Early in Barack Obama’s Oval Office tenure, WND columnist Les Kinsolving wrote of a decision by the Maine Human Rights Commission to back away from a requirement that schools allow men who identify as women to join women’s teams.
A commissioner who supported shelving the plan called it a “victory for common sense and sound reasoning on a very controversial issue.”
“How long will most female athletic teams last if they’re all open to males?” Kinsolving asked at the time.
The world is about to find out, with the International Olympic Committee announcing it will allow transgenders in virtually all athletic competitions without undergoing reassignment surgery. That means men competing against women in various sporting events.
“They ought to make good boxers and power lifters,” commented Jim Hoft at The Gateway Pundit.
WND Vice President David Kupelian, author of “The Snapping of the American Mind,” said the issue ultimately is fairness.
“A few years ago, Americans were shocked when the first transgender bathroom measures were being discussed, and the idea that men could use the ladies’ room was shocking,” he said. “Once the shock subsided and the leftist lawyers and legislators forced implementation, they aimed for a higher bar – forcing girls to accept boys in their locker rooms and showers, as long as the boys claimed they identified as female,” he said.
“But with the International Olympic Committee’s ruling that men claiming to be women can compete against woman athletes, a new world record in insanity and unfairness has been established,” he said.
Kupelian’s new book shows how the long-coalescing forces of the political left, turbocharged by the Obama presidency, are causing a breakdown of bedrock American institutions, core values, families, individual happiness and sanity itself.
“The Olympics as an institution is already hurting, with fewer and fewer cities being willing to take on the expensive job of hosting the event,” he observed. “Once the worldwide viewers – most of whom have not been brainwashed and intimidated into embracing the increasingly bizarre LGBT agenda – realize that men can now compete against women in the Olympics, the inherent unfairness of this and the total inversion of traditional sportsmanship will cause the Olympic flame to dwindle still further.
After all, Kupelian noted, the “LGBT agenda is supposedly all about fairness.”
“But the naked unfairness of this ruling by the IOC, which, had it been in place four decades ago, would have allowed Bruce Jenner to compete against women athletes, will widely be seen as a bridge too far,” he said.
The move was recommended by the IOC Consensus Meeting on Sex Reassignment and Hyperandrogenism, which included Angelica Hirschberg of the Karolinska Institutet, Gerare Conway of the University College London, Maria Jose Martinez Patino of the University of Vigo and dozens of other experts and advocates.
Their recommendations are that “those who transition from female to male are eligible to compete in the male category without restriction.”
An athlete who transitions “from male to female” must declare “her gender identity” and “demonstrate that her testosterone level in serum” has been below a specified level for at least 12 months.
Further, it must remain at that low level “throughout the period of desired eligibility” and be tested by “monitoring.”
Reacting to the IOC’s decision, a Christian sports ministry in Madison, Wisconsin, noted to Charisma News that athletes previously were required to have gender-reassignment surgery to compete as the opposite sex.
“We started in 2003 standing against transgenders in the Olympics,” 4 WINDS President Steve McConkey said. “Not only is the LGBT movement promoting immoral behavior in sports, but science will show that the new IOC ruling is not scientifically sound. The IOC has opened the door for a threat to the Olympics worse than performance-enhancing drugs.”
The transgender movement has grown exponentially during the Obama administration.
For example, it made headlines in 2007 when the University of Southern Maine announced a “gender neutral” restroom facility.
“The USM library bathrooms are designed to accommodate several people simultaneously, and they have no exterior door locks,” said Mike Hein of the Christian Civic League of Maine. “Men and women were seen entering and leaving the bathrooms freely, often together as groups, throughout the transgender event.”
Within a couple of years, a Senate committee was beginning to give “serious consideration” to a plan that would provide special protections for transgender people in the workplace.
Over the last two years, the movement has surged. WND reported on a radical “co-ed bathroom law” adopted in California that allows public school students to identify themselves as boys or girls, regardless of their sex. Then the Department of Defense, under Obama’s direction, issued a new rule weakening the prohibition against transgender personnel in the ranks. It said being transgender no longer was a criterion for removal.
A short time later, Mitchell Primary School children in Kittery, Maine, were being taught from a book called “I Am Jazz,” about a boy who claims to have known at the age of 2 that “she had a girl’s brain in a boy’s body.”
A character in the popular television series “Glee” came out as transgender, and the industry announced more transgender shows.
Recently, the Obama administration threatened an Illinois school district with the loss of Title IX funding if officials refused to let a boy who dresses as a girl use the locker room for girls to change and shower.
Meanwhile, a play has now featured Jesus as a transgender woman, and a bar in Portland, Oregon was ordered by the state court of appeals to pay $400,000 in damages to transgender customers the owner asked to stay away.
The Obama administration hired its first openly transgender official recently, and of course, Olympic legend Bruce Jenner announced that he was now a woman named “Caitlyn.”
Which brings things full circle to the Olympic committee’s determination now that not only can transgendered people compete against the gender with whom they identify, but that no surgery is required.
The Guardian reported that former IOC medical commission chairman Arne Ljungqvist, who helped draft the new guidelines, said the consensus was driven by social and political changes.
“‘It has become much more of a social issue than in the past,’ he told the Associated Press. ‘We had to review and look into this from a new angle. We needed to adapt to the modern legislation around the world. We felt we cannot impose a surgery if that is no longer a legal requirement.'”
Marissa Payne at the Washington Post cited some current “professional transgender athletes,” including cyclists Natalie van Gogh of the Netherlands and Michelle Dumaresq of Canada, and Team USA duathlete Chris Mosier, who identifies as male. Van Gogh and Dumaresq have both undergone gender reassignment surgery while Mosier has not.
Perhaps a harbinger of Olympic events to come, a male-to-female transgender mixed martial arts fighter, Fallon Fox, defeated opponent Tamikka Brents by dishing out a damaged orbital bone and a concussion.
The badly injured Brents commented, “I’ve never felt so overpowered ever in my life.”
