Outsports, a publication that touts itself as the “leader in LGBTQ sports news & commentary for athletes, coaches & fans,” recently published an article under the headline “ Sports need to discuss cisgender discomfort over transgender athletes winning.”

Jon Kay, at Quillette in Canada, noted on Twitter that “the word ‘discomfort’ in the title of an article like this is a good indication that the contents will be gaslighting bulls**t, as its usage falsely suggests that the problem lies with unenlightened heretics (who just need to try harder to overcome some inwardly felt neurosis).”

Woke activists routinely portray opposition as stemming from a “phobia,” “hatred,” or other gut reaction. They want you to believe the new orthodoxies they’re foisting on us cannot be challenged except by primitive prejudice. If you disagree, you cannot be actuated by solid data, considered argument, and intelligent thought. This slander portrays opponents as backward, bigoted, and (to borrow Hillary Clinton’s locution) deplorable. The militants arrogantly demand that everyone shut up while they poison our culture. Your contrary opinion makes you a bullet-headed bigot who can be brushed aside insouciantly.

Science, which the Left regularly arrogates to itself, is, however, on the side of clear traditional distinctions between the sexes. Men, with X and Y chromosomes, are generally bigger, stronger, and faster than women, who have two X chromosomes. Being bigger, stronger, and faster confers huge advantages in athletics.

Thus, as swimmer Riley Gaines points out, women are being driven out of women’s sports because they are denied the victories, rewards, and lifelong advantages they’ve earned by making themselves the best in their sex at their sports. Gaines has suffered personally from men colonizing women’s sports, for she had to compete against Lia Thomas, a male swimmer who swept up available honors by identifying as a woman after several seasons competing ineffectively as a man.

Gaines described Thomas as a “six-four, 22-year-old male who was fully intact with male genitalia,” which Outsports describes as “libelous scrutiny.” Apparently, Thomas may be only 6 feet and 1 inch tall, but how is it libelous to get his height wrong or point out that Thomas is 22 years old and male? For that matter, can scrutiny be libelous? These are mysteries that presumably only trans activists understand.

But let us return to the distinction woke warriors wish to make between gut feelings and considered judgments. Should visceral antipathies be dismissed? If so, what are they for? Certainly, as rational, intelligent, and civilized creatures, we should not be actuated only by feelings. But don’t decent humane feelings properly moderate remorseless logic? Of course they do.

It is not wrong to have the gut feeling of anger at the sight of a biological man standing on a gold medal podium basking in victory over physically incomparable female competitors. If we react with disgust and outrage at seeing a biological man smashing a woman in a martial arts fight, does that make us knuckle-dragging troglodytes? Don’t advocates of such a mismatch fit that description better? If we look uncomfortably away from the sight of men sprinting away from women down a track, or brushing them violently aside on a rugby pitch, or storming past them round a velodrome, are we unevolved barbarians on the wrong side of history? No, we are not. We are holdouts for common sense, truth, and decency.

There are transgender people who recognize this. Caitlyn Jenner, the most celebrated decathlete in the world, has just set up a political action committee, Fairness First, to “fight radical gender ideology, put parental rights at the forefront of education, and keep boys out of women’s sports .”

Certainly, there are bigots in this debate as in any other, and on both sides. But the urgings of our feelings are not all bad. We have instincts and prejudices that we exercise to our credit. The instinct to protect the weak against the strong is admirable. Our prejudice in favor of fair play is desirable, as is distaste for manipulative exploitation and queasiness over intolerance from wherever it comes. It is not bigotry that prompts ordinary people to reject the destruction of women’s sports by the inclusion of biological men. It is, rather, an array of fine instincts that happen to coincide with the conclusions of cogent argument and the compulsion of facts.

We oppose biological men being allowed into women’s sports because we are civilized people, because we know it is unfair and often dangerous. We also know that those who push this transformation of our culture are suffering from a psychological disorder that needs treatment, or they are just cynically riding a bandwagon that they hope (often with good reason) will bring them praise, social status, fame, and wealth.

There are many more who, perhaps fearing the Left’s aggression, are merely weakly unresisting as they are swept along by an extraordinary ideological fashion. But they too will eventually find themselves as worn down as the female athletes being forced to give up their trophies and private spaces — because if there is one thing the Left has made clear, it is that they will accept nothing less than total capitulation.