By CHRIS POWELL
According to the leader of the Democratic majority in the state Senate, Norwalk’s Bob Duff, Republican legislators are “mean” for proposing legislation to prevent boys from participating in girls’ sports when the boys think of themselves as girls.
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“Mean” is pretty tame as Democratic criticism of Republicans goes these days. At least Duff didn’t call the Republicans racist, misogynist, or right-wing extremists, as is commonly done by many Democrats without prompting other Democrats to call them “mean.” These days anyone who suggests, for example, that state government shouldn’t be controlled by the government employee unions anymore is bound to be called one of those things, maybe all three. For as Lenin or some other totalitarian is supposed to have observed: If you label something well enough, you don’t have to argue with it.
Calling Republicans “mean” for wanting to keep males out of female sports is not an argument. It is a distraction, because there is no argument against keeping males out of female sports, except that doing so may hurt the feelings of the males who think of themselves as female.
But keeping those males out of female sports doesn’t deny them the ability to participate in sports, as is sometimes alleged, since they remain free to participate in male sports.
If anyone really needs reminding, the premise of segregating the genders in sports is that on average males are larger, stronger, and faster than females, and that only such segregation can assure equal opportunity for females, which the 1972 amendments to Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were meant to achieve.
But now that the transgenderism cult has taken over the Democratic Party, the party maintains that physical differences between the sexes have disappeared and there is no unfairness in requiring females to compete against males, even as males competing as females have famously robbed the latter of deserved victories in Connecticut and throughout the world, sometimes inflicting physical injuries on the females.
That unfairness is what is “mean,” though Duff affects not to see it.
If a male can deny biology and merely think himself female and induce government to compel everyone to pretend along with him, what becomes of reality? After all, if the adage is true — that you’re only as old as you feel — how can adults be prevented from playing in Little League and lording it over the kids there?
Most people know that the transgenderism cult in sports is nonsense but are reluctant to say so lest they risk having the cult’s many demagogues call them “mean” or something worse. After all, they may figure that there is only a little injustice here — to the few females who lose to the males who purport to have transcended their gender and its physical advantages.
Even so, it’s injustice all the same, and resolving the issue in favor of justice might be easy in Connecticut if a team competing against the University of Connecticut’s beloved women’s basketball team recruited a transgender player or two who proceeded to knock the UConn women around in a blowout on television.
The resulting popular indignation might give Connecticut Democrats some political courage.
The Biden administration turned Title IX on its head, the Trump administration is striving to put it back upright, and a few Democrats may be realizing that the country is not inclined to keep pretending along with them that males belong in female sports, bathrooms, and prisons, nor to pretend that immigration law enforcement should stop. Indeed, only such Democratic nuttiness could have brought Donald Trump back to the presidency.
California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, who aspires to his party’s next presidential nomination, appeared to have deduced this the other day when he told an interviewer that male participation in female sports is unfair. This was amazing, since California is where most nuttiness originates.
If Newsom can repudiate the nuttiness, could Senator Duff and other Democrats in Connecticut repudiate it someday as well? Or would that be too “mean”?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 