Herschel Walker is a bad candidate but of course he's right about 'transgender' athletes and women's sports

It is pretty easy to be right about that

I think Republicans made a bad gamble running Herschel Walker in Georgia—the guy seems like a grade-A doofus, forgive me for saying so; he seems to have a lot of baggage, and he honestly doesn’t seem to be able to speak that well. (Earlier this year when asked a pretty basic gun control question by CNN, he responded: “What I like to do is see it and everything and stuff.”) I think he’d be a pretty likable guy if he owned, like, a Ford dealership or something down in Macon, but I think he’s a bit of a trainwreck as a candidate and I bet he’s going to get pantsed by Raphael Warnock next month even after nearly overtaking him a few weeks ago. Ah well.

But the man is right about transgenderism and women’s sports. Indubitably. Now, to be sure, it doesn’t take much brains to be right about this stuff. But it does take something of a spine, even if you’re a conservative who’s mostly surrounded by other conservatives most of the time. People are very afraid of criticizing transgenderism; they know that if they do, people are going to say mean things about them on social media, and for most people that seems to be the functional equivalent of a tortuous death sentence. People will sell their own children to Barbary pirates to avoid having mean things said about them on social media. So Walker does get some credit here:

Natalie Allison @natalie_allison

Herschel Walker is up with a new runoff ad about transgender athletes, featuring a swimmer who tied with Lia Thomas. “My senior year, I was forced to compete against a biological male,” Riley Gaines says in the ad for Walker’s Senate campaign.

It’s “unfair and wrong” for women to be forced to compete against men. I mean, yes, it is. This is such a slam-dunk that it can barely even be qualified as a trenchant observation. It’s just beyond basic stuff. And really even hardline transgender advocates would probably admit the basic concession outright. Ask them if they believe women should be forced to compete against men and most of them will likely say no, of course not. Ask them if they believe women should have to compete against “transgender women” and they’ll give you a different answer, but without ever stopping to think of the incomprehensible dissonance at play. That’s why we’ve gotten to the point that a major senatorial candidate can actually use “men shouldn’t be allowed to compete against women” as a campaign plank.

There has arisen this whole weird economy of “studies” to try and disprove the very basic fact about the stark differences between male and female athletic performances; they’ll point to these investigations— with titles like “The Performance Gap Between Female and Male Age Group Runners from 5 Km to 6 Days Running”—as evidence that the old sex binary of athletic division is outdated and no longer relevant. I always find hard data more relevant than “studies” performed by scientists who may very well have an agenda of some kind; my favorite data in this genre are the ones that, as these Duke researchers put it, compare the athletic performances of “the best elite women to boys and men.” As they note, in just one class of sports competitions, “not only did hundreds and thousands of males outperform the best results of the elite females, they did so thousands and tens of thousands of times.” That’s decisive enough on paper; when you put a man in the same competition as women, as Penn did last year, you get a male athlete “crushing” his competitors, “destroying” records, and just absolutely dominating the events overall.

This is bad, dirty stuff, but the most interesting thing is that Democrats are plainly unaware of just how badly this is going to hurt them—maybe not now, but a few years from now, five or 10, as the transgender zeitgeist continues and more and more young women watch their athletic dreams get snatched away from them by men in tank suits. The backlash against that is already brewing. Young girls who have been training for their whole lives are waking up to find their best times and trophies scholarships going to guys; mothers and fathers are watching their daughters climb wearily out of the pool while a big broad-chested fellow pumps his fists in victory a few lanes down; everyone is profoundly discomfited that young women are being trounced by these young men and then being forced to get naked in front of them in the locker rooms.

This is the kind of stuff that can utterly decimate the political party that supports it. It’s probably not enough to save Herschel Walker’s really awful campaign this year, but if nothing else, he gets credit for being well ahead of the curve.