Counterpunch: Men Banned from Swimming Against Women

CLAY: A lot of you out there, as you are paying attention to the insanity that has been going on in the larger United States universe, have recognized that one of the things that you never would have thought would ever be an argument would be that men shouldn’t be able to decide they want to compete against women. And that’s because we basically create massive differentiators for competition in sports because we recognize that there are all sorts of things that make competition unfair.

For instance, kids play against other kids their own age when they are growing up. Boxers box against people who weigh around their own weight because a heavyweight boxer shouldn’t be fighting a flyweight. People who are bigger and stronger in boxing, in combat sports, shouldn’t be competing against each other. This is not controversial. But this past year what has been inevitably forecast and all the people told you it would never come to reality began to come to pass in great magnitude, which is men — biological men — decided they were identifying as women, and they would start to compete against women.

This happened in a big way in college athletics with a transgender swimmer from Penn, swam on the men’s team for several years, decides that he is a woman, begins to compete as a woman, and wins one of the women’s swimming championships at the NCAA event. That was a man who decided to call himself Lia Thomas. And so this is really the first really punchback I’ve seen against this. And I want to read some of the details here, Buck, and get your reaction.

“The world swimming governing body has effectively banned,” I’m reading from the Associated Press, “transgender athletes from compete in women events.” This happened yesterday. “Members voted” 71.5% of them, by the way “in favor of a new policy that only permits swimmers who transition before age 12 to compete in women’s events,” and so this situation that just happened in the NCAA in theory, under this guideline, would not be able to happen. Now, this is a 24-page policy analyzing all of this.

Here’s the challenge, Buck, and this is why while this is the right result, I’m actually troubled by this exemption that they put in, which is if you begin to transition before the age of 12, then you would still be eligible to compete as a woman. My concern is, this is going to be used as evidence of those in the transgender community that children being given puberty blockers, transitioning, all of those things should be encouraged to happen. So how do you assess this? On the one hand, yes, biological men shouldn’t be able to compete against women. The downside here, though, is they’ve left open a loophole — an exemption, as it were for people who transition or begin to transition before puberty, before the age of 12.

BUCK: Well, one thing I think will be fascinating to watch this play out is who that transitions before the age of 12 is going to want to without the benefit of —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — all of those years of testosterone therapy, because really what are we talking about? “Biological men,” also known as men, swimming against women. Okay? So who is going to say, “Well, I essentially was chemically castrated at a very young age — you know, at age 10 or 11, whatever it may be”?

CLAY: Which we both agree, by the way, is child abuse, and shouldn’t be happening at all.

BUCK: And it’s interesting all these people say, “Well, look at this practitioner or that practitioner.” I’m pretty sure what we’ve seen in the last two years is that blue check MDs on Twitter — who have lots and lots of Ukraine flags and vaccine needles and mask emojis on their profiles — are not to be trusted on matters of policy or judgment and certainly not with your kids. So I wonder if this is even… Effectively, you won’t see the same kind of dominance —

CLAY: It may not even arise as an issue —

BUCK: That’s right.

CLAY: — under these auspices.

BUCK: Because it’s about what’s fair, and so if you don’t have the biological advantage as Lia Thomas, for example, has roughly 10 years of testosterone therapy, natural testosterone therapy that has changed muscle, bone structure, heart size, all that. This is science.

CLAY: Six foot four as well.

BUCK: #Science, okay? So that’s reality. What we’ve seen is the Democrat Party now wholesale embrace this standard of… We used to be a society where we would say, “Is that male genitalia or female genitalia?” And you and I and everyone listening would say, pretty sure we can tell the difference. When you ask, though, when you pose that question of a Democrat now, the answer always must be, it depends. It depends. Not sure we could… This is what they say about babies, Clay. Remember they say…

CLAY: They think doctors get it wrong sometimes when babies are born and they say, “it’s a boy” or “it’s a girl.” They are forcing people to abandon their own most basic objective reality and sensibility in favor of a political fad and fashion right now. And that is what is happening all over the country. It’s happening in the schools. It’s happening in the boardrooms and everywhere else. They’re demanding this of people.

And it all started… You know, years ago it was, “Oh, let’s just be courteous to each other. Let’s be civilized to everybody,” with which conservatives completely agree, right? You treat human beings with dignity, decency, and kindness irrespective of whatever the gender spectrum issues or whatever it may be. But somehow that transitioned — pardon the phrase — in the last 10 years to now when you see a six-foot-four guy dominating NCAA female swimming, you better clap and cheer or else you’re a bigot.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: So we’ve gone all the way. Now it’s doctors don’t know if a baby’s male or female. They’re just making an educated guess.

CLAY: A guess. This is crazy.

BUCK: That is what they say, by the way.

CLAY: I know. I know.

BUCK: That’s not an exaggeration. I know you know this, but for everyone listening, I’m not joking. That’s not a joke.

CLAY: This is what trans activists say. They say doctors get it wrong and they’re basically guessing when a baby is born, and they say what the gender is.

BUCK: I insist on my right as a person — as a sentient being, as a rationale human being, I insist on my ability — to say, “I can tell the difference between male and female genitalia.” I can tell you the difference between a man and a woman. They can argue with me as much as they want, but see, they want you to concede. I am always, Clay… I’ve been fascinated by the history of totalitarian regimes of the last hundred years.

And it’s the more aggressive lies that they want you to accept, ’cause if something is a close call, is a judgment call — if there are things on both sides you could sort of see — that doesn’t break your spirit. That doesn’t make give in your rational faculties and say, “Fine, I’ll just do anything.” The whole point is to get you to affirm that which you know to be untrue because they degrade you in the process.

They degrade your ability to make your own judgments on other things too. And that’s part of why this is so important to the Democrats — to the left — in this moment in time. They seek to remake and break society, and one of the ways they do it is by telling you, “You fundamentally cannot tell the difference between a man and a woman. You can’t do it,” and they’re wrong, and that’s a lie.

Ad that’s why on the swimming issue, finally one organization is saying, “Look, if you’ve been a man until last year, you have a physical advantage because of reality.” I’m sorry if that hurts some people’s feelings, and it’s amazing to see the left wing freak out about this and act like we don’t see what reality is. But, Clay, what do you think the crossover is when people say, “It’s so bigoted not to let Lia Thomas swim against women”? Under these rules, the crossover between that and people who are gonna be so excited if they have children to get their 2-year-old not one, not two, but I think it’s a three-dose vax now.

CLAY: That’s right, three doses. A huge overlap. And that’s also intriguing and fascinating to me, Buck, about this entire story is there’s almost no one — almost no one — out there who is involved in the world of sports at all that will argue in favor of this. They either pretend the story doesn’t exist or they say something like, “Well, that’s for the governing body to decide.” No one will say even the far left-wing — and you know now how far left wing the sports universe is.

There’s nobody out there who’s a strong advocate for this, and here’s another one that I saw. Did you see Hillary Clinton came out and got asked about — and we think Hillary, even though she’s saying she won’t run, Hillary is doing a lot of things that would suggest she might be interested in running. She did an interview with the Financial Times, and this was the quote she was asked. Democrats “seem to be going out of their way to lose elections by elevating activist causes, notably the transgender debate, which are relevant only to a small minority. …

“What sense does it make to depict J.K. Rowling,” of course, the Harry Potter author, “as a fascist?” That’s the question she got asked, and she said, “We are standing on the precipice of losing our democracy,” And she basically said, we don’t need to be focusing on transgender-related issues in the Democrat Party. Even Hillary Clinton — which, by the way, the trans community is not happy about this answer.

But Hillary is saying something that the vast majority of the American population agrees with, and most Democrats won’t even go there, right? Most Democrats Joe Biden certainly does. I would love… I know Peter Doocy listens to this show. I would love whenever Joe Biden is in front of the media again for Peter Doocy to say — ’cause this story is out there — do you believe that biological men should be able to compete against women like what happened with the Penn transgender swimmer, or do you think this governing body got it right? Joe Biden one billion percent… He’s 78 years old. He’s a sports fan. He’s not in favor of guys being able to identify as women and compete against them. What would he say in response to that question, though? How handcuffed by the transgender community is he?

BUCK: He’ll do the good old Joe by the fireplace grandpa routine that, unfortunately, idiots still fall for somehow. (impression) “It’s not about that. It’s about middle class and, you know, it’s about, you know, decency, common decency.” He won’t give an actual answer. He will retreat as he always does to platitudes for the idiotic, and that is this guy’s entire political career effectively.

But he certainly won’t say what everybody knows, which is that this is absurd and this is outrageous. One thing that I thought about recently, Clay, is, in this transgender sports thing, they used to play the game of, “Why are Republicans so focused on this? Why do you even care so much?” which is always… That’s when they know their argument is bad; they don’t want the American people paying attention. That’s always a tell. “Why are you…?”

CLAY: It’s a “distraction,” yeah. That’s all they say, yeah.

BUCK: This is a huge movement folks. We all see it. They want to drag your kids through this agenda in school as well too. But as all this is going on, I used to think, “You know what needs to happen? The only way this comes apart is if you were to have somebody who is, let’s say, a male basketball player —

CLAY: LeBron James deciding to play in the WNBA would be amazing.

BUCK: Six foot eight to seven feet tall, 40-inch vertical, whatever, right? Just one of these guys who are physical phenomena and have them play on the WNBA and score a hundred points a game. This is the kind of the joke that Dave Chappelle made that got him into trouble, that LeBron James would score 800 points a game.

But you see now what the Democrat media would do if that happened is stand and clap and say, “It is stunning and brave that LeBrona James,” in this example, “is scoring 130 points a game. This is what it means to be a good person in America today.” They would actually do it. They would mouth the preferred slogans like the little marionettes of the apparatus that they are.

CLAY: I also wonder how long could LeBron James play in the WNBA, until he’s 65? Think about how big and strong and fast he would be even identifying as a woman. And, by the way, some of you out there who are esteemed, brilliant scholars of I think late nineties, early nineties movies may remember, this was the plot of a Damon Wayans film, Juwanna Mann. Do you remember Juwanna Mann, Buck, at all?

BUCK: Yeah.

CLAY: It’s an esteemed member of the canon.

BUCK: I don’t think the Rotten Tomatoes were very high on that one.

CLAY: Yes, but the concept is — and it was played for laughs — an NBA star gets banned from playing in the league and so decides to become a woman and disguise himself, and it was played for laughs then. Now, I guess Juwanna Mann would be a heroic film about the struggles of a man inside of a woman’s body — or vice-versa, whatever the heck it is.