Former President Donald Trump drew loud applause from his supporters when he said he would prefer to ban men from women’s sports.
“We will ban men from participating in women’s sports,” he promised on January 29 during a Texas speech that mimicked a campaign rally.
Trump then referred to the Ivy League sex scandal where a man — Lia Thomas — has been allowed to swim in womens’ races after declaring he is “transgender” because he has a “female gender identity”:
So ridiculous. Did you see the man who was on the swimming team at a certain school that I know very well? The [womens’ swimming] record held for like 11 years. He beat it by 38 seconds.
Trump’s statement got loud applause, unsurprisingly, because even pro-transgender advocates admit they have lost the public argument over sex-switching athletes.
Numerous polls show that the public increasingly rejects the transgender ideology. The new opponents include many liberal-leaning, college-educated women and men who hated Trump and voted for Joe Biden in 2020.
Trump’s Texas promise is a voter-forced reversal of his prior hands-off response to the transgender ideology. In June 2020, for example, Trump endorsed the Supreme Court’s declaration that a 1960s sex-equality law now bars employers from firing men who insist they are women:
No, they’ve ruled. I’ve read the decision, and some people were surprised. But they’ve ruled and we live with their decision. That’s what it’s all about. We live with the decision of the Supreme Court — very powerful, very powerful decision, actually. But they have so ruled.
Throughout his four-year term, Trump mostly dodged the issue. But his mainstream deputies worked hard to replace the pro-transgender policies that President Barack Obama imposed on the departments of defense, education, and housing. Trump did speak out against Obama’s pro-transgenderism Pentagon policy.
But Trump’s narrow promise in Texas about cross-sex athletes did not refer to the many other intrusive — and often, anti-woman — demands of the transgender ideology.
The ideology declares that people and children can switch their legal sex by simply announcing their cross-sex “gender identity.”
The ideology also demands that the government force Americans to agree with the ideology’s sexual claims, for example, that children are legally entitled to begin permanent and risky bodily modification, that schools should train all children to think they might want to change their sex, and that there are minimal health or mental risks when trying to live as a member of the opposite sex.
The intrusive transgender push has prompted voters in many states to replace their school boards and to pass state-wide laws protecting children and single-sex sports.
GOP investor Glenn Youngkin recognized and validated this opposition, and in exchange, the voters elected him governor of Virginia.
But the establishment GOP has largely dodged the issue, just as it has dodged many other civic priorities of GOP voters.
A teammate of famed transgender UPenn swimmer Lia Thomas claims that he recently colluded with another transgender swimmer to lose a race. https://t.co/2QGps6hMM3
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) January 20, 2022
Federal GOP politicians are under intense pressure from some major donors to ignore the sex vs. gender issue. The donors fear that GOP might trade away unpopular business goals — such as deregulation — while trying to win a popular deal with Democrats that would curb the transgender ideology.
But some GOP politicians are speaking out, prompted by the zero-sum unfairness of Thomas stealing prizes from female swimmers.
“This is going to be a detriment to a lot of women’s sports,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) told Fox News on January 28; He continued:
Not just individual sports like tennis, and swimming, and golf, but you’re going to see it. If this ruling goes through, you’re going to see all the sports have an influx of young men playing in these sports and these women are going to be playing for second …
The president of the United States should come out and make an opinion on it. We need to know where they stand … Because there is no possible way that this would even be a case if the President of the United States and if this administration would tell the progressive left enough’s enough.”
When men can join womens’ sports, he said, women “are playing for second and third [place] … It’s absolutely disheartening to all these young women.”
Tuberville’s new role in the issue was welcomed by the American Principles Project, which has tracked public opinion on the transgender issue. In a January 31 statement to Breitbart News, the group said:
It’s clear that Republicans are finally seeing the political advantage of highlighting Democrat extremism on this issue. But with the GOP seemingly poised to take back Congress next year, the question remains: Will they actually do something about it once they retake power? That will be the real test, and it will be critical that conservatives hold them to it.
Tuberville “has done more than talk,” the statement said. “Last year, he proposed an amendment to the COVID relief bill that would have prohibited funds from going to educational institutions allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports. Predictably, Senate Democrats voted it down.”
Public opinion on biological men competing in girl’s sports is so bad for trans activists that the Transgender Law Center didn’t even release the results of their poll.
No matter how the question was asked, they lost the debate. pic.twitter.com/iadBMMrA7Y
— American Principles 🇺🇸 (@approject) December 30, 2021