Left Wingers Discover the UPenn Trans Swimmer Story

CLAY: Buck, I don’t know if you saw this yet, but all of a sudden left wingers have discovered this UPenn swimmer story. Have you noticed this?

BUCK: I have not seen this. No. Tell me more.

CLAY: The New York Times yesterday had an article about it, about the controversy, and they said, “Oh, right-wing media outlets are fed up about it,” as if being in favor of women competing against women is a super right-wing idea, and they’re trying to turn it into a political issue. No. Look. If you’re a man and you decide to compete against women, we’re not making that issue. You chose to do that, and I don’t even see this as remotely…

People sometimes fight against this idea, but I really do see this as not a particularly political issue because there’s nobody out there arguing, for instance, if you just take outside male-and-female sex. If somebody was like, “Hey, I think this 240-pound boxer should get to compete as a flyweight,” you would say, “No, no, no. Flyweight boxers are 120 pounds or less; it would be fundamentally unfair for a 240-pound, heavyweight boxer. Obviously, he would be the best boxer at 240 pounds.”

I coach 10- and 11-year-old basketball and have coached Little League and all different sorts of stuff. If suddenly I trotted out a 16-year-old on my team has a mustache, fully grown, that kid would be the best kid on the court. But everybody in the stands and everybody on the opposing team — that’s why we have birth certificates — would say, “No, no, no. You don’t get to bring in a 16-year-old to compete in 10-year-old athletics.”

So this idea that you can just parachute in a man and then he’s going to be able to compete against women because he now identifies as a woman, as this being a right-wing issue, what percent…? I mean this honestly, Buck, because I read the New York Times piece, and they’re trying to turn it into a real strong political wedge issue. What percentage of people in America think that a biological man in sports should be able to compete against biological women — straight up, if we were polling this — 2 or 3%?

BUCK: So I’d have to say this: I think you would get 20% of Americans right now to say to a pollster that they’re okay with “biological males” (also just males) competing against females, but I think at the moment, the number of people who would be okay if they were competing — or rather they had a family member, a child, college age, competing — with that situation is less than 1%.

I think essentially no one who is touched by the issue would ever say it’s okay, ’cause it’s so obviously unfair, right? It’s such a common sense-based issue. But, you know, it’s interesting, Clay. There are actually some interesting studies out, and you could see… I’ll just tell you. I’m reading this book — it’s just called Testosterone — ’cause I wanted to know more about the gender debate, and one of the things that keeps coming up about trans issues and all the rest of it?

Within science, there’s an effort right now — within the scientific community, scientific consensus, just like the Fauciites with the covid stuff — to say that testosterone doesn’t really affect things as much as we think it does and it certainly doesn’t affect behavior, desire. All the science is against that, but it is fashionable. All the actual data shows testosterone is enormously important.

Not just to your physicality, male versus female — and, of course, testosterone exists in women, too, but it’s the level of testosterone. Not only your physicality, but also your behavior, your deportment, your desires. All that is affected by it. But they try to suppress this because it goes to what we’re saying. This is about biochemistry. This is actually about science.

CLAY: So I also think it ties in, Buck, with the way that we decide what’s acceptable and unacceptable when it comes to fair competition. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are two of the greatest baseball players of all time. They didn’t get into the Hall of Fame because they used performance-enhancing drugs. So when you change your gender, that’s a pretty significant drug that you’re allowed to use that, also, gender is performing enhancing. And I don’t understand how you’re not spending more time as a larger sports society talking about the analogy there. To me, it seems like there’s a big connection.

BUCK: Yeah. It’s cool and deep anti-feminist, by the way, to allow this to happen. Just point that out too.