger, faster, stronger boys to steal their places and their medals.

The Supreme Court will likely make the right call. It’s been fun to watch the likes of Justice Samuel Alito bamboozle the students’ lawyers with such questions as: ‘What does it mean to be a boy or a girl?’ And yet while things might get fixed legally, we still have a huge problem socially. That even the once-reasoned ACLU now splutters in confusion when asked ‘What is a boy?’ is a testament to how far and wide the post-truth malady has spread. And many states in the US still allow ‘trans girls’ – boys – to play on girls’ teams, despite President Trump’s stirring executive order that rightly said it is ‘demeaning, unfair and dangerous’ to let boys compete against girls.

There’ll come a time when we look back on this historical moment with bewilderment. Just as modern-day Americans wonder at the hysteria that befell Salem, so future Americans will wonder how well-educated people came to argue for the right of men to intrude into women’s sports and spaces, and then damned as a ‘bigot’ any woman who dared to say: ‘No. Get out.’ The sooner that bewilderment comes, the better.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.