As Andrea Widberg recently reported, UPenn, facing the loss of untold millions of federal dollars, has seen the light. They’ve been forced to obey federal anti-discrimination law, primarily Title IX. Remember the Republican “war on women?” It’s sort of about that. Presumably they’re not going to say “trans women are women” aloud anymore, but one can’t police whatever errant thoughts rattle around in the empty heads of university administrators.
UPenn will no longer allow men in women’s sports, will erase fake female swimmer Lia Thomas’ records and wins from the books, reassigning them to the women who actually earned those accolades, and in a development that will surely have administrators screaming in rage, will issue written apologies to the affected real women. The NCAA is also, in a more weak-kneed manner, following the lead of UPenn.
But what about the International Olympic Committee (IOC)? Have they been whacked upside the head with the reality stick? That’s a firm “maybe.”
Kristy Coventry, the incoming President of the IOC appears to be shaking off that whack with a new perspective:
“We understand that there’ll be differences depending on the sport… but it was very clear from the members that we have to protect the female category, first and foremost to ensure fairness,” Coventry said.
“But we need to do that with a scientific approach and the inclusion of the international federations who have already done a lot of work in this area.”
Coventry said there is “unanimous support” for agreeing to amend the organization’s transgender athletes policy; she said the IOC may follow in the footsteps of the World Athletics policy, which restricts transgender-identifying males from competing in women’s sports if they have gone through puberty.
Wow. What a difference Donald Trump makes. That sounds like a complete reversal of the IOC’s previously uber-woke stance. Not so fast:
“It was very clear from the membership the discussion around this has to be done with medical and scientific research at the core, so we are looking at the facts and the nuances and the inclusion of the international federations that have done so much of this work… having a seat at the table and sharing with us because every sport is different,” she said.
Graphic: Boxing at the 2018 Summer Youth Olympics – Girls' lightweight Gold Medal Bout 078. Wikimedia Commons.org. CC A-SA 3.0 Unported.
Ah. “Nuances.” “Inclusion.” As always, the devil is in the details, and where any “international” body is involved, the devil is the details. The IOC’s record on such things is less than encouraging. For example, at the 2024 Paris Olympics, two boxers took gold despite failing international competition gender-eligibility tests. Even better, the UN—the UN—released a report last year indicating real women lost almost 900 medals to mediocre male athletes pretending to be women:
The study, called “Violence against women and girls in sports,” found that more than 600 female athletes did not medal in more than 400 competitions in 29 different sports because they were beaten by transgender-identifying males.
“The replacement of the female sports category with a mixed-sex category has resulted in an increasing number of female athletes losing opportunities, including medals, when competing against males,” the report said.
Will Coventry go as far as UPenn in making things right? Of course not. Like American Democrat politicians whining we must “move forward” to cover up Democrat scandals, the IOC will not strip trans of medals they didn’t legitimately win, nor will the record books be changed to award female athletes the honors they earned. Don’t bother asking about apologies.
“We’re not going to be doing anything retrospectively. We’re going to be looking forward. From the members [it] was, ‘What are we learning from the past, and how are we going to leverage that and move that forward to the future?’” Coventry said.
Doesn’t the future sort of move forward on its own without any assistance from Democrats or international bureaucrats?
Of course they’re not “going to be doing anything retrospectively.” That’s probably one of those “nuances” about which Coventry spoke. One can only imagine how such scientific, medical nuances will be interpreted to allow Trans dominance of women’s sports in one way or another. Just as with DEI in academics, how do people whose entire professional lives have been dedicated to an insane denial of biology suddenly discover reality? Normally, they don’t. They get stealthy, rebranding themselves, their terminology and intentions, laying low until they can again impose their warped versions of reality on an unwilling populace.
But hey, miracles happen! Just not very often where international bureaucrats are concerned.
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Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.