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Doubling Down on Men in Women’s Sports
The Boston Globe promoted a new book last week titled Open Play, the authors of which propose that, rather than protecting female athletes by preventing men from competing in women’s sports, we abolish the gender divide in athletics altogether – because it’s holding women back, don’t ya know.
The new book “makes a provocative argument more convincingly than you might imagine,” The Boston Globe tepidly claims.
English academics – of course they’re academics, because academia is where the most inane and destructive ideas in human history have come from – Sheree Bekker and Stephen Mumford argue in Open Play that “women’s sports” limit the possibilities for girls and women. After all, “the expectations are lower, the facilities are inferior, the rewards are fewer.” They point out that last year, the mean salary for WNBA players was a fraction of what men earn in the NBA. They neglect to mention that women make far less because no one cares about women’s basketball – least of all women themselves, who generally watch sports less than men do anyway, and men don’t care about women’s sports at all.
The authors argue, in the face of biological truth and the evidence right there in front of everyone’s eyes every time a man trounces a woman on the playing field or on the track or in the boxing ring, that men have no natural advantage over women in size and strength. They claim that the most important explanation for the gap between male and female athletic performance is the difference in “opportunity and expectation.”
Bekker and Mumford assert that “there really is so much more going on, mostly socially and culturally — how little boys and little girls are treated, and how we’re treated throughout our lifetimes — that plays into performance.” That can have much more of an impact than testosterone, they claim: “The chief indicators of athletic performance are going to be investment in the infrastructure — the training facilities and so on” – as if access to more brightly-lit gyms and locker rooms is going to enable Angel Reese to dominate LeBron James.
The two also suggest that segregating the sexes in sports is a tool of patriarchal exclusion, that women were banned from men’s sports so that men wouldn’t lose to them. Bekker and Mumford believe women need to be enlightened about all of the ways in which “they’re being kept small and their sport is being kept small… Women are not getting equal treatment as men. They’re not getting equal funding. They’re not getting equal prestige.”
Again, the dearth of funding and prestige is simply because sports fans overwhelmingly prefer to watch men’s versions of sports. Pumping more money into women’s sports isn’t enough to put women on a level playing field, if you’ll pardon the pun, with men.
As for the reality that most Americans are opposed to men who pretend to be female playing in women’s sports, the academics dismiss that controversy as “a manufactured issue.” Yes – it’s an issue that has been manufactured by gender ideologues like Bekker and Mumford defending mediocre male athletes who realized they could dominate women’s sports. Bekker and Mumford argue that “the dangers have been completely exaggerated” – after all, “trans women don’t hold any world records.”
Right – men pretending to be women don’t hold world records because they’re not exceptional, record-breaking athletes; they are mediocre male athletes who nonetheless win easily in competition with women.
Gender ideology has become the tip of the spear of the Left’s secular religion. They cannot acknowledge biological truth because then their whole house of cards would collapse. So they play the long game and keep hammering away at the truth with false narratives, doubling down like Bekker and Mumford until they wear down the opposition enough to change the culture – until one day we are all living by lies.
Decolonizing Shakespeare
The UK Daily Mail reported recently that Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust, which owns buildings in the celebrated playwright’s hometown Stratford-upon-Avon, wants to “create a more inclusive museum experience” and move away from Western perspectives after complaints that Shakespeare’s ideas were helping to advance “white supremacy”:
In 2022, a research project between the trust and Dr Helen Hopkins at the University of Birmingham postulated that the idea of Shakespeare’s ‘universal’ genius ‘benefits the ideology of white European supremacy’.
This is because European culture is portrayed as the standard for high art and the playwright as a symbol of British ‘superiority’, according to The Telegraph.
Yes, and why shouldn’t England be proud of Shakespeare? If the Congo or Thailand had an equivalent world-beating artist, they would have every right to be proud too, and not one European or American academic would think to argue otherwise. But because Shakespeare is a pre-eminent Western icon, celebrating him is racist and oppressive, and so Westerners must repent by deconstructing and discarding his genius, with our educated elites leading the lynch mob.
The Trust promised to remove racist, sexist, and homophobic language from its collections. The research project also advised that the Trust stop claiming Shakespeare was the “greatest” and instead refer to him as but part of a global community of “equal and different” writers. I wouldn’t even bother to remark upon how absurd and laughable this is, except that it is not merely ludicrous but a perversion of the truth and an open attack on Western civilization.
As always with the innocuous-sounding imperatives of “diversity and inclusion,” the real goal is the eradication of Eurocentric culture. So-called anti-racist activists will openly admit this: that Western civilization is infected with problematic “whiteness,” which must be wiped away in order to elevate non-white peoples and cultures.
The Daily Mail also notes that a growing number of woke academics are refusing to teach Shakespeare in American schools and pushing for “modern” alternatives. Writing in School Library Journal, Amanda MacGregor, a Minnesota-based librarian, bookseller and freelance journalist declared that “Shakespeare’s works are full of problematic, outdated ideas, with plenty of misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism and misogynoir.” As an aside, anyone who unironically uses the term misogynoir, or hatred of black women, should be pilloried in the public square in good old Elizabethan fashion.
In recent years, The Globe Theatre has shamefully begun offering anti-racist seminars to discuss “decolonising” Shakespeare and attaching trigger warnings about misogyny and racism to performances of his plays.
The Left is an anti-civilization movement which can only tear down, not create. It envies the great and the prosperous, and hates the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.
Ending Anti-Christian Persecution
On a more positive note, Tommy Valentine, Director of the Catholic Accountability Project at CatholicVote, wrote recently that President Trump has officially put Christian-hating domestic terrorists on notice for nearly 500 attacks on Catholic Churches across America since 2020.
Valentine cited Trump’s pledge to investigate an attack on St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Wichita, Kansas that left a Satanic website address scrawled on the wall. “I think it’s a terrible thing,” Trump said, when asked about it. “I am going to take a look at it.” Indeed, a suspect has already been arrested.
This came in the wake of the administration’s “Anti-Christian Weaponization Task Force,” established in February to investigate and put an end to the Biden administration’s harassment of, and hostility towards, Catholics at the hands of law enforcement agencies weaponized against American citizens.
CatholicVote tracked hundreds of cases of the active persecution of Catholic churches and pro-life organizations by the FBI and DoJ, which deliberately ignored hundreds of violent attacks on pro-life organizations and churches across America.
In the 2024 election, Catholic voters made their voices heard at the ballot box, effecting an historic swing in the Catholic vote towards Trump, resulting in the largest margin of victory among U.S. Catholics in decades.
“It seems there really is a new sheriff in town in America, one who will not tolerate the persecution of Catholics and the vulnerable, nor the weaponization of government agencies to shield such abhorrent behavior,” Valentine wrote. “Initiatives like this will go a long way towards correcting the injustices of the previous administration and cultivate goodwill between Catholics and their leaders in government.”
In other words, making America great again.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior