Father Of Female Athlete Speaks Out: Gender Wokeness Will Destroy Women's Sports

One of the most rewarding experiences of being a parent was watching my daughter compete in Division One track during her college career. The feeling of pride is something difficult to describe. But you just knew that when she was running, pushing her body to give all she had, while her teammates and crowd cheered her on, something wonderful was happening. And it was not just about the immediate competition of an 800-meter run. Women’s athletics is about so much more than that.  Most who watch these events are not privy to all that goes into making these girls what we see before us. This is just the apex of a pyramid of commitment, dedication, and grueling practice that brought these girls to this level.

In my daughter’s case, stepping up to the starting blocks represented the culmination of years of motivation, sacrifice, and focus…attributes that have served her well not just on the track but in her studies and indeed her adult life as a whole.  What I saw when she waited in that tense silence for the starter’s pistol to ring out was someone who began playing soccer as a young girl; her speed was noticed by coaches who steered her to high school track. I saw years of hard work in high school, constantly honing her skills and technique until college coaches noticed her gift for speed as well. Then the true work began. Weight rooms on a daily basis. Long, grueling runs to build up her stamina, in all kinds of weather in very hilly terrain. Indeed, several hours each day devoted to her training, and then hitting the books at night to maintain the grades needed in a STEM major to get into medical school. I saw her staying home on weekends while her college friends went out to enjoy the campus night life because she had a meet the next day and there was no tolerance for drinking or cavorting during the season. No doubt other parents of women athletes will tell you the same tales.

And yet…

For the women athletes of the future, such discipline, effort, and sacrifice could very well all be for naught. Try to imagine you are a woman runner at an NCAA national championship. You have worked much of your life, logging countless hours of self-denial and pushing yourself to reach this moment. You step up to the starting block only to discover you are standing next to someone who calls himself a “woman”, but is really a physically dominant biological man on hormones and possibly suffering gender dysphoria. You know you have no chance of winning. And perhaps the words of Vince Lombardi go through your mind: “We run to win, not just be in the race.” You wonder if this is a quirky dream. Pre-race jitters playing tricks on the eyes. But, no, this is really happening. Everything you have worked for has been dragged onto the altar of wokeness in a bizarre sacrifice to a faux reality imposed by those who are either delusional or the worst of cynics.

The fact is women’s athletics is under a relentless assault from the forces of uber-wokeness that anyone with functioning brain cells not so invested in ideology as to have lost touch with reality can only describe as collective madness. As Daily Wire and other news outlets have reported, UPenn swimmer, Lia Thomas, a biological male who identifies as a female, “crushed the competition” on Thursday evening, taking first in the NCAA Women’s Swimming Championship 500-yard freestyle. When competing as a man Thomas finished sixth in his state high school swimming championships and second in several Ivy League men’s freestyle events. In other words, he was a pretty good men’s swimmer. But Michael Phelps he wasn’t. Not to worry, as that’s an easy fix now. What Thomas and other second-tier male athletes have learned is that if you can’t compete as a man, just move on to girls athletics and beat them instead. John Lohn, editor-in-chief of Swimming World magazine, described Thomas’ win as “a joke, with biological women as the punchline,” adding it is “hardly a laughing matter.”

Thomas is not an anomaly but part of a disturbing trend in women’s sports. As a former track dad I watched with dismay a few years back when another biological male who calls himself CeCe Tefler [in photo] did the identity shell game and suddenly showed up at women’s track and field events. Just for your guide, Tefler, whose name for 90% of his life was Craig, competed in men’s Division II (not even D1) in the 400-meter hurdles at the 36-inch men’s division height, in which he ranked 200th in 2016 and 390th in 2017. A mediocrity at best. Again, no problem. He just did the gender switcheroo and voila, he became not just a top “female” athlete, but an insurmountable force who shattered records and put up numbers that no biological woman will ever touch.

The prima facie lunacy of this existential threat to the integrity of women’s athletics is superseded only by its rank unfairness. As Piers Morgan tweeted out: “If you support this you’re actively participating in the willful destruction of women’s sports and women’s rights to fairness & equality. It’s shameful.”

It is indeed shameful. And even more so when you consider the complicity of the NCAA, and trophy-hungry coaches, in sanctioning this charade. And Heaven help any female athlete who dares point out this obvious injustice. They are silenced by fears of being kicked off teams (and losing scholarships), being ostracized by the leftist crowds that infest the college campus, and even having their good names tarnished with the label “transphobic”. No wonder they are cowered. The risk/reward calculation favors keeping their mouths shut. Such punitive threats in the face of speaking an obvious truth is something out of the pages of Solzhenitsyn. So much for colleges being places of learning and discovery. Think on that the next time you cut your tuition check.

Of course, like all woke trends, this will not end with Tefler or Thomas. Already other so-called “self-identified females,” unable to compete with the men, are lining up to take their shot at decimating women’s sports. Today it is the NCAA but it is only a matter of time before this cancer metastasizes into the professional level. Consider: John McEnroe was chastised a while back for his observation that, even as he believes her to be the greatest women’s tennis player in history, Serena Williams could have barely cracked the top 700 in the men’s rankings. So what, then, is to prevent a lower to middle-ranked male player from suddenly discovering he is really a “woman”, taking a few hormone shots while changing his name, and mopping up all opponents, walking away with every Grand Slam event…and the lucrative prize money that goes with them? Why have a WNBA at all? Just have it be another league of gender-confused men, and turn it into one of two conferences modeled after the NFL. On and on it goes until all that is left for female athletics is the uneven parallel bars, for obvious reasons (ouch!).

The frightening thing is how much all this has already wormed its way into our language, and therefore our culture. Go on Wikipedia and Lia Thomas and CeCe Telfer are described as having been “assigned male at birth”, and referred to “she” and “her” throughout; nor will you find any mention of the male names by which they went through most of their lives...until they started losing meets. In fact, it took me a long time of net surfing before I found an obscure mention of Thomas’ baptized male name, Will. It has been effectively scrubbed. Although overused, the phrase “Orwellian” aptly applies here. “There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than the corruption of language.” Indeed.

I am relieved this wave of reality distortion hit the NCAA after my daughter graduated, as I fear for the women athletes of the future. Still, there are glimmers of hope. The conservative group Concerned Women for America has filed a civil rights complaint with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights against UPenn, accusing the school of “refusing to protect the rights of female athletes” under Title IX. We shall see.

So, let’s finally get the elephant in the room out of the way: am I “transphobic” for writing this? Only to those who have lost all semblance of reality. To the rational I am merely a concerned dad, and supporter of women’s sports and Title IX. In fact, I would argue that, as I am a classical liberal and fanatical devotee to Civil Liberties and the Bill of Rights, I am incapable of “phobia” (from the Greek “phobos” or fear) about anyone’s self-identification. One would think anyone who genuinely cares for others would not wish to make someone feel threatened or despised simply for how they choose to live their lives. If you want to call yourself a rooster and start clucking and parading around the barnyard be my guest. Where I take issue is when you then take this self-identification a step further by insisting you now have a right to enter a cock fight. This is not “trans rights.” This is the imposition of one’s self-identification upon others. One might use a version of an old phrase we learned in school when bona fide liberals, not neo-fascist far-left nihilists, taught my classes. One’s right to call himself a woman ends where our  daughters’ collegiate athletic careers and scholarships begin. Should you misconstrue this as anything more than a plea for justice, fairness, the protection of women’s sports and just basic common sense, then you are the problem. Not me. And, yes, as Piers says, you should be ashamed of yourself.