Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Recently we have had two contrasting phenomena.
One is that President Donald Trump had issued an executive order suggesting or maybe threatening K-12 sports programs—and indeed, college and higher education as well—that if they allowed biological men to compete in women’s sports, then he was going to consider cutting off federal funds for that.
But at the same time he did it, the number of transgendered women—that is biological men who have transitioned to supposedly women—has increased and soared in women’s sports.
So, here on the West Coast, a trans athlete dominated the state high school track and field competitions, winning three or four main events. The same thing happened in Oregon. The same thing had happened in Washington. The same thing is happening in Minneapolis with girls baseball in the finals.
The point is it’s usually a phenomenon in blue states and in particular, blue cities. And Donald Trump’s executive orders are going the way of sanctuary cities. People are just ignoring them because they feel that he wouldn’t dare cut off federal funds because it would shut down the whole school.
But let’s get some background on this whole transgendered sports phenomenon. And maybe there’s five or six things we should keep in mind.
No. 1: We know a lot about gender dysphoria. There’s a long history of sex research about people whose psychological or hormonal makeup does not match their physical characteristics. But here’s the key: They’re very rare.
Until the transgendered—I don’t know what we would call it—phenomenon in the last 10 years, we accepted classical epidemiological studies that showed there were about five people who suffered from genuine transgendered phenomenon per 100,000 people: 0.005%. If you do the math, in a country of about 340 million people, we’re talking maybe 20,000, maybe 0.005%, or five per 100,000, maybe 10.
But you see the Pew poll and other polling ask students on campus, they ask the general public and they say there may be 20 million people. But there has been no history of that once the science of epidemiology started, which suggests it might be more of a trendy phenomenon than actual biological or scientific matter.
The second thing to remember is this is not new.
As a classicist, I can tell you that there are documented fables, myths, poems, histories about people who feel they were in the wrong bodies. The most famous is Catullus Poem 63, about a young man who performs transsexual surgery on himself in a fit of mania in honor of the god—the sexually ambivalent god—Cybele and castrates himself and is very unhappy when he wakes up out of the frenzy.
We have this novelist Petronius’ “Satyricon,” where a lot of men are cross-dressers—which is a different phenomenon—but transvestism. And we have—I think there’s a fable in “Phaedrus” about men who change into women. And we got to remember the god Hermaphroditus that comes from Hermes and Aphrodite—the combination of a male and female god. And there’s many fables about that.
So, it’s an ancient phenomenon.
Here’s another thing to remember. Does anybody know—and I’m asking a genuine question—does anybody know of a female athlete who decided that she was in the wrong body and she transitioned to maleness, manliness, and she won a major event? I know of none.
So, when we talk about transgendered sports, we’re talking about one phenomenon. We’re talking about men.
And if anybody—let me ask a corollary question as I pause here. Does anybody know a famous, well-known, but especially spectacular male athlete that transitioned? I don’t. It’s usually men that were not very successful, at least in the elite of their division or their field, who transition to feminism. And then they become very, very successful.
And this is very important because we are told that once you transition, you are a genuine new sex. That your prior muscular skeleton frame doesn’t really matter, given your hormonal treatment. But it does. Because when we’re talking about transgenderism in sports, we’re not talking about women who become men. And because they don’t succeed in that sport, that reminds us that they’re not fully men. Or if they were, they could just declare their new gender and compete competitively.
And by the same token, 100% of what the controversy is about are men who have bigger frames, more muscles who transition and dominate women’s sports in a way they did not dominate male sports. In other words, they’re taking.
Final thoughts: It has so many political ramifications. One is the party of the left, the Democratic Party, has embraced this 20-80 political issue—20% to 30% tops support this, of the American people. And yet, they’re going down the road of a very unpopular development and supporting transgendered women who are decimating and destroying female sports.
The second thing is it’s counterintuitive. The Left was supposed to be for gender parity. And that meant—that was defined by giving money and attention and resources to women so that their sports would be equivalent to male sports. And now we’re kind of reactionary. We flipped it upside down, where males go around the back, take over women’s sports, and essentially, destroy it. And yet that is popular among many on the left.
And then there’s a final political corollary. We were also told by some radical feminists—especially as it applies to women in combat units—that women could do anything that men could do. A small percentage can, physically. But the vast majority—in terms of muscularity, size, frame, endurance, lung capacity—cannot.
So it kind of, in a weird way, also affects that issue that women cannot really compete with men on the battlefield—at least in tasks that require physicality and muscularity.
Let’s just end the discussion with a brief summation.
Transgenderism is an old phenomenon. It was very, very rare, a very small percentage of the population. Sometime around 2005 to 2015, it exploded as a civil rights issue. And the numbers have been vastly inflated. It’s been trendy among young people on campus. But it has almost destroyed female sports in a way that’s ironic, tragically ironic, because the Left once was a protector and the champion of female sports and now it’s de facto, it’s destroyer.
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