"The event was moved off campus. It was limited to 35 people. And the police were called in because of threats." What a shame. It deserved to be a commencement speech.
"And when I look back on my life thus far, it occurs to me that the decisions of which I am most proud—the ones that strike like an unexpected kiss—are not the times when I obeyed the algorithm. They’re the times when I defied it and felt, for a moment, the magic and power of being alive."
I find it interesting that so many self proclaimed liberals, which cried out how transphobic North Carolina was about a bathroom policy, are now starting to understand what conservatives saw 6-7 years ago; How these same liberals were calling to cancel an entire state. How these same liberals backed pulling business from NC because how they are a state of hate. These same people are waking up.
I think conservatives saw Critical Queer Theory creeping in and knew it was wrong but they were unable to articulate why it was wrong. They didn’t even know there was such a thing as Critical Queer Theory.
Conservatives are waking up as well. The sad thing is Critical Theories have fully captured the Democratic Party and I don’t know how to uncapture them.
I want to be able to vote for a Democrat again. I want to have a choice.
This is my quandary too. I am a Second Wave feminist and I agree 100% with Abigail’s inspiring and gut-wrenching remarks. I abhor the authoritarian, anti-free speech turn the Democratic party has taken. I see critical race theory and so-called anti-racism as the grifts they really are, and I’ve come to appreciate the Black conservative position of brilliant thinkers like Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell.
But I’m still a liberal. I believe deeply in WOMEN’S reproductive rights, gun control, universal health care, labor rights, and the mitigation of global warming. I will never vote for an anti-choice candidate.
This raises the question of a third party. As always, it’s a spoiler, a long shot, a pipe dream. But maybe politics is ceasing to be the Blue Menu vs. the Red Menu, where we only get to order from one side. A meal of entirely one or the other is making me sick.
We must be strategic in this battle. In order to defeat the "transgender" crazies, we must have a broad coalition of people who unite in their opposition to the "gender"madness. It doesn't matter whether they're liberals or conservatives, Republicans or Democrats. The only thing that matters is that reject the "transgender nonsense" that now has a stranglehold on the entire country and has the potential to do far more damage to women and girls, boys and men than other issue we face today.
nancy... I am not up on this topic, but i really do not see why this guy from Penn U. would Ever want to be doing what he is doing. If his reason is "To Win", my felling is so far from the "win- win" thing, but i suspect that somehow society brings people to this point of "Win at all cost" ...so stupid. Hey, just me.
I will never understand why a young man like Will ("Call me Lia") Thomas would turn his strikingly handsome, masculine face and body into the most unconvincing parody of an biological woman. Why would any young man trash his enviable good looks and health and commit himself to an uncertain, medicalized future just to be able to break a few swimming records, records that everyone, except for the most brainwashed, knows were won only because he claimed to be something he is not and never will be. A biological woman.
Perhaps he has a condition that makes him more vulnerable. People with autism are especially easy to convince that they're "trapped in the body" of the opposite sex. Maybe he's gay. Though I've seen the photo of him dressed in women's clothes with his arms around a young woman that leads me to believe he's straight.
Or perhaps he's an autogynehile who gets off sexually on the idea of becoming a woman by wearing women's clothes. A few men do. When I was a child, Norman, my long-dead shoe salesman cousin showed me a photo of a man's foot wearing a pink satin high heel. Norman claimed the show model was some other salesmen. For many years I believed him, but I now know it was Norman, himself.
Or maybe he's just brainwashed by the woke propaganda that permeates the University of Pennsylvania. Perhaps he thinks coming out as a woman is the key to righteousness and popularity. I don't know. I can only guess. I can't read his mind.
If this Thomas incident were a one-of event, we could safely ignore it. But it's not. Not a week now passes when some "trans" guy who claims to be a "woman" doesn't make the main stream press. Last week it was Thomas. This week it's this "Amy" Schneider, the guy who's now on a winning streak on Jeopardy. I suspect he's autistic, though he only claims to have ADHD. Despite the June Cleaver pearls he's about as unconvincing as America's newest four star general, Richard (call me "Rachel") Levine.
Yes. You're absolutely right. We could not ignore Thomas even if he was a "one of." But the situation is especially critical because these incidents are now occurring more and more frequently. And the demands are growing more and more outrageous.
I’m a longtime conservative who, after the last election, opted out of all national news sources. And the best thing about that is not being on a “team” anymore. The world that the news depicted didn’t correspond to the world I lived in, a world where people were almost uniformly nice, a world in which people generally wanted to help each other out. It’s been a real blessing to see each other as individuals and not as avatars, to genuinely listen to individuals concerns.
Men who claim to identify as women (no meds or surgery required) are demanding legal equality with biological women by way of the Equality Act, legislation that has already passed the DEM House, meaning they will have equal access to women's sports, prisons, shelters and rights!
Men's feelings should not take legally protected priority over women's feelings but that is exactly what will happen if the Equality Act is passed!
The Equality Act is an abomination. If it is ever passed by the Senate, the health, safety, rights and privileges of women and girls trampled over by the radical "transgender" mob.
Gary... i can see what you are saying...yep. let me toss in my feeling that what you say still has meaning in the smaller towns. No perfection, but lots better, small towns.
But most of what you believe in have nothing to do with being “liberal”. Progressive (universal health care, pro-abortion, anti-gun) standpoints but not “liberal” in the classical sense.
Beeswax, I love this response! (especially the last line...hilarious and true) I too have a history of voting red, blue, and 3rd party. When I have voted 3rd party, I am chastised for "wasting" my vote. It is only a waste if others aren't brave enough to do the same. While I too am concerned with 3 of the 5 issues that you listed, I consider myself a conservative. I have often thought that that label is a misnomer. I have many liberal views, but am conservative when it comes to how much influence and reach our government has. This is the land of opportunity; historically, that is what brought so many immigrants to our shores. Now I fear that it may be the promise of "freebies". I guess only time will tell.
Bees... i can agree with most/post, thanks. But, Women's rights could step on the rights of others and "mitigation of global warming" (since IT Has been warming for 100's/1000's of years) could cause more problems, not to say , don't clean the water/ air, but that has been happening for 40/50 years. Too drastic to limit CO2 , since it is the lifeblood of the World, could become drastic, except for those that capitalize on "Climate Warming".
Yes, the climate is warming, which can/is helpful in many ways. What is the cause...problem. thanks.
An old friend, a liberal from North Carolina strongly supported the bathroom bill and even wrote a satirical song about it. But when his own daughter announced she was a "he," my friend saw the error of his ways and changed his tune. Sadly he's no longer alive to offer support as we fight the "trans" crazies.
Just stop voting for them or any politician that doesn't align with your values. We go through this all the time in California. Parents that go to school board meetings and voice concerns relative to CRT still continue to vote for the same politicians that vote this silliness in. They did this with AB101....Good Luck!
I really do believe a vast majority or registered Democrats, or those US citizens who identify as “liberals,” are not true believes of the woke ideology. Anyone familiar with the hidden tribes study? The perennial silent majority exists. I do think there is a generational divide though (while I don’t, however, blame young people for having been indoctrinated into this newer social justice scholarship while in college).
I have always considered my self a classical liberal and this had me voting Democrat for national elections and Republican for local stuff.
Of late, I don’t see any values I align with with the Democratic Party. The are several tenants I disagree with on the Republican but they seem to be more directionally “true”.
Doesn't matter. Voting DEM now means voting for trans extremism. I feel extremely betrayed. The DEM party has been bought and by the trans lobby. You don't have to dig very deep to discover that the DNC has become a men's rights organization.
"Yes, you can reject the false, dogmatic insistences of Gender Ideology and still wish to see transgender Americans prosper and flourish and fulfill their dreams in America."
This doesn't seem accurate to me. If a transgender American's concept of fulfilling his or her "dreams in America" requires other people to affirm that a person has changed sex, or to admit a person of one sex into spaces or competitions for the other sex, that cannot be accomplished without coercion.
What is the admission of males to women's sports, bathrooms, shelters, or prisons but the same old story of the strong devouring the weak? How many incarcerated women should be sacrificed out of "courtesy" to men who believe they are or wish they were women?
I can want an individual person to flourish and fulfil his or her dreams without supporting their right to rob a bank. Similarly, I can want transgender people to flourish without accepting that Lia Thomas belongs at a women's NCAA event.
I am concerned about the rapid rise in transgender identification, especially in children, but if a person suffering from dysphoria wants to present as the opposite sex, and that makes them happy, why should I oppose that? It will be a non-issue in 95 % of all social contexts. Where I -- and I think Abigail Shrier, and JK Rowling, and some other "TERFs"--draw the line is the limited number of traditionally sex-segregated spaces, which I think should be reserved for natal women.
The idea that the ""flourishing" of trans women means access to changing rooms, women's swimming events, and women's prisons is a fallacy.
And that is what is so insidious about that ideology. It actually becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy--if you sell the idea that trans people cannot possibly be happy and may even commit suicide if they get anything less than 100% validation in every context, trans people who might otherwise have been perfectly okay with something short of that internalize that not getting access to a locker room or someone saying the word "biological male" is a catastrophe.
True. But can one be truly happy/validated without 100% access? If not, does that mean that there is inevitable, inherent conflict within the concept of Gender Ideology? If so, does that not remove it from the fairy tale realm?
Since when is the right to happiness enshrined in any document?
In modern medicine, you would think that if someone comes to a doctor and say "my brain says I need to cut off a part of my body in order to be truly happy" the doctor would say, let's work on the brain part first, before anything else. Maybe a pill is better than amputation.
"The entire point is to destroy and dismantle society"
Yes, and to collect all power and moral authority into itself in the process. To oppress everyone to the point where freedom is utterly extinguished, and no one can remember what it was.
Mostly, but not always easily. There is a rare (1% of the population) third category, inter-sex, also called Differences of Sex Development. It is a well-studied, established medical condition that has nothing to do with politics or metaphysical self-identification. The chromosomes may say one thing, and yet each inter-sex individual has a unique profile in terms of how their bodies developed in utero, which usually leads to a choice at some point that may require surgical and hormonal intervention. Research this topic and you’ll see what a conundrum it can be.
It's also possible to be born without legs or arms. Shall we ban even acknowledging the very existence of arms and legs in order to "accommodate" such people?
There are still only two sexes, male and female. If someone has a disorder of sexual development, that doesn't make them "transgender," and intersex doesn't mean a person is between the two sexes. Some DSDs are very minor and easily corrected. And we certainly should not turn society into some crackpot idea of "gender inclusivity" just because one baby in 20,000 is born with a certain type of ambiguous genitalia.
I don’t disagree, but my comment was in response to the previous person who suggested deciding by chromosomes whether someone was male or female, and I was pointing out that this is almost always going to work, but there are extremely rare cases where the sex chromosomes don’t correlate with the hormone profile, morphology, presentation, etc. Thus, one might be XY but have no testosterone production and appears completely female. The absence of testosterone and lack of male secondary sex characteristics would deprive them of any male sex advantage over females in athletic competition. It is a rarity, to be sure, but it isn’t analogous to trans. It’s based on a true medical anomaly and often comes as a huge shock to a person who had defined themselves their entire life as a woman before discovering that they are XY. It has nothing to do with ideological gender inclusivity, which, again, I don’t care about and don’t even know what it means.
I went back and checked my sources and realize I erred when describing this type of XY person as producing no testosterone. In fact, they do produce testosterone, but in utero it is not recognized by the fetus (they suffer from complete androgen insensitivity syndrome — CAIS) and therefore, male genitalia do not develop. At puberty, the testosterone converts to estrogen, which the body can process, and this produces female secondary sex characteristics, including breasts, although since the person is XY they have no ovaries or uterus, so no periods. However, they do have the features, hair, skin, and body shape of females, and appear 100% female. Unlike a manufactured transgender “identity,” CAIS is based in the body. It seems to me that this is the one time when an XY person could be viewed as female for athletic purposes without having an unfair advantage or sabotaging the level playing field.
Thank you. I don’t claim to be an expert on this specific topic in any way, and I’m not qualified to speak on the difference between individuals who are truly intersex and those who aren’t. Are they pretending? incorrectly diagnosed? using the term for ideological or political aims? That last hypothesis seems the most plausible to me, given how pseudo-scientific trans ideology is.
Anyway, there is controversy regarding exactly how common DSD is in the human population worldwide, which may have to do with the fact that not all inter-sex people have ambiguous genitalia at birth and so may not be immediately recorded as inter-sex. I have no dog in this fight, except for wanting to know what is objectively true. As a counterweight to your statistic, here’s an article from an organization for the rights of inter-sex people which posits a significantly higher number.
This is a very interesting topic, although peripheral to the theme of the current article here on Substack. But I’d love to see a reference or two that would help me to get a clearer picture, if you care to share. Best regards.
As Jennifer Bilek points out in her amazing 11th Hour blog, "transgender" rights activism is not a grass roots movement. The trans rights activists are well funded by a dark network of nonprofits controlled by a small number of autogynephile billionaires including Stryker, Rothblatt, and Pritzker, who push this gender-bending malarky for the money, the power, their deranged sexual fantasies of giving birth to octuplets. The ultimate goal is transhumanism, and they see "transgenderism" as the easy on ramp. So if you're eager to have your great grandchildren spout feathers and gills where their genitals should be, step right on board. The "trans" train is leaving from Track 69.
At this point, I honestly don't give a rat's asterisk whether "transgender" people flourish or not. They have worn out their welcome.
'The idea that the "flourishing" of trans women means access to changing rooms, women's swimming events, and women's prisons is a fallacy.'
You or I can say that, but if an individual transwoman believes that "flourishing" requires, for example, competing in women's sports, who are you and I to disagree?
My point is that, if we start from the premise that the self-defined flourishing of self-defined transgender persons is an important societal goal or moral imperative, there is no limiting factor other than the conflicting self-defined flourishing of regular people, women and men. And that means it's a power conflict, plain and simple.
The demands of biological men who claim to be women grow more extreme and dangerous each day. Aggressive "transgender" activists aren't just content to destroy women's sports. They are now determined to destroy women's private spaces in prisons.
California's SB 132 requires that biological men who claim to be women (regardless of whether they're on hormones, have intact penises or even present as women) be transferred into women's prisons. Once inside, these biological men, some of whom are convicted murderers, rapists, or child abusers are placed inside locked cells with female inmates, whom they can freely beat, rape, and impregnate. Since SB132 took effect last January, 300 biological men have been transferred. Conditions are so dire that prison officials now distribute condoms and information on how to secure abortions for all female inmates.
We must never sacrifice the health and safety of biological women to pacify a small subset of biological men. "Trans" ideology is an outrage that rational people must reject loudly and forcefully.
This is where shanks should come into the equation, and perhaps or definitely preemptively. Because you know that when a male prisoner says he’s a woman and wants to go be with women, it’s not because he really thinks he’s a woman, he just wants a woman or twelve. Female prisoners should really think about performing some chopadickfrommes and then maybe accidentally cutting the femoral artery as well. Word would get around.
Basically allowing men who think they are women to take over women's spaces and sports and lives is the erasing of women. Some may be truly mentally ill and could just as easily think they are a duck. Others are malevolent like the predators who want to be in women's prisons for easy victims and game the increasingly leftist nut job systems.
User01 - I agree. The ethics of decision making and cheating is that deciders can be forgiven for allowing someone with invisible or hidden “cheat skills”. But once the cheating technique becomes known, deciders are expected to act against it: leadership 101.
The same place they are when women in Iran are beaten for leaving their homes or teenage girls in Gaza are trained as suicide bombers or toddlers in Afghanistan are sold as "brides." (The geographic designations could be replaced with cities and neighborhoods in Europe, as well.)
I'm not sure where that is. Faculty seminars? Critical theory conferences?
That's a really good topic. On the other hand, the trans phenomenon we're discussing is found in the United States among, in large part, upper-middle-class white people. The type of relativism that says, "Islam is a different culture, so forced marriage and honor killing are good for *those* women," doesn't seem applicable.
Is there some other identifiable factor that would explain many feminists' choice to favor men over women, if the men claim to be women?
And consider the cost of all the drugs and surgery. Those costs are distributed through the population - in pennies-per-person, but that's true of every costs accrued by everything from smoking to motorcycling. And every medical professional who is involved in gender is one who isn't doing anything about infant mortality in communities of color or treating cancer patients. Every hospital bed taken by a gender surgery patient is one not available for a shooting victim.
They are. Idaho has to pay for some guy who was a child abuser, a child abuser!, to now become a “woman”. Hopefully it’s still on appeal because as a taxpayer in Idaho this infuriates me.
On the question of why I'd speak up as well: I can't live with myself if I keep quiet and ignore the lies. So many old friends have silenced themselves, refused to speak to me when I bring up the usual forbidden (but bestselling!) authors--you, John McWhorter, others. How many times have I heard: "trust me and don't talk about this." I feel like I'm the kid who points out the emperor is naked, and I wish a few other kids would wave and say the same thing!
“Take back the right to speak your mind—thoughtfully, courteously, with a goal in mind beyond giving offense. The list of unmentionable truths expands so rapidly, without reason other than the attempt to suffocate a free people so that they forget the exhilaration of a lungful of air.”
-Abigail Shrier 12.2021
Abigail,
Thank you for inspiring us to enjoy a deep breath and to continue to speak our minds courteously, unapologetically, & out of love for each other and for the truth.
So proud of you and this message.As someone who has raised two wonderful women I am so impressed that your voice rings so loudly and true in the crazy madness of todays social warrior nonsense.I have wondered why young women don’t unite and respectfully boycott women's sports when they exclude women by putting biological men in the mix.The only way around this is putting on the XX or XY games where one plays in the games which one is.Years of women’s rights and hard fought improvements will be lost in a single generation and not just on the sports field.So much of this progressive nightmare is just to tear down the strength of the individual and the push for the collective which almost always devolves at the point of a gun.Be quiet and get back in line or we will shoot you,imprison you,take away your children or you ability to make a living.Please stand strong against these tides,there are many folks who stand with you.
My only quibble is I don’t think it’s a courtesy to go along with someone’s delusions like with their pronouns - it’s submission. We wouldn’t go along with someone who thinks they are Napoleon or a cat, we’d see them as rightly needing mental help. And we shouldn’t embrace someone who is transgender because there is no such thing, it’s only a person who mutilated themselves. A man can never not be a man. A woman can never not be a woman. The courteous thing to do, the kind thing to do, is help them get help.
Mr. Orwell put it in a nutshell many years ago: "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." He was good at that. We should emulate him as best we may.
I quite agree that the ideology of gender is a toxic concept, an invitation amounting to a demand that all of us abandon the concept of objective reality in favor of "tolerance" and "inclusion." This demand extends to other dogmas of postmodern progressivism as well, such as "anti-racism." And as Ms. Shier notes, the demand is backed up by the threat of persecution and punishment. At my age (72) that's really not much of a threat. But for young people just beginning to make their way in the world, it's a serious one indeed. Yes, female athletes should speak out against the ideology that makes nonsense of all their hard work and dedication—and what is worse, the demand that they smile and nod along as a mockery is made of women's sports. But when I remind myself of the near-universal condemnation and hymn of hate that would descend upon those young women, I can well understand their reluctance to raise a protest.
But I also see reason for hope. The very virulence of the gender ideology mob, its willingness to blame, bully, blight reputations, destroy lives, betrays a knowledge that the cause is not just, that it cannot be sustained by rational argument or appeals to justice. The devotees of this inhuman ideology know that power and power alone, in the sense of compelling people to do and say what they would not otherwise do and say, is the only way of imposing their will on the rest of us. That may look like their strength but in reality it's their great weakness.
Outstanding work Abigail; those are powerful words, sentences, and ideas.
The mob, led by government officials in Wisconsin, knew they weren't going to get a guilty verdict on Rittenhouse. But that was not the objective of the prosecution. The true objective of that prosecution was to create fear and doubt in those who may think of opposing the mob in the future. And the mob has succeeded; Rittenhouse himself now says, in retrospect, he wouldn't have gone to Kenosha.
And there are probably millions of people who saw that prosecution and said to themselves "Rittenhouse was defending himself, but I'd never put myself in the position risking losing everything."
As "the mob" continues their march towards tyranny, more and more people are likely to decide "it's just not worth it to risk losing everything", without realizing that giving into the mob will result in you, or your children, losing everything. It is only a matter of when.
I believe the US is currently in a civil war. It has not yet turned bloody, but it probably will. I can only hope that enough people will be willing to sacrifice all to save the greatest country the world has ever known: a country that has done more good for more people around the world for a longer period of time than any country that has preceded it. If we lose this country to the mob, it will be many centuries before a worthy successor appears.
A worthy successor might only appear out of the ashes of ruin and after the evolution of the free will with which Ms. Shrier began this marvelous speech. I agree that we are in a civil war now, albeit a cold one.
What I don't seem to get about all of this is that some people don't seem to understand what the primary goal of sports is.
Despite the approved narrative, it is not to be 'inclusive'. I would argue that word tries to mean too many things to too many people. I mean, just being a human being in the world and interacting with other human beings is, in my head, being inclusive. But that's not where my argument is going here.
The primary purpose of all sports is this: fair competition. That's it really. You need both of those to be true for it to work right, or at least as close to it as humanly and pragmatically possible. So that means that opponents in a competition should be have as equal a foundational ability as possible in order to engage in a fair competition. Otherwise it's...well...not fair.
Take wrestling for instance. There are lots of different weight classes in that sport. Each person only wrestles someone else in the same weight class because otherwise the match would be unfair. A 200lb wrestler would have a huge advantage against a 140lb wrestler. No one questions this because it makes complete and logical sense.
So why then is this logic completely thrown out the door when it comes to gender? You literally have to suspend reality and the laws of physics in order to say that a man who identifies as woman, or just a trans woman, can legitimately and fairly compete against a woman. Even if they are in the same weight class. Anyone who adheres to even a rudimentary understanding of rational thought should get this.
I don't know much about gender identity, I'm admittedly pretty ignorant on the matter. But I do know sports. And the entire point of them is to have a fair fight. If it's not fair, it's not a legitimate competition. And by extension not really a true sport either. It's just a random pick-up game in the park at that point.
In sports, what separates the winners from the losers (yes, there are losers...deal with it) should not be any obvious advantage and/or disparity between the competitors. Like getting to start the race 20 yards ahead, or having a body that hands-down completely outclasses everyone else's body before the race even begins. Winners should be determined by things like skill, desire, intelligence, conditioning, etc. Basically all of the things athletes spend lifetimes doing - training their asses off for a chance at being the best.
Elliot - I agree with you. I did sports in high school. Additionally, I expect sports directors or whatever the bosses call themselves to stop and say “Oops, we accidentally talked ourselves into a corner. We need to redo the discussion on ‘inclusion criteria’ or rules about who is allowed to compete.” If there is some “invisible hand” threatening menace - then ask the public for help.
"The event was moved off campus. It was limited to 35 people. And the police were called in because of threats." What a shame. It deserved to be a commencement speech.
Shrier is extraordinary.
Actually Abigail you are loved and admired. The only hate you receive is from a tiny cohort of zombified elites..
"And when I look back on my life thus far, it occurs to me that the decisions of which I am most proud—the ones that strike like an unexpected kiss—are not the times when I obeyed the algorithm. They’re the times when I defied it and felt, for a moment, the magic and power of being alive."
I'm ready to run through a brick wall.
Let’s gooooo!
I find it interesting that so many self proclaimed liberals, which cried out how transphobic North Carolina was about a bathroom policy, are now starting to understand what conservatives saw 6-7 years ago; How these same liberals were calling to cancel an entire state. How these same liberals backed pulling business from NC because how they are a state of hate. These same people are waking up.
I think conservatives saw Critical Queer Theory creeping in and knew it was wrong but they were unable to articulate why it was wrong. They didn’t even know there was such a thing as Critical Queer Theory.
Conservatives are waking up as well. The sad thing is Critical Theories have fully captured the Democratic Party and I don’t know how to uncapture them.
I want to be able to vote for a Democrat again. I want to have a choice.
This is my quandary too. I am a Second Wave feminist and I agree 100% with Abigail’s inspiring and gut-wrenching remarks. I abhor the authoritarian, anti-free speech turn the Democratic party has taken. I see critical race theory and so-called anti-racism as the grifts they really are, and I’ve come to appreciate the Black conservative position of brilliant thinkers like Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell.
But I’m still a liberal. I believe deeply in WOMEN’S reproductive rights, gun control, universal health care, labor rights, and the mitigation of global warming. I will never vote for an anti-choice candidate.
This raises the question of a third party. As always, it’s a spoiler, a long shot, a pipe dream. But maybe politics is ceasing to be the Blue Menu vs. the Red Menu, where we only get to order from one side. A meal of entirely one or the other is making me sick.
We must be strategic in this battle. In order to defeat the "transgender" crazies, we must have a broad coalition of people who unite in their opposition to the "gender"madness. It doesn't matter whether they're liberals or conservatives, Republicans or Democrats. The only thing that matters is that reject the "transgender nonsense" that now has a stranglehold on the entire country and has the potential to do far more damage to women and girls, boys and men than other issue we face today.
Agreed.
If you want to stop it you may just have to vote for a Republican. The Democrats will not fix it, they promote these intellectually vacant ideas.
I agree. We may just have to vote for a Republican just to break the stranglehold.
nancy... I am not up on this topic, but i really do not see why this guy from Penn U. would Ever want to be doing what he is doing. If his reason is "To Win", my felling is so far from the "win- win" thing, but i suspect that somehow society brings people to this point of "Win at all cost" ...so stupid. Hey, just me.
I will never understand why a young man like Will ("Call me Lia") Thomas would turn his strikingly handsome, masculine face and body into the most unconvincing parody of an biological woman. Why would any young man trash his enviable good looks and health and commit himself to an uncertain, medicalized future just to be able to break a few swimming records, records that everyone, except for the most brainwashed, knows were won only because he claimed to be something he is not and never will be. A biological woman.
Perhaps he has a condition that makes him more vulnerable. People with autism are especially easy to convince that they're "trapped in the body" of the opposite sex. Maybe he's gay. Though I've seen the photo of him dressed in women's clothes with his arms around a young woman that leads me to believe he's straight.
Or perhaps he's an autogynehile who gets off sexually on the idea of becoming a woman by wearing women's clothes. A few men do. When I was a child, Norman, my long-dead shoe salesman cousin showed me a photo of a man's foot wearing a pink satin high heel. Norman claimed the show model was some other salesmen. For many years I believed him, but I now know it was Norman, himself.
Or maybe he's just brainwashed by the woke propaganda that permeates the University of Pennsylvania. Perhaps he thinks coming out as a woman is the key to righteousness and popularity. I don't know. I can only guess. I can't read his mind.
If this Thomas incident were a one-of event, we could safely ignore it. But it's not. Not a week now passes when some "trans" guy who claims to be a "woman" doesn't make the main stream press. Last week it was Thomas. This week it's this "Amy" Schneider, the guy who's now on a winning streak on Jeopardy. I suspect he's autistic, though he only claims to have ADHD. Despite the June Cleaver pearls he's about as unconvincing as America's newest four star general, Richard (call me "Rachel") Levine.
We couldn't ignore Thomas even if he was a "one of" because he has stolen the women swimmer's achievements and records from them.
Yes. You're absolutely right. We could not ignore Thomas even if he was a "one of." But the situation is especially critical because these incidents are now occurring more and more frequently. And the demands are growing more and more outrageous.
I’m a longtime conservative who, after the last election, opted out of all national news sources. And the best thing about that is not being on a “team” anymore. The world that the news depicted didn’t correspond to the world I lived in, a world where people were almost uniformly nice, a world in which people generally wanted to help each other out. It’s been a real blessing to see each other as individuals and not as avatars, to genuinely listen to individuals concerns.
Easy for you to say that—You are a man!
Men who claim to identify as women (no meds or surgery required) are demanding legal equality with biological women by way of the Equality Act, legislation that has already passed the DEM House, meaning they will have equal access to women's sports, prisons, shelters and rights!
Men's feelings should not take legally protected priority over women's feelings but that is exactly what will happen if the Equality Act is passed!
The Equality Act is an abomination. If it is ever passed by the Senate, the health, safety, rights and privileges of women and girls trampled over by the radical "transgender" mob.
Gary... i can see what you are saying...yep. let me toss in my feeling that what you say still has meaning in the smaller towns. No perfection, but lots better, small towns.
I hear you. Lately I identify with the likes of Bill Maher.
"I abhor the authoritarian, anti-free speech turn the Democratic party has taken"
There was no "turn". It was always this way. You just liked what it promoted before.
Nope. Wrong. We’ll have to agree to disagree.
But most of what you believe in have nothing to do with being “liberal”. Progressive (universal health care, pro-abortion, anti-gun) standpoints but not “liberal” in the classical sense.
We have a difference of opinion regarding defined terms. I’m not here to debate, but to present my views. Disagree as you please.
Statements like this are confessions of wrongness.
See above.
STAY ON TOPIC, PLEASE!
Beeswax, I love this response! (especially the last line...hilarious and true) I too have a history of voting red, blue, and 3rd party. When I have voted 3rd party, I am chastised for "wasting" my vote. It is only a waste if others aren't brave enough to do the same. While I too am concerned with 3 of the 5 issues that you listed, I consider myself a conservative. I have often thought that that label is a misnomer. I have many liberal views, but am conservative when it comes to how much influence and reach our government has. This is the land of opportunity; historically, that is what brought so many immigrants to our shores. Now I fear that it may be the promise of "freebies". I guess only time will tell.
Bees... i can agree with most/post, thanks. But, Women's rights could step on the rights of others and "mitigation of global warming" (since IT Has been warming for 100's/1000's of years) could cause more problems, not to say , don't clean the water/ air, but that has been happening for 40/50 years. Too drastic to limit CO2 , since it is the lifeblood of the World, could become drastic, except for those that capitalize on "Climate Warming".
Yes, the climate is warming, which can/is helpful in many ways. What is the cause...problem. thanks.
I think it is speaks well of a person’s character when they are able to change their mind, right?
I agree. Mine changed in 2012.
An old friend, a liberal from North Carolina strongly supported the bathroom bill and even wrote a satirical song about it. But when his own daughter announced she was a "he," my friend saw the error of his ways and changed his tune. Sadly he's no longer alive to offer support as we fight the "trans" crazies.
Just stop voting for them or any politician that doesn't align with your values. We go through this all the time in California. Parents that go to school board meetings and voice concerns relative to CRT still continue to vote for the same politicians that vote this silliness in. They did this with AB101....Good Luck!
I really do believe a vast majority or registered Democrats, or those US citizens who identify as “liberals,” are not true believes of the woke ideology. Anyone familiar with the hidden tribes study? The perennial silent majority exists. I do think there is a generational divide though (while I don’t, however, blame young people for having been indoctrinated into this newer social justice scholarship while in college).
I have always considered my self a classical liberal and this had me voting Democrat for national elections and Republican for local stuff.
Of late, I don’t see any values I align with with the Democratic Party. The are several tenants I disagree with on the Republican but they seem to be more directionally “true”.
And yet I bet you've long subscribed to the notion that Democrats' ludicrous straw manning of Republicans was valid.
If the majority of Democrats did not support wokeness, wokeness would not have an approval rating well over 50% among registered Democrats.
Doesn't matter. Voting DEM now means voting for trans extremism. I feel extremely betrayed. The DEM party has been bought and by the trans lobby. You don't have to dig very deep to discover that the DNC has become a men's rights organization.
*believers
Everything?
"But—when asked, I will not state my pronouns and if you don’t believe in Gender Ideology, you shouldn’t either."
Compelled speech is the sine qua non of fascism.
"Yes, you can reject the false, dogmatic insistences of Gender Ideology and still wish to see transgender Americans prosper and flourish and fulfill their dreams in America."
This doesn't seem accurate to me. If a transgender American's concept of fulfilling his or her "dreams in America" requires other people to affirm that a person has changed sex, or to admit a person of one sex into spaces or competitions for the other sex, that cannot be accomplished without coercion.
What is the admission of males to women's sports, bathrooms, shelters, or prisons but the same old story of the strong devouring the weak? How many incarcerated women should be sacrificed out of "courtesy" to men who believe they are or wish they were women?
I can want an individual person to flourish and fulfil his or her dreams without supporting their right to rob a bank. Similarly, I can want transgender people to flourish without accepting that Lia Thomas belongs at a women's NCAA event.
I am concerned about the rapid rise in transgender identification, especially in children, but if a person suffering from dysphoria wants to present as the opposite sex, and that makes them happy, why should I oppose that? It will be a non-issue in 95 % of all social contexts. Where I -- and I think Abigail Shrier, and JK Rowling, and some other "TERFs"--draw the line is the limited number of traditionally sex-segregated spaces, which I think should be reserved for natal women.
The idea that the ""flourishing" of trans women means access to changing rooms, women's swimming events, and women's prisons is a fallacy.
“The idea that the ""flourishing" of trans women means access to changing rooms, women's swimming events, and women's prisons is a fallacy.”
Not in the ideology driving this madness. The entire point in to destroy and dismantle society.
The vast majority of trans people simply want to blend in. They DON’T want to draw attention to themselves.
And that is what is so insidious about that ideology. It actually becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy--if you sell the idea that trans people cannot possibly be happy and may even commit suicide if they get anything less than 100% validation in every context, trans people who might otherwise have been perfectly okay with something short of that internalize that not getting access to a locker room or someone saying the word "biological male" is a catastrophe.
True. But can one be truly happy/validated without 100% access? If not, does that mean that there is inevitable, inherent conflict within the concept of Gender Ideology? If so, does that not remove it from the fairy tale realm?
Since when is the right to happiness enshrined in any document?
In modern medicine, you would think that if someone comes to a doctor and say "my brain says I need to cut off a part of my body in order to be truly happy" the doctor would say, let's work on the brain part first, before anything else. Maybe a pill is better than amputation.
Today's Gender Doctors are more Theodoric of York than Jonas Salk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edIi6hYpUoQ
There is no right to validation. In fact, I posit, thinking so is simply narcissistic.
"The entire point is to destroy and dismantle society"
Yes, and to collect all power and moral authority into itself in the process. To oppress everyone to the point where freedom is utterly extinguished, and no one can remember what it was.
I am of very simple mind:
One is either XX or XY chromosomes and compete in the appropriate event as such.
Solves the problem easily...
Manetti
Science!
Mostly, but not always easily. There is a rare (1% of the population) third category, inter-sex, also called Differences of Sex Development. It is a well-studied, established medical condition that has nothing to do with politics or metaphysical self-identification. The chromosomes may say one thing, and yet each inter-sex individual has a unique profile in terms of how their bodies developed in utero, which usually leads to a choice at some point that may require surgical and hormonal intervention. Research this topic and you’ll see what a conundrum it can be.
1%?? Based on a friend working at 23 And Me, closer to 0.01% or less. This means the “estimates” of 0.1% to 0.5% are way off.
Intersex is truly rare and they still express one way or the other and many don’t even know it.
Yes, vanishingly rare. Not unusual to go through an entire medical career without encountering a single case
It's also possible to be born without legs or arms. Shall we ban even acknowledging the very existence of arms and legs in order to "accommodate" such people?
Well, they can't compete. Too bad. Life ain't fair.
There are still only two sexes, male and female. If someone has a disorder of sexual development, that doesn't make them "transgender," and intersex doesn't mean a person is between the two sexes. Some DSDs are very minor and easily corrected. And we certainly should not turn society into some crackpot idea of "gender inclusivity" just because one baby in 20,000 is born with a certain type of ambiguous genitalia.
I don’t disagree, but my comment was in response to the previous person who suggested deciding by chromosomes whether someone was male or female, and I was pointing out that this is almost always going to work, but there are extremely rare cases where the sex chromosomes don’t correlate with the hormone profile, morphology, presentation, etc. Thus, one might be XY but have no testosterone production and appears completely female. The absence of testosterone and lack of male secondary sex characteristics would deprive them of any male sex advantage over females in athletic competition. It is a rarity, to be sure, but it isn’t analogous to trans. It’s based on a true medical anomaly and often comes as a huge shock to a person who had defined themselves their entire life as a woman before discovering that they are XY. It has nothing to do with ideological gender inclusivity, which, again, I don’t care about and don’t even know what it means.
I went back and checked my sources and realize I erred when describing this type of XY person as producing no testosterone. In fact, they do produce testosterone, but in utero it is not recognized by the fetus (they suffer from complete androgen insensitivity syndrome — CAIS) and therefore, male genitalia do not develop. At puberty, the testosterone converts to estrogen, which the body can process, and this produces female secondary sex characteristics, including breasts, although since the person is XY they have no ovaries or uterus, so no periods. However, they do have the features, hair, skin, and body shape of females, and appear 100% female. Unlike a manufactured transgender “identity,” CAIS is based in the body. It seems to me that this is the one time when an XY person could be viewed as female for athletic purposes without having an unfair advantage or sabotaging the level playing field.
I agree with everything you said.
Individuals that are TRULY intersex are .02% of the population.
Thank you. I don’t claim to be an expert on this specific topic in any way, and I’m not qualified to speak on the difference between individuals who are truly intersex and those who aren’t. Are they pretending? incorrectly diagnosed? using the term for ideological or political aims? That last hypothesis seems the most plausible to me, given how pseudo-scientific trans ideology is.
Anyway, there is controversy regarding exactly how common DSD is in the human population worldwide, which may have to do with the fact that not all inter-sex people have ambiguous genitalia at birth and so may not be immediately recorded as inter-sex. I have no dog in this fight, except for wanting to know what is objectively true. As a counterweight to your statistic, here’s an article from an organization for the rights of inter-sex people which posits a significantly higher number.
https://www.intersexequality.com/how-common-is-intersex-in-humans/
This is a very interesting topic, although peripheral to the theme of the current article here on Substack. But I’d love to see a reference or two that would help me to get a clearer picture, if you care to share. Best regards.
As Jennifer Bilek points out in her amazing 11th Hour blog, "transgender" rights activism is not a grass roots movement. The trans rights activists are well funded by a dark network of nonprofits controlled by a small number of autogynephile billionaires including Stryker, Rothblatt, and Pritzker, who push this gender-bending malarky for the money, the power, their deranged sexual fantasies of giving birth to octuplets. The ultimate goal is transhumanism, and they see "transgenderism" as the easy on ramp. So if you're eager to have your great grandchildren spout feathers and gills where their genitals should be, step right on board. The "trans" train is leaving from Track 69.
At this point, I honestly don't give a rat's asterisk whether "transgender" people flourish or not. They have worn out their welcome.
https://www.the11thhourblog.com/
100%
'The idea that the "flourishing" of trans women means access to changing rooms, women's swimming events, and women's prisons is a fallacy.'
You or I can say that, but if an individual transwoman believes that "flourishing" requires, for example, competing in women's sports, who are you and I to disagree?
But if a woman says no to competing with those born biologically male, who are you and I to disagree?
Indeed.
My point is that, if we start from the premise that the self-defined flourishing of self-defined transgender persons is an important societal goal or moral imperative, there is no limiting factor other than the conflicting self-defined flourishing of regular people, women and men. And that means it's a power conflict, plain and simple.
If the Equality Act is passed by the Senate, God forbid, it will mean that men's feelings will take legal precedence over women's feelings!
The demands of biological men who claim to be women grow more extreme and dangerous each day. Aggressive "transgender" activists aren't just content to destroy women's sports. They are now determined to destroy women's private spaces in prisons.
California's SB 132 requires that biological men who claim to be women (regardless of whether they're on hormones, have intact penises or even present as women) be transferred into women's prisons. Once inside, these biological men, some of whom are convicted murderers, rapists, or child abusers are placed inside locked cells with female inmates, whom they can freely beat, rape, and impregnate. Since SB132 took effect last January, 300 biological men have been transferred. Conditions are so dire that prison officials now distribute condoms and information on how to secure abortions for all female inmates.
We must never sacrifice the health and safety of biological women to pacify a small subset of biological men. "Trans" ideology is an outrage that rational people must reject loudly and forcefully.
This is where shanks should come into the equation, and perhaps or definitely preemptively. Because you know that when a male prisoner says he’s a woman and wants to go be with women, it’s not because he really thinks he’s a woman, he just wants a woman or twelve. Female prisoners should really think about performing some chopadickfrommes and then maybe accidentally cutting the femoral artery as well. Word would get around.
We're sane, rational adults, that's who.
Basically allowing men who think they are women to take over women's spaces and sports and lives is the erasing of women. Some may be truly mentally ill and could just as easily think they are a duck. Others are malevolent like the predators who want to be in women's prisons for easy victims and game the increasingly leftist nut job systems.
Where are the so called feminists?
"Where are the so called feminists?"
Exactly! My constant question. They are the ultimate hypocrites.
As if they didn't disappear a long time ago when it came to Islamic misogyny.
I am a feminist and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the ultimate feminist imo, is my hero!
User01 - I agree. The ethics of decision making and cheating is that deciders can be forgiven for allowing someone with invisible or hidden “cheat skills”. But once the cheating technique becomes known, deciders are expected to act against it: leadership 101.
Check out WoLF, the Women's Liberation Front that fights to protect the civil rights and private spaces of women and girls. It's TERF Central Station.
https://www.womensliberationfront.org/
The answer is "they are alive and well--and being cancelled" Barri has published extensively on this topic
"Where are the so called feminists?"
The same place they are when women in Iran are beaten for leaving their homes or teenage girls in Gaza are trained as suicide bombers or toddlers in Afghanistan are sold as "brides." (The geographic designations could be replaced with cities and neighborhoods in Europe, as well.)
I'm not sure where that is. Faculty seminars? Critical theory conferences?
Cynthia...not sure either, but i could not imagine One Female voting Dem. in any election after the Afgan debacle, Sept 9th '21.
No--it's just that many, many people in the West today are cowards. There's no way to sugar-coat it.
That's a really good topic. On the other hand, the trans phenomenon we're discussing is found in the United States among, in large part, upper-middle-class white people. The type of relativism that says, "Islam is a different culture, so forced marriage and honor killing are good for *those* women," doesn't seem applicable.
Is there some other identifiable factor that would explain many feminists' choice to favor men over women, if the men claim to be women?
I think you've figured it out.
I'm right here—fighting this insane misogyny in every way I possibly can!
Or are lying to achieve a truly horrific outcome.
Good point.
And consider the cost of all the drugs and surgery. Those costs are distributed through the population - in pennies-per-person, but that's true of every costs accrued by everything from smoking to motorcycling. And every medical professional who is involved in gender is one who isn't doing anything about infant mortality in communities of color or treating cancer patients. Every hospital bed taken by a gender surgery patient is one not available for a shooting victim.
It's even worse than that. I understand that some prisons in the US are required to pay for inmates to have "transgender" surgery. This is nuts.
They are. Idaho has to pay for some guy who was a child abuser, a child abuser!, to now become a “woman”. Hopefully it’s still on appeal because as a taxpayer in Idaho this infuriates me.
True: courts ordered it.
On the question of why I'd speak up as well: I can't live with myself if I keep quiet and ignore the lies. So many old friends have silenced themselves, refused to speak to me when I bring up the usual forbidden (but bestselling!) authors--you, John McWhorter, others. How many times have I heard: "trust me and don't talk about this." I feel like I'm the kid who points out the emperor is naked, and I wish a few other kids would wave and say the same thing!
“Take back the right to speak your mind—thoughtfully, courteously, with a goal in mind beyond giving offense. The list of unmentionable truths expands so rapidly, without reason other than the attempt to suffocate a free people so that they forget the exhilaration of a lungful of air.”
-Abigail Shrier 12.2021
Abigail,
Thank you for inspiring us to enjoy a deep breath and to continue to speak our minds courteously, unapologetically, & out of love for each other and for the truth.
So proud of you and this message.As someone who has raised two wonderful women I am so impressed that your voice rings so loudly and true in the crazy madness of todays social warrior nonsense.I have wondered why young women don’t unite and respectfully boycott women's sports when they exclude women by putting biological men in the mix.The only way around this is putting on the XX or XY games where one plays in the games which one is.Years of women’s rights and hard fought improvements will be lost in a single generation and not just on the sports field.So much of this progressive nightmare is just to tear down the strength of the individual and the push for the collective which almost always devolves at the point of a gun.Be quiet and get back in line or we will shoot you,imprison you,take away your children or you ability to make a living.Please stand strong against these tides,there are many folks who stand with you.
Excellent speech and a true warrior for freedom.
My only quibble is I don’t think it’s a courtesy to go along with someone’s delusions like with their pronouns - it’s submission. We wouldn’t go along with someone who thinks they are Napoleon or a cat, we’d see them as rightly needing mental help. And we shouldn’t embrace someone who is transgender because there is no such thing, it’s only a person who mutilated themselves. A man can never not be a man. A woman can never not be a woman. The courteous thing to do, the kind thing to do, is help them get help.
Almost no interactions require third-person pronouns. We just say "you," which includes any gender or number.
Plenty of people don't even know what a pronoun is...
Some languages don't have pronouns.
Inspiring speech. You are one of a small group of people who have become modern day freedom fighters. Congratulations!
Courage such as yours is a rare and beautiful thing. God bless you Abigail.
Mr. Orwell put it in a nutshell many years ago: "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." He was good at that. We should emulate him as best we may.
I quite agree that the ideology of gender is a toxic concept, an invitation amounting to a demand that all of us abandon the concept of objective reality in favor of "tolerance" and "inclusion." This demand extends to other dogmas of postmodern progressivism as well, such as "anti-racism." And as Ms. Shier notes, the demand is backed up by the threat of persecution and punishment. At my age (72) that's really not much of a threat. But for young people just beginning to make their way in the world, it's a serious one indeed. Yes, female athletes should speak out against the ideology that makes nonsense of all their hard work and dedication—and what is worse, the demand that they smile and nod along as a mockery is made of women's sports. But when I remind myself of the near-universal condemnation and hymn of hate that would descend upon those young women, I can well understand their reluctance to raise a protest.
But I also see reason for hope. The very virulence of the gender ideology mob, its willingness to blame, bully, blight reputations, destroy lives, betrays a knowledge that the cause is not just, that it cannot be sustained by rational argument or appeals to justice. The devotees of this inhuman ideology know that power and power alone, in the sense of compelling people to do and say what they would not otherwise do and say, is the only way of imposing their will on the rest of us. That may look like their strength but in reality it's their great weakness.
Outstanding work Abigail; those are powerful words, sentences, and ideas.
The mob, led by government officials in Wisconsin, knew they weren't going to get a guilty verdict on Rittenhouse. But that was not the objective of the prosecution. The true objective of that prosecution was to create fear and doubt in those who may think of opposing the mob in the future. And the mob has succeeded; Rittenhouse himself now says, in retrospect, he wouldn't have gone to Kenosha.
And there are probably millions of people who saw that prosecution and said to themselves "Rittenhouse was defending himself, but I'd never put myself in the position risking losing everything."
As "the mob" continues their march towards tyranny, more and more people are likely to decide "it's just not worth it to risk losing everything", without realizing that giving into the mob will result in you, or your children, losing everything. It is only a matter of when.
I believe the US is currently in a civil war. It has not yet turned bloody, but it probably will. I can only hope that enough people will be willing to sacrifice all to save the greatest country the world has ever known: a country that has done more good for more people around the world for a longer period of time than any country that has preceded it. If we lose this country to the mob, it will be many centuries before a worthy successor appears.
A worthy successor might only appear out of the ashes of ruin and after the evolution of the free will with which Ms. Shrier began this marvelous speech. I agree that we are in a civil war now, albeit a cold one.
Thank-you Abigail for your life affirming piece. Light in the darkness.
What I don't seem to get about all of this is that some people don't seem to understand what the primary goal of sports is.
Despite the approved narrative, it is not to be 'inclusive'. I would argue that word tries to mean too many things to too many people. I mean, just being a human being in the world and interacting with other human beings is, in my head, being inclusive. But that's not where my argument is going here.
The primary purpose of all sports is this: fair competition. That's it really. You need both of those to be true for it to work right, or at least as close to it as humanly and pragmatically possible. So that means that opponents in a competition should be have as equal a foundational ability as possible in order to engage in a fair competition. Otherwise it's...well...not fair.
Take wrestling for instance. There are lots of different weight classes in that sport. Each person only wrestles someone else in the same weight class because otherwise the match would be unfair. A 200lb wrestler would have a huge advantage against a 140lb wrestler. No one questions this because it makes complete and logical sense.
So why then is this logic completely thrown out the door when it comes to gender? You literally have to suspend reality and the laws of physics in order to say that a man who identifies as woman, or just a trans woman, can legitimately and fairly compete against a woman. Even if they are in the same weight class. Anyone who adheres to even a rudimentary understanding of rational thought should get this.
I don't know much about gender identity, I'm admittedly pretty ignorant on the matter. But I do know sports. And the entire point of them is to have a fair fight. If it's not fair, it's not a legitimate competition. And by extension not really a true sport either. It's just a random pick-up game in the park at that point.
In sports, what separates the winners from the losers (yes, there are losers...deal with it) should not be any obvious advantage and/or disparity between the competitors. Like getting to start the race 20 yards ahead, or having a body that hands-down completely outclasses everyone else's body before the race even begins. Winners should be determined by things like skill, desire, intelligence, conditioning, etc. Basically all of the things athletes spend lifetimes doing - training their asses off for a chance at being the best.
But none of that works when the game isn't fair.
Elliot - I agree with you. I did sports in high school. Additionally, I expect sports directors or whatever the bosses call themselves to stop and say “Oops, we accidentally talked ourselves into a corner. We need to redo the discussion on ‘inclusion criteria’ or rules about who is allowed to compete.” If there is some “invisible hand” threatening menace - then ask the public for help.