Sorry Ladies; It’s Just Biology, Psychology, and Economics

Just like probably 90 percent or so of those virtue signaling in favor of “pay equality” for the American women who won the FIFA Women’s World Cup, I’ve never paid to attend a women’s soccer game. In fact, as best I can recall, I’ve never paid to attend ANY women’s sporting event. The only girl I’ve ever paid to watch compete in sports is the beautiful and talented Caroline Thomas—the (now) 13-year-old karate champion:

Yeah, that’s my girl, and she has about 15 of those first-place trophies—in both karate fighting (which involves contact, but is not very violent) and forms, or “kata.” Caroline also plays in a co-ed basketball league. Like most other fathers, I would pay (up to a point) to watch my daughter show off her talents in almost any venue—whether in sports, performing on stage, or in a cooking contest (Caroline also likes to cook). However, it doesn’t mean that the public at large is interested in forking over their hard-earned dollars to watch my daughter perform—especially in the realm of athletics.

The “inequality” that exists in women’s sports is nothing new, and in spite of what many on the left would have us believe, involves nothing nefarious. As I noted several years ago, the fact that consumers overwhelmingly prefer men’s sports to women’s sports is merely a matter of biology and psychology and not due to some mythical misogynistic plot. The facts and the data clearly bear this out.

Just as was the case in 2015—the latest data available when I last wrote about this issue—in 2018, when examining sports audiences, men’s sports dominated television ratings. Of the 50 most-watched sporting events in 2018, 43 of them were men’s football—40 NFL games and three college football games. The other seven were events from the Winter Olympics.

According to Sports Media Watch, including pre-game coverage, Fox earned a 7.7 rating and had 12.98 million viewers for the Women’s World Cup final. These number are nowhere close to what was needed to make the top 50 most-watched sporting events of 2018. The 50th place event—Winter Olympics night 6—had an 11.4 rating and 19.3 million viewers. There’s virtually no doubt the Women’s World Cup final will not make 2019’s top 50 list either.

If you exclude the NFL and the Winter Olympics, women’s sports are still nowhere to be found among the most-watched sporting events in 2018. Again, as was the case in 2015, even non-humans outperform women’s sports in viewership—two of the 2018 non-NFL/Winter Olympics top 50 were horse racing events. The Kentucky Derby was 16th on this list with an 8.5 rating and 15 million viewers.

When it comes to television audience and paid attendees, the women’s professional sports that compete annually are not in the same universe as men’s sports—or even horse racing. In 2018, the top-rated women’s tennis event was the U.S. Open Women’s final. It earned a 1.9 rating with 3.1 million viewers. The top-rated women’s golf event for 2018 was the U.S. Women’s Open Final Round. It earned a 0.6 rating with 878,000 viewers. The top-rated WNBA event for 2018 was the WNBA All Star Game. It earned a 0.5 rating with 709,000 viewers.

Thus, as such consumer data implies, according to Forbes—from boxer Floyd Mayweather ($285 million) to basketball player Nicolas Batum ($22.9 million)—of the world’s 100 highest paid athletes in 2018, not a single female athlete made the list. Again, there is nothing evil at work here; it is simply a matter of economics. Whether in person or through television or live streaming on their phone or computer, fans simply prefer to watch men compete than women.

Of course, this does not mean that fans are “discriminating” against women. Fans are discriminating, just not in the way the “equal pay” loons of the left would have us believe. I’ve jokingly told the left before how to make women’s sports more interesting: allow men to compete as women. Forgetting that the left takes jokes and makes them into policy, I never thought they would take me up on it.

Given the pay disparity that already exists among male and female athletes, and given how the left is determined to convince us that this is “unfair,” the fact that liberals are now allowing men to take trophies and dollars from women is the height of absurdity. It just goes to show how tragically devoted to the perverse LGBT agenda is the modern left.

Unless the left continues down this road where gender-deluded (or financially savvy?) men are allowed to compete as women, there will never be “equal pay” or “gender equality” when it comes to athletics, because human genders are not—and will never be—equal. Men are bigger, faster, and stronger than women. And “bigger, faster, and stronger” makes for more exciting and interesting sports.

What’s more, as most anyone not devoted to a liberal worldview who has observed human beings for at least 15 minutes was already aware, men are naturally more physically aggressive than are women. As Psychology Today points out:

The fact that males are more aggressive and more violent is reflected by their anatomy itself; in many animals species they are heavier, more muscular, better armed with means of attack and defense. In humans, for example, the arms of men are, on average, 75 percent more muscular than those of women; and the top of a male body is 90 percent stronger than the top of a female body [Bohannon, 1997; Abe et al., 2003, apud Goetz, 2010, p. 16]. Also, men are taller, they have denser and heavier bones, their jaw is more massive, their reaction time is shorter, their visual acuity is better, their muscle/fat ratio is greater, their heart is bulkier, their percentage of hemoglobin is higher, their skin is thicker, their lungs bigger, their resistance to dehydration is higher etc. In other words, from all points of view, men are more suited for battle than women, and these skills are native.

As Ann Coulter noted over a decade ago, “Competitive sports are ritualized forms of fighting, and boys like to fight.” In other words, sports—especially those involving heavy contact—is a form of battle, and in spite of what the foolish left would have us believe, men are much more suited for battle than are women. No amount of legislation, legal wrangling, or whining is going to change these facts.

(See this column at American Thinker.)

Copyright 2019, Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com
Trevor is the author of the The Miracle and Magnificence of America
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com

I Told You Testosterone Would Make Women’s Sports More Interesting

To be fair—given the perverse transgender agenda of the modern left—my idea was that men (like Bruce—“Dude Looks Like a Lady!”—Jenner) would compete as “women.” My idea was not that female athletes who want to pretend that they are men (or boys)—and thus take athletic performance-enhancing drugs such as testosterone to help live such a deluded fantasy—would compete as females. I did not imagine this because (I thought) virtually every female athletic association would not allow such an advantage.

Of course, in most athletic associations this is the case, but at the high school level in the state of Texas, it seems there are exceptions. As has been widely reported recently, a female wrestler in Texas—Mack Beggs—has won the state championship in her division largely due to the fact that she has a significant competitive advantage: she’s taking steroids (testosterone).

Once upon a time, such behavior was widely considered cheating. In fact, some of the biggest scandals in sports history involve behavior virtually identical to the behavior of Mack Beggs. (Alex Rodriguez took testosterone.) In fact, due to the widespread problem of “doping” (taking performance-enhancing drugs) in the world of athletics, in 1999, the World Anti-Doping Agency was created. Clearly (and always) on the list of banned substances: testosterone. In spite of being an endogenous (naturally occurring) anabolic androgenic (promotes male characteristics) steroid, testosterone use among athletes is prohibited if administered from outside the body.

In the modern era of sports, scandals involving performance-enhancing drugs are numerous. One of the largest examples (in terms of sheer volume of athletes and length of time) involves the Olympians of East Germany. In a tragic attempt to hide the real devastating effects of a communist government and a socialist economy, and instead to present itself as a strong, healthy nation, during the Cold War, the East German government began doping its athletes.

The primary drug administered to thousands of East German athletes as young as eight years old was Chlorodehydromethyltestosterone (CDMT)—a synthetic steroid and, as the name indicates, a synthetic “derivative of testosterone.” (This was the same drug that disgraced Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson took.) Unlike Mack Beggs and others who knowingly take performance enhancing drugs, most of the East German athletes were duped into doping. Their coaches told them they were taking “vitamins.” In terms of medals—with over 500 summer and winter Olympic medals between 1968 and 1988—the result of the doping, as in the case of Beggs (a record of 56-0), was a huge success.

However, as The Daily Mirror reported in 2015, the East German athletes paid a terrible price. As the Mirror notes,

The stars of yesterday suffered severe depression, heart conditions, degenerative bone disease and infertility. Some even changed sex because of the drugs. Many spiraled into drink and drug addictions, unable to find work.

Shot putter Heidi Krieger suffered the loss of her femininity. She had a “sex-change” operation (of course, it’s not really possible to change one’s sex) and now lives her life pretending she’s a man, “teaching youngsters the dangers of pumping steroids in a bid for sporting glory.” Concerned that the current situation with Olympic athletes in Russia mirrors that of East Germany, Ines Geipel, 55, a 1980s East German champion sprinter, warns:

It is more than 25 years ago now and yet there are so many parallels with the Russian situation and ours. It is about a state-controlled abuse. 

It carried on until 1989. We are probably talking about 10 to 15,000 athletes in total. We saw kids as young as eight being doped. They were guinea pigs and we have seen the health impact down the generations, passed from grandfather to grandchild. 

The bodies are broken, and so are the souls. Naturally there was great gynaecological damage because the women were taking men’s hormones. We have seen still births, infertility, disabled children born to former athletes.

In other words, there are significant health risks—especially for women, in taking testosterone. Of course—like the oppressive East Germans—this is secondary to the perverse sexual agenda of the modern left. What’s more, whether those struggling with their gender identity take dangerous drugs, as Dr. Paul McHugh—University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School and the former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital—puts it:

The idea that one’s sex is a feeling, not a fact, has permeated our culture and is leaving casualties in its wake. Gender dysphoria should be treated with psychotherapy, not surgery.

And when the perverse LGBT agenda invades the world of sports, the harm extends beyond the physical and mental damage done to the athlete who’s decided to indulge his or her delusions with drugs and surgeries. Whether it’s males competing as females—as in the case of Alaska’s Nattaphon Wangyot—or, as in the case of Beggs, a female taking testosterone, the ones who will suffer competitively are the female athletes who have decided to play by the rules of sound science, morality, and the athletic associations that govern their sports.

Beggs’ case is just the latest example of this lunacy. Multiple organizations corrupted by liberalism have laid the groundwork for rendering women’s athletics a farce. As I noted last year,

Among many other crazy things, on “transgender and gender non-conforming students,” The National Center for Transgender Equality declares:

• You have the right to equal educational opportunities regardless of your gender, including your gender identity or expression, or your race, nationality, or disability. This includes not being punished or excluded from school activities or events [read: sports] because you are transgender or gender non-conforming.
• You have the right to use restrooms, locker rooms, and other facilities that are consistent with your gender identity, and can’t be forced to use separate facilities. 

As early as five years ago the NCAA “Office of Inclusion” produced a document that, among many other crazy things, recommended allowing humans who were born male to compete as females. They piously and ignorantly declared that assumptions commonly made about humans born male who wish to pretend they are female “are not well founded.” 

Ignoring sound science and common sense, the June 2016 edition of the “science” magazine Cosmos concluded that, “It’s only a matter of time before trans female athletes compete in the Olympics,” and “they will not have an edge over the rest of the field.”

Given the physical advantages of men over women (as I’ve pointed out twice before—but which are obvious to those not corrupted by liberalism), male athletes will not suffer competitively in this latest cause of liberalism, where, ironically, trophies and money will be taken from women and given to men. A real feminist would fight against such an injustice, but alas, modern feminism is beholden to the sexual agenda of modern liberalism.

So beholden that, in spite of all that science and common sense reveal, prior to Beggs beginning her quest for a state championship, The Washington Post began their piece on her story with,

On Friday, Mack Beggs, an undefeated high school wrestler from Texas, will compete at the girls’ state tournament in suburban Houston. 

But unlike the rest of the teen’s female competitors, Beggs, 17, is a boy.

Pause for a moment and consider the stupendous stupidity of that last sentence. NOTHING in sound science or morality allows for that conclusion, yet one of the supposed premier news organizations in the world—the paper that helped bring down a U.S. President—printed that sentence.

Additionally, after Beggs’ story broke, “trans athlete and activist” Chris Mosier, via Twitter, ignorantly declared,

High school athletic association policies for trans athletes should allow for participation by gender identity, not by birth certificate.

So again, by this perverse logic, males “identifying” as females would be allowed to take trophies from real girls or women.

The University Interscholastic League (UIL), the governing body for public school athletics in the state of Texas, requires student athletes to compete as the gender listed on their birth certificate. With support of about 95 percent of Texas school superintendents, the wise rule change was made last year, no doubt in response to cases like that of Nattaphon Wangyot’s. Yet UIL rules also allow the use of steroids if “dispensed, prescribed, delivered and administered by a medical practitioner for a valid medical purpose.” Thus, the UIL and the state of Texas should have further ruled that, since “gender identity” is a disorder, and since it is not possible for a female to “transition” to a male, the “roided-up” Beggs should not have been allowed to compete in any division.

Again, these people need serious physical, mental, and spiritual help. They do not need accommodation in living a lie.

(See this column at American Thinker.)

Copyright 2017, Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com
Trevor is the author of the brand new book The Miracle and Magnificence of America
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com