Cracks in the facade of the transgender zeitgeist

The pendulum shifts, ever so slightly

Two observances from the transgender front this month: First, the World Boxing Council has announced its intention to create a “separate transgender league” to guarantee that boxers “will never be allowed to fight a different gender by birth.” So far as I can tell, the Council will require men who identify as women to fight only against other men who identify as women, ditto with women who identify as men—which is to say this “separate” league will have men boxing men and women boxing women, so it’ll basically be identical to the original league. Okay then.

Secondly, Victoria’s Secret this week announced that “transgender actor and activist Bell Agam will serve as one of the lingerie brand’s ambassadors in Israel.” Agam is a man who thinks he’s a woman; he hailed the appointed as one that helps “celebrate the freedom of all genders and sexual orientations.” The IDF is already 50% woman and very gay-friendly so it’s kind of already been done before, but you get the idea.

Taken together these two developments represent what will likely be a growing chasm between the idealizations of the transgender movement and the hard facts of physical reality. Men are overwhelmingly much stronger and larger than women; sports leagues will want to reflect this basic physical difference by separating the sexes, at least if they don’t want to end up with a bunch of brutally injured women at the hands of a bunch of men who think they are women. (This is already happening: A young female high school athlete earlier this year reportedly suffered “severe head and neck injuries, together [with] long-term concussion symptoms” after a boy on the opposing women’s team spiked a ball at her face at 70mph.) Then too the plain competitive advantages that boys possess at sports will likely keep too many leagues from integrating the sexes. (Maybe the best example of those advantages is found in the “Boys vs. Women” project, which compares the athletic accomplishments of high school boys relative to female Olympians.) This sort of thing can only go on for so long before people start to get embarrassed.

At the same time you will likely see more and more institutions like Victoria’s Secret embracing this zeitgeist, at least in the near future. You can’t really hide a man’s obvious maleness within the realm of athletic sports; you can make him look pretty compellingly like a woman—sort of—so long as you’re prepared to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in plastic surgery, makeup and lingerie. There’s less immediate pressure to concede to reality in the realm of women’s underwear, I’m afraid, so this sort of thing is going to continue—at Victoria’s Secret, sure, and also within movies, television shows, branding, news reporting, employment, places where you can sort of roughly conceal the wholesale fraud of this ideology a little more easily.

But I feel like eventually that will collapse, as well, simply because you cannot easily sustain a culture so diametrically at odds with itself, with sports leagues being the only institutions acknowledging basic biological facts while every other holon in society is aggressively pushing for the opposite; it feels like the hammer will fall eventually. Moreover, the longer the pop culture continues this charade, the more it puts young girls in danger: If you signal to predatory men that it’s acceptable for them to dress up like women and access women's intimate spaces like locker rooms and bathrooms…they’re going to do it, with predictable results. There will be a tipping point for this eventually, and it’s going to be brutal, after which you’ll probably see the pendulum start to shift pretty comprehensively.

We’re not there yet, of course, and there are assuredly many more years of difficulty ahead. But it seems like there are encouraging signs of change on the horizon. It is of course extraordinarily hard to think of the many lives that have been ruined by this zeitgeist, and the many more yet to be ruined. All we can do is keep working toward the better goal. It is improbable but welcome that professional boxing should be one of the conventions to lead us there.