Sports and the culture war

The news that numerous schools are beginning to take a stand against men being allowed to pretend to be women and play in intercollegiate sports is welcome but also indicative of a deeper problem in American culture. Recently the focus has been on San José State University and its women’s volleyball team, which includes a 6-foot-1-inch man. Five schools have so far refused to play SJSU this year.

This news is welcome for several reasons. First, these are mainline schools, not bastions of the political and cultural right. It shows that the transgender issue cuts across normal ideological and political divides. The whole trans question is aimed at erasing women and will have the effect of erasing women’s private spaces. By granting men unhindered access to restrooms, changing rooms, and prisons, it endangers women, as has been pointed out many, many times. The kind of men who will take advantage of this will fall into two basic categories that scarcely inspire confidence: the deeply confused who think they are women and the cynical predators who want to take advantage of the vulnerable.

Second, sports clearly resonate with a large swathe of the population. Given how high the stakes are, the emergence of women’s sports as the key area that has come to gain traction on public opinion is a most welcome development. To protect women and children and to help those struggling with gender dysphoria, the extremism of the trans lobby must be defeated in the court of public opinion. Women’s sports seem to be proving the most effective arena for doing so. Lia Thomas and Riley Gaines are household names. And nowhere does the “science” of the trans lobby appear more intuitively implausible to the general population than on the fields of play.

And yet there is cause for concern here. What does it say about our culture in general when it is sports, not safety, that is the hook for winning over the public? Safety does play a role in sports, of course. Until the COVID-19 pandemic declined, I was briefly the college faculty adviser to a women’s rugby team and was on record as saying that I would never field them against an opponent whose roster included a man. I had no desire to expose the women to such danger and certainly no wish to have to make the difficult call to parents that their daughter had been paralyzed or worse by a tackle from the 250-pound male prop forward on the opposing side. But in swimming, track and field, and other noncontact sports—including volleyball—there is less physical danger posed to women by the participation of men. So, is it not a little odd that this issue seems to be the one that has most gripped the public imagination, given that the underlying concern is not women’s safety?

What this reveals—or perhaps confirms, as it is scarcely a secret—is the hyperbolic role that sports play in American culture. That such comparatively trivial pursuits have become so important should be a cause for concern. In his autobiography, Ralph McInerny, who was a professor at the University of Notre Dame, commented that no college football coach should ever earn more than the highest-paid professor. He was commenting on what he was witnessing at his own institution, but the point has application well beyond the groves of academe. The cult of sports runs deep in America and reflects something about the culture in general: The comparatively trivial pursuits of the sports arena have somehow come to be among the most important events in life. And this—rather like transgenderism—is a function of our therapeutic culture, where the avoidance of discomfort, the need to feel good about ourselves, and the necessity of distraction from the deepest questions of life have become the great moral imperatives.

That women’s sports might well prove to be the most effective tool for turning around popular attitudes to transgenderism is to be welcomed. But it is also worth reflecting on whether that in itself is ironically a function of precisely the sort of society that created transgenderism in the first place.