Tommy Conlon: Tide is starting to turn in sport and in society against men masquerading as women
Truth doesn’t need a loud voice but an ideology needs noise, and plenty of it
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is tentatively taking steps to admit that men are, after all, different to women.
Optimists are hopeful that at some stage the IOC will also declare without fear or favour that the Earth isn’t flat either.
But for the moment we must be content with baby steps here. After years of cowardice masquerading as ‘inclusiveness’, this epically unethical outfit is tiptoeing its way back to biological reality, having realised which way the wind is now blowing.
On Monday last reports emerged that the inner chamber of the five-ringed casino might be in the process of banning men who identify as women from women’s competition. In June the new IOC president, Zimbabwe’s Kirsty Coventry, had commissioned a scientific review of the evidence.
Having won seven Olympic medals in swimming, Coventry herself would hardly have needed much scientific research to know why male and female athletes had separate competitive categories. The reasons were so obvious that a child would have understood them. The reasons were as old as humankind itself.
And we doubt Coventry would have been entirely happy if she’d had to compete in the pool with men who’d declared themselves to be women; and then to find that she’d have to share a locker room with them too for the business of togging out and togging in. These were and remain fundamental violations of fairness and privacy.
Coventry knew this all along, of course. So did all the other passengers on the IOC’s five-star gravy train. The whole world of sport knew it. The whole world, full stop, knew it.
The gender ideology racket was and is the Emperor’s New Clothes of the 21st century. Hans Christian Andersen’s famous fable was first published in 1837. One read it in childhood but even then it seemed to have a basic plausibility problem: surely so many people could not be so stupid as to believe that the emperor parading through the streets was actually wearing the most beautiful new fashions, given that he was wearing no clothes at all?
You concluded in your innocence that it was a quaint story of its time. Since then we’d had Darwin and Marie Curie and Einstein, aviation and penicillin and the motor car, the atomic age and DNA and computers and the internet and artificial intelligence.
After a century of astonishing scientific achievement, surely a biological reality that is one of human life’s very building blocks was proven beyond doubt. The age of empiricism, science and reason had banished swathes of superstitions and irrational beliefs. And anyway, one didn’t need to be Einstein to know that man is man, woman is woman, and the Earth is round.
But hark, somewhere out there in the secret laboratories of the left-wing hypocrisy complex, a cry went up; they had made a discovery that was revealed only to them, the true believers. Like Archimedes shouting “Eureka!”, this tiny cabal of zealots had its own slogan for its own divine revelation: “Transwomen are women!” Let the word spread far and wide from this day forward: “Transwomen are women!”
And slowly but surely an outside world that was going about its business started picking up this discourse on the bush telegraph, in between going to work and washing the children and making the dinner. And most of us were silently thinking, what fresh madness is this now?
We were still only getting our heads around the ever-lengthening list of vowels and consonants for gay people, which will soon enough be longer than the alphabet itself. And now we were hearing more and more talk of transgender this and transgender that and transgender the other.
It came with its own jargon too, the better to confuse and intimidate us. This of course is a time-honoured strategy deployed for millennia already by religions and the law. Where once we had plain old lesbians and homosexuals, we now have LGBTIQCAPGNGFNBA. If it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, it’s because it’s not supposed to. Keeping the terminology obscure is a way of keeping you in your place. The preachers prefer to have sole command of the language; it helps to keep the flock quiet and cowed.
And in the gender ideology battle of the last 10 years, the flock has been introduced to a new gospel containing phrases that sound scientific but are more like accusations. You are no longer merely male or female, boy or girl, lad or lass; instead you are “cisgender”, “heteronormative”, a “gender binary” pleb. In this brave new world, to be born heterosexual is almost akin to being born with a form of original sin for the secular age. And like original sin, you should accept you are guilty as charged from the day you came into the world.
Citizens have been lectured into a new vocabulary such as “gender dysphoria”, “gender self-identification”, “preferred pronouns”, “pregnant people”, “assigned male at birth”, “assigned female at birth”, “pre-operative transsexual”, “post-operative transsexual”, and so on. We’ve been trying to tiptoe across this linguistic minefield, anxious not to give offence, even more anxious not to incur the wrath of the new vigilantes waiting to pounce on your innocent mistakes.
Truth doesn’t need a loud voice because it’s inviolable. It has its own sovereign integrity. But an ideology needs noise, and plenty of it. It needs propaganda and policing and anger. It needs zealots to chase down heretics and publicly scourge them. Sadly, it cannot nowadays physically torture dissidents, as in the grand old days of the Spanish Inquisition, but it can economically destroy them by driving them out of their jobs, and psychologically destroy them by hounding them on social media, where vast mobs are available at the touch of a button to hunt down the fugitive.
And if your ideology happens to be scientifically risible, then by Jaysus you are going to need an army of fanatics to impose it on society. There is no room for milk-and-water followers here. Because this is a big job. In fact, as Helen Joyce writes in her 2023 book Trans, it is asking for nothing less than “a total rewrite of societal rules”.
And if you’re intent on driving a coach through “the legal and societal order”, it helps if the horses pulling the coach can be labelled Diversity, Inclusion, Equality and Empathy. The four gospels of the new Testament of Tolerance, the Matthew, Mark, Luke and John of the holy and apostolic Church of Utopia. After all, everyone is in favour of empathy and compassion and general decency. But the professional craw-thumpers of this creed tend to get high on their own supply.
As with many clerics of many faiths, the preachers of this dogma have gotten fond of the ego trip. The urge to tell people what to think, what to say and what to do, will always appeal to those who enjoy a frisson of power and control. Better still if you can disguise your authoritarian streak behind a veneer of righteous tolerance. You have the luxury of behaving with gratifying intolerance under the guise of tolerance.
Joyce is the Dublin-born academic and journalist who forensically dismantled the cod science behind gender ideology, and the vicious hysteria with which its fundamentalists prosecuted the cause across academia, politics, the arts and media.
Bottom line: a man cannot become a woman just because he wants to. “Biological sex has an objective basis,” writes Joyce in Trans. “Sexual dimorphism — the two sexes, male and female — first appeared on Earth 1.2 billion years ago. Mammals date back 210 million years. In all that time, no mammal has ever changed sex. Men and women have therefore evolved under differing selection pressures for an extremely long time, and these have shaped male and female bodies and psyches in ways that matter profoundly for health and happiness. The distinction between the sexes is not likely to be at all amenable to social engineering, no matter how much some people want it to be.”
Undeterred by this biological brick wall, the “social engineers” set about trying to knock it down anyway. Unable to make the scientific argument, they had to turn it into a form of ideological terror. The way in which they cowed western societies into submission ought to be a warning to us, in order to recognise it early when it starts happening again in the name of some other cause. (One could argue that the same playbook has been deployed in the ongoing immigration wars.)
The gender conflict, writes Joyce, is “about transactivism. It is a story of policy and institutional capture; of charitable foundations controlled by billionaires joining forces with activist groups to pump money into lobbying behind the scenes for legal change. They have won over big political parties, notably America’s Democrats, and big businesses, including tech giants.
They are backed, too, by academics in gender studies, queer theory and allied fields, and by pharmaceutical and health-care industries, which have woken up to the fortunes to be made from ‘gender-affirmative’ medicine. This powerful new lobby far outnumbers the trans people it claims to speak for. And it serves their interests very poorly.”
Indeed, the actual numbers of trans people are so tiny, and the crusade around them so disproportionately maniacal, that one often wondered if it really was about trans rights at all. Is the trans issue just another wedge with which to attack the conservative middle ground that holds societies together?
Anyway, whenever they appeared online, in print, on television and radio, the rage of trans activists was unmistakable. They were The Furies of Greek mythology reincarnated, the goddesses of vengeance and wrath. And all along they were, and still are, commanding us to believe that black is white, that up is down, that two and two is five. Biology was just another bourgeois construct. Yes, the Emperor is wearing beautiful clothes although he is bollock naked; yes, the Emperor is a woman, even if his balls are swinging between his knees as he cavorts down the high street.
And Imane Khelif is a woman too, even when Angela Carini swore afterwards that she’d never felt punching power like it before. Carini is the Italian boxer who quit after 46 seconds against the Algerian Khelif in the Olympic games last year. “In highly-charged scenes at the North Palais Arena,” reported Seán Ingle for the Guardian from ringside, “a first punch from Khelif dislodged Carini’s chinstrap and a second smashed against her chin and bloodied her shorts. After multiple punches Carini returned to her corner and raised her hand. She fell to her knees sobbing and refused to shake Khelif’s hand after the Algerian was declared the winner.”
The controversy generated such an outcry that it may have become a tipping point for the IOC, and indeed sport in general. Khelif had been disqualified from the World Championships in 2023 for failing a testosterone test. He won gold at the Olympics. In May of this year World Boxing introduced mandatory sex testing for all competitions under its aegis. Khelif refused to undergo the test and did not enter the World Championships in September. But man, he still feels like a woman, not unlike Shania Twain perhaps.
In sport and in society, the tide is starting to turn. But the transition, as it were, will probably be long and painful as The Furies continue to vent their rage. Eventually however, the tide always turns because nature has to have her way. King Canute tried to turn the waves back too, once upon a time. Maybe if he’d identified as a queen, he’d have had better luck.
