Poison Ivy in women’s golf

Veronica Ivy apparently aspires to be the transgender version of Mildred “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias.

“Babe” Zaharias was a pioneer for female athletes in the early 20th century and a multi-sport superstar. In the early 1930s, at a time when most high schools and colleges didn’t even have women’s basketball teams, the native Texan was on the All-America team. (She played for her employer’s company squad.) At the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, the 21-year-old Zaharias dominated in women’s track and field: She set world records in both the 80-meter hurdles (11.7 seconds) and the javelin throw (143 feet) en route to winning gold in both events and taking silver in the high jump.

It was in golf, however, that Zaharias truly achieved superstardom. The woman who earned the nickname “Babe”—after none other than Babe Ruth—as a teen for hitting home runs in neighborhood baseball games against boys, won 82 golf tournaments in her career, at one point winning 17 straight. She was also a founder of the Ladies’ Professional Golf Association.

Fast forward to 2019: The player now known as Veronica Ivy—then known as Rachel (formerly Rhys) McKinnon—wins the 200-meter sprint championship in the women’s 35-39 age group at the Masters Track Cycling Championships in England. It’s not the first time a man has claimed the title, either: It’s Ivy’s second straight. And Ivy is by no means apologetic about defeating actual women: “I have yet to meet a real champion who wants trans women banned,” the native Canadian crows. “If you win because bigotry got your competition banned … you’re a loser.”

Now, skip ahead to the present: Like Zaharias, Ivy has abandoned his previous sport to take up golf. And like Zaharias, Ivy has gotten very good very quickly: Now well into his 40s, the man known for wearing rainbow-colored glasses has already won British Columbia’s Mid-Amateur and Mid-Master championships.

“By ‘won,’ I mean ‘stole,’ because he’s still a dude,” MRCTV commentator Brittany Hughes said. “But now he’s just bounding from sport to sport playing against women, because what does he have to worry about?”

As if that’s not enough, Ivy has boasted that his new goal is to drive the ball more than 280 yards. According to the LPGA’s website, only three women competing on the association’s tour—Spain’s Julia Lopez Ramirez (288.20 yards on average), and Americans Riley Smyth (287.76) and Auston Kim (280.58)—have consistently been able to launch the ball that far.

By contrast, more than 30 men on the PGA Tour have driven the ball more than 400 yards this season, according to CBS Sports. Even the three players with the worst long drives—Americans Otto Black and Preston Cole, and Japan’s Taiga Kobayashi, who as of this writing were tied for 443rd—have hit the ball more than 340 yards.

Ivy’s goal of hitting the ball 280 yards would thus be downright laughable were he competing against men, as he should be.

“But when this guy does it, it’ll be hailed as a great victory for women by idiot leftists who have become so open-minded that their brains have just fallen out of their skulls,” Hughes said.

Chief among those exposing her cranium is Cathy Engelbert. Amid her somewhat self-inflicted controversy over who qualifies to compete in the Women’s National Women’s Basketball Association, the league commissioner had the audacity to snap at reporters, “If you think you know how to tell the difference between a man and a woman, please speak up.”

Um, Ms. Engelbert, two questions: (1) Have you read an anatomy book, like, ever? (2) Are you sure you’re qualified to run America’s elite women’s pro basketball league if you don’t even know who qualifies to participate? (For that matter, is Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson qualified to opine on issues involving sex-based discrimination if she cannot define what a woman is?)

Regardless, Ivy is just the latest example of a mediocre male athlete using “womanhood” as a path to dominance. It’s the thing leftists stubbornly insist never happens. When it does happen, they say so-called “transgender” athletes are just trying to be themselves and aren’t looking to gain a competitive advantage. That doesn’t stop mediocre male athletes from gaining one every time they conveniently discover their inner female.

Sadly, far too many officials in charge of women’s sports have indulged that delusion. And athletes like Ivy, California state girls’ triple- and high-jumping champion A.B. Hernandez, and former University of Pennsylvania swimmer Will (aka Lia) Thomas, once the 2022 national champion in the women’s 500-yard freestyle, are all too eager to bask in the limelight of their ill-gotten victories, rubbing them in the faces of the actual women they’ve robbed of athletic glory.

It’s far past time for those in charge of women’s sports to grow a spine. They do know what a girl or a woman is. And to protect the integrity of their sports, they need to abandon the “inclusion” nonsense and keep people like Ivy out of women’s sports.