What the Atlantic Got Wrong About Trans Sports
30th October 2022
(The Atlantic got something wrong? Sah it ain’t so!)
In September, the Atlantic published an article headlined “Separating Sports by Sex Doesn’t Make Sense.” In it, author Maggie Mertens bemoans the fact that “many people still view sports as a perfectly reasonable venue in which to enforce exclusion on the basis of sex” and seeks to explain why this is a misguided position.
Here we go again. The headline told me where things were headed. A strange trend had emerged on the left: many progressives were feverishly insisting that biological sex “isn’t real,” or is so complicated that it’s silly to say someone has a sex in a stable sense. These bizarre claims were being disseminated for one reason: to undercut arguments that trans women aren’t “real” women, or that trans men aren’t “real” men. The thinking goes that once people realize these claims are bigoted and empirically false, it will greatly accelerate society’s path toward trans acceptance.
This is a fundamentally confused position. Until very recently, everyone understood that sex (being male or female) and gender identity (feeling like one is male or female, if you believe in that sort of thing) are two very different concepts, and that arguments for trans rights don’t — can’t — rely on the idea of trans women, for example, literally being women. But the orthodoxy changed swiftly. These days, not only is the sentence I just wrote considered dangerously close to hate speech, uttering the term “biological sex” makes you a dinosaur. We’re supposed to say “sex assigned at birth,” as though delivery-room nurses are flipping coins.