Just how absurd is American culture becoming? How long will sane Americans put up with it?
A biological man who identifies as a woman and goes by the name “JayCee Cooper” has filed a lawsuit to force USA Powerlifting to let him compete with biological women who face extreme disadvantages in this kind of sport. To add insult to injury, Cooper was a former junior national champion in curling before he stopped competing due to gender dysphoria. According to The Hill, Cooper “overcame” his gender dysphoria using “prescribed medications,” likely cross-sex hormones, and then wanted to return to the sport.
The man has the gall to claim that he is the aggrieved party. In fact, he has suggested that USA Powerlifting’s rational stance against males competing against females constitutes an attack on his “basic human dignity.”
“I don’t want anyone to experience what I and other trans athletes have and continue to experience: having our basic human dignity questioned and opportunities denied because we are trans. We all benefit when sports are as inclusive as possible, when we organize around our shared humanity and collective empowerment,” Cooper, co-director of Pull for Pride, said in a press conference.
“I believe in the power of sports to bring people together and build strong communities. Women should be able to participate and succeed at every level — including trans women,” he argued.
Of course, “trans women,” short for “transgender women,” is a category exclusively for biological males. Last year, three Connecticut high school girls and their mothers filed a Title IX lawsuit challenging rules that allow biological males to compete in women’s high school sports. Their lawsuit noted that “male puberty quickly increases the levels of circulating testosterone in healthy teen and adult males to levels ten to twenty times higher than the levels that occur in healthy adult females, and this natural flood of testosterone drives a wide range of physiological changes that give males a powerful physiological athletic advantage over females.”
“Inescapable biological facts of the human species [are] not stereotypes, ‘social constructs,’ or relicts of past discrimination,” the lawsuit argued. It also listed 8 broad physiological athletic advantages males enjoy over girls and women after the onset of puberty, including larger lungs, larger hearts, an increased number of muscle fibers and muscle mass, higher myoglobin within muscle fibers (enabling faster transfer of oxygen to those muscles), larger and longer bones, increased mineral density in bones, and height.
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Due to these long recognized advantages, sporting events have long had different standards for boys and girls to accommodate the athletic striving of biological females. For example, women’s volleyball nets are 7 inches lower, the weight of high school shot put for boys is 36 percent heavier, the hurdle is 6 inches higher for boys, etc. Even the Journal of Medical Ethics, which has published an article calling for Child Protective Services to remove gender-confused kids from their parents if the parents won’t give them experimental transgender drugs, also published an article condemning the “intolerable unfairness” of the Olympic Committee’s pro-transgender rules.
Testosterone is far from the sole reason males have an unfair advantage over females in women’s sports, however. Differences between male and female development begin in the womb and continue throughout life. As Duke Law School professor Doriane Lambelet Coleman testified, if the pro-transgender Equality Act allowed biological men to compete in women’s sports, “the very best women in the world would lose to literally thousands of boys and men, including thousands who would be considered second-tier.”
Given these facts, it is the height of hubris for Cooper to demand to compete against biological women.
Yet he responds to the basic unfairness of his demands by claiming that critics are “demonizing” his “body.”
“Powerlifting is a sport of empowerment pushing through adversity and seeing what our bodies can do. As a trans person this took on additional meaning because our bodies are so politicized and demonized regularly,” he argued.
Tragically, the law in Minnesota may be on Cooper’s side. The group Gender Justice filed a lawsuit on Cooper’s behalf, alleging that USA Powerlifting violated the Minnesota Human Rights Act, which expressly bans “discrimination” against transgender people. Technically, the law only includes “sexual orientation” as a protected class, which is broadly (and falsely) interpreted to include transgender identity.
USA Powerlifting told Cooper he was ineligible to compete because “[m]ale-to-female transgenders are not allowed to compete as females in our static strength sport as it is a direct competitive advantage.” The organization does allow biological women who identify as male — “transgender men” — to compete with males, ostensibly because these women face the disadvantage. USA Powerlifting claims it has not banned transgender athletes because it allows “transgender men.”
The Hill‘s article on Cooper referred to him as “she” throughout, even though he has male DNA, ostensibly went through puberty as a male, and performed well in male junior curling — becoming a national champion. The Hill also cited athletes who celebrated Cooper and mentioned the hatred that transgender people face, without any reference to biology or the inherent advantages males have over females in powerlifting.
While Cooper appears to have taken cross-sex hormones, the article did not mention whether or not he underwent transgender surgery. Even if he has, he still enjoys multiple biological advantages from the womb onward, not to mention his history as a national champion in male sports.
If there were ever a case to reject a man’s petition to compete with biological women, this seems to be it. Yet the very fact that The Hill and other outlets push the transgender narrative as if it were the only way of approaching these issues suggests that the court may cave to societal pressure. Americans must oppose this insanity.
Tyler O’Neil is the author of Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Follow him on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
