We Stand With Women Against Men Dominating Their Sports

CLAY: Buck, one thing that nobody’s talking about: This transgender swimmer issue. Some of you know that we’ve talked about this story a decent amount and the reason why I love it is because it brings to the forefront identity politics and the failure of identity politics as a reliable and reasonable and rational political philosophy. Because you have hard-core feminists — women’s athlete spokespeople, Title IX adherents — who believe that women — and I’m one of these people — are the equal of men and that they deserve the right to compete at the highest possible level against other women.

And then you have transgender activists who believe that men can decide to become women and set all-time women’s records and they should be applauded for this. And you can’t be both. You have to pick a side. And these are two theoretically left-wing groups. I’m a hundred percent confident in picking my side. I’m in favor of biological women being able to compete against biological women.

And so are the vast majority of Democrats, Republicans, independents, anyone who cares about sports competition in this country. I’m one of the only people — and OutKick is one of the only media sites — that will even cover this story, Buck. The parents of these UPenn swimmers, probably many of them liberal, certainly many of them, if you look at the overall breakdown of UPenn, probably from wealthy Northeastern communities.

They have written a letter now to the NCAA saying this wrong and all these people in sports media who have said, “Oh, we’ve gotta speak out! We’ve gotta talk about the intersection of sports and politics,” they’re all silent. They’re pretending — ESPN, Buck, they gave Caitlyn Jenner the ESPY for courage for becoming a woman. They haven’t even covered this story at all. There’s not one ESPN article about this direct threat to women’s athletics.

BUCK: And this is why when we had Abigail Shrier on, I asked her that question about the machinery and the apparatus, and who really pushing for this because it’s fascinating. You won’t see… There are so many people who will go along with this, but they won’t — as an individual in public — stand up and say, “This makes sense. This is a good idea.” What you do have are the massively influential but nameless… Well, faceless. They have named companies, of course. But no one individual.

It reminds me of my dad used to belong to — a long time ago — a hunting club, right? You go shoot birds, and there was really one guy who ran the whole place, and he used to sign every pronouncement. If it was that you had to wear blue shirts on Tuesday, everything was signed “The Committee.” But he was the committee. There was no other committee, right?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: What do you do? You can’t go up against a committee. You have H.R. departments, you have college admissions offices, you have corporate now — at the very top level — executives who will put forward this guidance about the trans issue — and obviously universities, all the university administrators will get on board with this. But it always comes as part of the collective. Individuals will not make this argument, Clay, because they know they would be humiliated because it is so clearly wrong and so clearly stupid. So they have to hide behind the committee, if you will, or the collective.

CLAY: I put up a poll, Buck, ’cause I was just curious. We know Twitter is extremely left-leaning and that it’s overwhelmingly filled with Blue Checkmark Brigade members who are running around trying to defend the transgender community or whatever “oppressed group” of the moment that they have decided is being disrespected. And I just asked a simple question, right?

Do you believe a biological male athlete should be able to compete in women’s sports if he decides to change his gender to a woman? Okay? Simple question. Over 20,000 people voted so far in the first couple hours — and if you want to vote on this you can go find me on Twitter @ClayTravis, scroll down. Buck, 98% of people said “no.” Ninety-eight percent.

You know how hard it is to get 98% of people to agree on anything under the sun right now? Yet almost no one will even discuss this. So I started tagging people, right? Megan Rapinoe. She’s always talking about women’s sports. She’s so brave ’cause she wouldn’t go to the White House, women’s soccer player, won’t talk about it. Jemele Hill. Remember Jemele Hill said Donald Trump was a white supremacist?

She won’t talk about it. Pat Forde — who’s a big Sports Illustrated writer — his daughter, to her credit, is actually a women’s Olympic swimmer. She made the Olympic team. If men are able to be female swimmers, she wouldn’t make the Olympic team! He tweets about women’s swimming all the time. He won’t comment on it. ESPN, as I said, Buck, hasn’t even written a single story about this case. It is unbelievable. It’s a conspiracy of silence because, Buck, remember for a long time they said, “Oh, this is never gonna happen.”

BUCK: That’s why they have to be quiet.

CLAY: This will never be an issue.

BUCK: They have to be quiet because the way that they tried to shut down people like you and me who for years — I’ve been talking about the trans issue for years — have been saying things like get ready for them in the bathrooms, get ready for transgender individuals competing in women’s sports, get ready for transgender individuals in female prisons, which is also now happening.

CLAY: That’s scary ’cause that’s a safety issue.

BUCK: You’ve gotta imagine if you’re a guy who’s facing life in prison, you’d probably rather be in the woman’s prison, wouldn’t you, right? And now what are the standards for this and, “Oh, you’ve gotta say some things to the prison shrink. ” This is happening. These are all things that are occurring now. But if the people that had been saying it will never happen now come out in favor of it then they’re caught because we can point to, “You said this was never going to happen and clearly you were full of it,” which has been true.

This is the incrementalism that the Democrats use to fight the culture wars all the time. In fact, they’ll call you bigoted for even raising what we all know will eventually happen. And then when it happens, they pretend like it didn’t. It’s effectively gaslighting on a massive scale. It is remarkable, though, that of all the women in sports media, for example —

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: — they’re not going to come forward and stand up for women’s sports. Women’s sports are actually at risk here as a serious endeavor. That is the reality of what is underway.

CLAY: A hundred percent true.

BUCK: What is the point of trying to be the best in your league, the best in the NCAA, the best in the world if a guy can come in and beat you? I remember years ago I used to do CrossFit, Clay. You’d see the men’s… There are guys going in there with… I’m not speaking personally but they got like 20 or 30 extra pounds around the belly, and there are women who were clear physical specimens working out every day. The chubby guy sitting behind a desk has a higher bench press than the women. We all see this. It’s reality around us all the time.

CLAY: Pound for pound, my wife is a much better athlete than me. She’s also five foot two, 105 pounds. The idea that we should be competing in a sprint when I’m six foot, 180-ish…? I say 180-ish cause it’s kind of the holidays and I’m not sure exactly what I weigh right now. But the idea is crazy. Everybody out there understands it — and, Buck, it’s not even just male versus female. We decide, for instance, in boxing or UFS or whatever, we have weight classes.

In high school, we have different standards for state championships because the school that has 3,000 students shouldn’t be able to be judged against the school that has 300. This is a big part of fairness in athletics. We have all different sorts of weight classes, all different sorts of designations when it comes to what schools, public versus private, some schools give scholarships and they don’t, big college and small ones. These things happen all the time.

BUCK: I rowed in college. It would have been great if I could have rowed as a lightweight. I would have been a kickass lightweight. I was a heavyweight in college.

CLAY: Here’s the deal, Buck. I suck at golf. I love to golf. I don’t get to do it as much since I had kids. If I got to play from the women tees, I would be pretty good at golf. If I got to 200 yards off of some of the holes, I’d be getting a lot more birdies. It would be ridiculous. Like, you if you and your buddies are playing. It’s kind of funny and ridiculous but it points to the absurdity. And you walked up and you were like, “Today I’m feeling like a chick,” and you just played from the red tees the whole day and you crushed your buddies, they wouldn’t allow you to do it, first of all, because it’s the very essence of competition.

BUCK: You almost think the only way this goes away is, you know, in USTA tennis, right, there’s the challenger matches beforehand. You can get into those pretty easily they could have the man who’s number 250 in the world compete as a woman for the U.S. Open tennis championship. If he wins, I think he gets 4 or $5 million. Is someone willing to do that? Are you willing to pretend you’re a woman for a week for 4 or $5 million? I think a lot of people the answer would be — well, not a lot, but some people the answer would be — yes.

CLAY: It’s almost on some level where someone just needs to change their gender for purposes of dominating a sport.

BUCK: That’s what I mean. Yeah.

CLAY: But make that candid choice and not even say it publicly initially, dominate, and then say this is the reality of what happens in the larger scale.