Living With Integrity

Genevieve Kineke
Posted

Recently, two young men identifying as women stood atop Connecticut’s high school podiums after their track victories, putting their competitors in an awkward situation. To grumble against the unfair physiological advantages of those who defeated them seems like unsportsmanlike conduct, and to suggest that it’s problematic to allow transgender athletes to compete (not to mention shower, and sleep with them on overnight travel events throughout the season) is simply not allowed in a milieu in which mind trumps matter. What have we done to our girls?

Since 1972, Title IX has guaranteed that every institution receiving federal funding must provide equitable access to men and women, boys and girls, and although it covers every aspect of participation in all institutions, Title IX’s impact on sports has drawn the most attention. While equal access sounds benign, schools in particular have had to adjust their financial outlays to conform to the new standard, and financing this radical realignment of structures led to the onus being shifted from choice to outcome.

The premise was that males and females chose differently only because of cultural norms, and if society recalibrated its expectations from an early age, then the differences between men and women would become indistinguishable. Thus, encouraging young women in myriad fields seems to have paid off, for not only did women’s sports grow exponentially, but they flooded the universities in such numbers that by 1982 they achieved parity with men, and now they comprise almost 60% of matriculated college students.

Young girls have been told for decades that if they work diligently, they can achieve whatever they wish, no matter the obstacles—but in recent years the social engineers have added a new twist. The flip-side of erasing differences between men and women means that men who identify as women will now be allowed to compete in women’s sports—the very arenas created for them to showcase their newly-tapped talents. This is because a century of feminism has been persistently morphing its agenda. From its roots of simply providing women equal opportunities to a more aggressive form of forced parity, now even the most radical ideologues have been supplanted by gender feminists, who insist on erasing the most foundational notions of what constitutes a woman.

An Olympic medalist in volleyball, Ana Paula Henkel wrote to the International Olympic Committee noting that their policy of allowing transgender men to compete in women’s events in the 2020 Olympics was absurd. “This rushed and heedless decision to include biological men, born and built with testosterone, with their height, their strength and aerobic capacity of men, is beyond the sphere of tolerance. It represses, embarrasses, humiliates and excludes women.”

As absurd as the present predicament surely is, it is only the logical outcome of rejecting that there is such a thing as natural law, and setting aside the intrinsic differences between male and female. The hormonal games that allow cross-sex transitions today began with the birth-control pill that was readily embraced as an effective way to trick the human body — the first foray into changing the consequences of our natural behaviours. Such hormones have become foundational to how we live, how we establish relationships, and how we navigate the demands of a family-crushing culture; they have become a part of our very identity.

How many of the dreams we offer to young women depend on distancing themselves not only from virtuous and balanced decisions about their lives, but on rejecting their very nature? Are women any happier today than they were fifty years ago when this dangerous experiment of mainstreaming hormones began? To inspire in girls a gender-neutral dream only to sandbag them in this irrational way is not only unloving but perverse. Perhaps it’s time for an honest discussion about the premise of this unnatural social experiment and find a reset button. There is another, more honest way to live.

Mrs. Kineke is a parishioner of Our Lady of Mercy in East Greenwich, and can be found online at feminine-genius.com.