Regular readers know that John Oliver aired a segment of his show ‘Last Week Tonight’ arguing for forty two minutes out of a forty eight minute show that we should totally let ‘trans women’ (as in, men pretending to be women) compete in sports and I thought I would take some time to fisk this nonsense.
Frankly, I was prompted by Ben Shapiro’s attempted takedown of this. I say ‘attempted’ because as much as I respect Shapiro in general, I think he dropped the ball a bit in this case. In fact, I think Oliver ended up fatally undermining the transgender movement in significant ways that Shapiro didn’t pick up on. As I dug into Oliver's segment, I started to see that John Oliver seems to have (ahem) massaged the data a bit. So, while Shapiro dropped the ball, I am here to pick it up and score.
If you want, you can watch Shapiro’s bit and Oliver’s segment, here:
And here:
But my goal is to write this so that you don’t have to watch them. Why would I demand that you torture yourself by watching John Oliver? I mean, wholly apart from the appalling substantive content where he is basically determined to destroy opportunities for women and expose women to a higher risk of injury, it’s just not very good. He is trying to ape Jon Stewart’s mixture of jokes and serious commentary, but he is failing because you can tell it is just a formula that is already stale. You can feel just how much he is desperately reaching for a joke now and then because he just has to have so many jokes per minute. Like it almost looks like its a quota for him.
Recommended
But, naturally, feel free to watch them if you really want to, but you don’t have to.
Now, first I want to start by asking a basic question, that transgender advocates inevitably avoid:
Let’s actually debate the issue. Do you believe we should have separate men’s and women’s sports at all? Under any conditions? And if so, why? https://t.co/hZgIcfBSzv
— (((Aaron Walker))) (@AaronWorthing) July 13, 2023
I mean, let’s be logical, here. It used to be that a great deal of our society was segregated by race. We had separate bathrooms, separate sports leagues, separate schools and, really, separate nearly everything according to race (at least in the South), but we correctly came to see that as deeply wrong.
And while many state institutions that were segregated by sex have been abolished—basically the Supreme Court doesn’t uphold single-sex public schools anymore—we have retained sex segregation in bathrooms, prisons, sports and so on. That’s not necessarily wrong—I tend to think this is right—but there is a cost to any kind of segregation and, therefore, we should always ask if that sex segregation is justified.
So how would I answer that question? Well, the short version is that I believe that there are relevant physiological differences that make it so women have a disadvantage in many sports. Furthermore, in contact sports that disadvantage often crosses the line into creating an unsafe situation.
The most clear cut version of this disadvantage is basketball. Can we agree that in basketball, being tall is an advantage? I’m not saying it is the end-all-be-all so that a short guy has no chance. For instance, I am taller than Muggsy Bogues and I am younger than him by almost a decade but I am pretty sure that Mr. Bogues would absolutely destroy me in a one-on-one game today—let alone in his prime. But there’s a reason why he became a household name: Because viewers couldn’t believe that such a short player (five foot three inches, reportedly) could actually compete in the NBA. Why? Because we knew he was at a disadvantage.
And can we agree that on average, men are taller than women? Again, this is not true in every case. I mean, I’m pretty sure that Peter Dinklage is shorter than everyone playing for the WNBA, but on average, men are taller than women. The tallest man is taller than the tallest woman.
So, we don’t even have to go into muscle mass and issues like that. It makes sense to have an WNBA segregated from the NBA if only because women tend to be shorter than men. If we let men play in the WNBA, too, those men would, on average, would have an advantage over women.
On the other end of it, I once saw a woman complaining that a ‘trans woman’ (a man who claimed to be a woman) won a women’s chess tournament and I had to wonder why women would be segregated from men in chess, at all. I have no reason to think that women have some kind of innate disadvantage against men in chess. Maybe someone can make the case, but I don’t see it right now. So, unless I see a good reason to separate men and women at all, the solution in my mind is to end the sex segregation in chess.
So, I am open to re-examining each sport (pretending for this discussion that games like chess is a ‘sport’) and deciding on a case-by-case basis whether this sex segregation makes sense. And even in the case of chess, I am not saying we should definitely merge men’s and women’s leagues: I am only saying that I am pretty skeptical of the argument that this segregation should continue. But if the sport is rightfully segregated for the reason I am giving—an innate difference that gives the average man an advantage over the average woman—then it is going to be hard to argue that a man who decides to he is a woman is equal to an actual woman.
Like let’s return to the example of basketball. Let’s say that John Smith spends his entire life as a boy and eventually a man and he likes to play basketball. Let’s say he is actually good enough to make it into the NBA, but he becomes a bench warmer, only rarely getting a chance to play. Then at the age of 25, he decides that actually he is a woman, and he starts to get hormone therapy and all that. He starts asking to be called Joan Smith. Well, by the age of 25 almost every man has reached his full height and he is not going to lose a single inch in his transition to being an alleged woman. He will still have that advantage. So, if the height difference alone is enough to justify a separate league for women, then ‘Joan Smith’ should not be allowed to play in the WNBA. It’s that simple.
And it is Oliver’s failure to truly, deeply understand why we have this sex segregation in sports that infects his entire analysis. What most Americans get intuitively, Oliver just completely misses. Indeed, over and over again, he makes arguments that are actually arguments to end sex segregation entirely, rather than to let men pretending to be women play in a women’s league.
To begin picking more specifically through the video, Oliver starts off by accusing the right of being fixated on this issue. He complains that Republicans have spent $116 million on ads talking about men in women’s sports and this, he says, has caused the majority of the American people to say that men and boys should not be playing in women’s and girls’ sports.
But Oliver is getting things backwards. Republicans didn’t hypnotize Americans into thinking that men shouldn’t be playing in women’s leagues. The American people overwhelming already believe this to be the correct policy. He paints this as a six in ten majority, but if anything he seems to be underselling it:
A January New York Times/Ipsos poll found 79% oppose men in women’s sports—67% of Democrats, 94% of Republicans. A 2024 Center Square poll showed 59% support a federal ban on procedures such as puberty blockers and gender reassignment surgeries for minors. pic.twitter.com/OjgWItRKIv
— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) April 14, 2025
I mean, this is the kind of numbers you need to get an amendment added to the Constitution.
So, Republicans didn’t spend that money because they were trying to convince the American people that men shouldn’t be in women’s sports. They were spending that money because the American people already felt this way, and wanted to make sure they knew which party aligned with their values on this issue. And it is insulting to the American people that Oliver thinks that they were so easily led on this issue.
Seriously, I am glad this is a VIP piece because otherwise, I would be tempted not to say it. Why tip Democrats off as to how bad this strategy is?
Indeed, he complains that ‘even Gavin Newsom … recently said that trans athletes being allowed to participate in women’s sports is ‘deeply unfair.’’ Look, I am under no delusion that Gavin Newsom has given this deep thought and decided from a philosophical perspective. This is the same governor who signed into law California Family Code § 3424 which says in relevant part that:
(a) A court of this state has temporary emergency jurisdiction if the child is present in this state and the child has been abandoned or it is necessary in an emergency to protect the child because the child, or a sibling or parent of the child, is subjected to, or threatened with, mistreatment or abuse, or because the child has been unable to obtain gender-affirming health care or gender-affirming mental health care, as defined by Section 16010.2 of the Welfare and Institutions Code.
Let me tell you what that means in practical terms. Let’s say that a child living in Texas wants to get a ‘sex change.’ Let’s say further that the child’s parents refuse to allow this to happen because they believe it is a bad idea. This law says that if that child runs away from home and goes to California, that the child can go in front of a judge and the judge can grant the child the right to obtain the sex change operation over the objection of his or her parents.
Also: This can happen if the child is taken away from the parents by a third-party adult. That is, some adult can offer to take a child away from his or her family so they can go to California to get their ‘gender affirming surgery,’ and this law gives a judge the right to grant that. That is true, despite the fact that this would be considered kidnapping in many states, including Virginia.
And if you want to get a sense of how crazy that law is, consider California Health and Safety Code § 119302, which regulates tattoos. It says in relevant part that:
(a) Pursuant to Section 653 of the Penal Code, a client shall be at least 18 years of age to be offered or to receive a tattoo or permanent cosmetics application, regardless of parental consent.
That’s right, in California minor children can’t get tattoos even with parental consent. Because of course a child cannot consent to needlessly alter their bodies in a permanent way and the parents can't consent for the child. The child is a minor, so he or she just can’t do it. But if your son is a minor and he wants to chop off his penis and put in a fake vagina, then this can be done over the objections of parents who might not even live in California. Make that make sense.
So, Gavin Newsom hasn’t suddenly seen the light. He has seen the poll numbers. He’s a weather vane, not a thought leader. But weather vanes are a great way to tell us which way the wind is blowing.
And, by the way, $116 million spent on ads that discuss—at least in part—the transgender in sports issue is not nearly as impressive as Oliver seems to think it is. For starters, he doesn’t give any time frame for the number. Is that in one year? Ten years? This entire millennium? The last hundred years? As we are going to see many times in this presentation, he is vague about what he is discussing.
Second, compare that to what the FEC says about spending on the last election:
Presidential candidates raised $1.6 billion and spent over $1.3 billion in the first 21 months of the 2023-2024 election cycle, according to campaign finance reports filed with the Federal Election Commission that cover activity from January 1, 2023 through September 30, 2024. Congressional candidates collected $3.3 billion and disbursed $2.8 billion, political parties received $2.1 billion and spent $1.8 billion, and political action committees (PACs) raised $12.3 billion and spent $10.9 billion, according to campaign finance reports filed with the Federal Election Commission that cover activity from January 1, 2023 through September 30, 2024. Disbursements for independent expenditures and electioneering communications reported in this period totaled $2.2 billion and $7 million, respectively. Communication costs reported to the Commission totaled $11.3 million.
Over a hundred million dollars is nothing to sneeze at, but it’s not self-evident proof of obsession in an election where that kind of money was being thrown around.
Next up, (I’m at about the 3:40 mark) he asks us, more or less ‘won’t somebody think of the children?’ Okay, that’s not quite the words. What he actually said was ‘for trans kids impacted by these bans, who just want to play sports with their friends, it’s been hard.’
Well, the idea that this is about playing sports with their friends is ridiculous. We’re not talking about a bunch of kids playing informally like the kids in ‘The Sandlot.’ We’re talking about formalized leagues or school play. And who makes it onto those teams often has absolutely nothing to do with pre-existing friendships. So, if they are ‘playing with their friends’ they are playing with friends they made while playing the sport, and they can just as easily make new friends if they play with people of their own sex.
And as we will see, Oliver doesn’t care at all about the feelings of the women being denied opportunities. Their feelings don’t matter, nor does the actual concrete benefits these women will be denied—or their injuries, for that matter. He claims to have compassion for them, but wait until he deals with actual specific victims of this nonsense.
In terms of the benefits, I’ll tell you a brief personal story that kind of illuminates what I am talking about. When I had to choose which law school I was going to go to, one of my choices was the University of Texas at Austin, which was offering me a full scholarship. It was the only option offering a scholarship. At one point I was talking the issue over with my father, he said something that really stuck with me. He said, ‘I never thought I would have a kid smart enough to get a scholarship by academics.’
In that one moment, I understood why my father encouraged me to try sports. Now, just to be clear, he was never very pushy about it. But he definitely encouraged me to at least give sports a shot, and one of the reasons why he was doing it was because he was hoping I would win the ‘jackpot’ and get a scholarship.
And he wasn’t crazy to think this. A friend of mine in North Carolina managed to get into Carolina (a.k.a. the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) on a fencing scholarship. Mind you, he didn’t get money from the school—I don’t think any school cares about fencing that much—but what they were calling a scholarship was admitting him to the school when his scores were not quite good enough to get in without that boost.
Now realistically, most kids won’t grow up to get any kind of scholarship, let alone living the dream of playing sports professionally. But the question is whether young girls will have any opportunity to go for that dream at all. And by the time I am done writing this, I think you will understand why I care very much about equal opportunity for the maximum number of people.
And that gets into another thing. Throughout the piece, Oliver complains that we are upset about a small number of transgender athletes. But what he is ignoring is how demoralizing it can be when you know other people have an unfair advantage over you. For instance, video game companies often spend billions of dollars detecting and punishing cheaters in online multiplayer games. Why? Because they know no one will want to play those games if they are constantly losing because the other players cheated. And they really want you to keep playing their games so you keep spending on those games.
And it doesn’t just have to be cheating. For instance, if we merged the WNBA with the NBA, the vast majority of women now playing in the WNBA would wash out of this new league. It wouldn’t be unfair: Based on their own merits, these women would wash out. But then I think we would also see something else: The number of young girls going into basketball would plummet, even if their youth leagues were still segregated by sex. Why? Because seeing that there is a hard limit to their achievement would destroy their desire to play.
I don’t say this academically. I know what it is like to be hopeless. Regular readers might know that I am learning disabled. I am probably the only person alive who can say that he has a G.E.D. certificate and a degree from Yale Law School. The reason why I had to get a G.E.D. was because I faced such severe discrimination in high school that I dropped out (both by a failure to accommodate and by active discrimination). Part of the problem was that as bad a time as I was having in high school, I believed it would only get worse if I ever tried to go to college or any further than that. I lost hope. Therefore, I gave up and dropped out.
And it was only years later when I decided to try again. And where lack of hope—inspired by that discrimination—was the reason why I dropped out, a flicker of hope brought me back. You see, I had a friend who attending college at the time and he discovered he had similar disabilities. And to my shock, they treated him better than I had ever been treated in public school. I could see that they genuinely tried to treat him fairly. And that gave me just enough hope to decide to try to get an education again and about seven years later, I was a Yale Law graduate.
See? I told you that you would understand why equality of opportunity was important to me by the end of this piece.
And that’s why I know that a few transgender people ruining opportunities for women and girls has an effect much greater than just robbing those specific women of medals they might have won otherwise. It destroys the hope of millions of young girls who might be just starting out in sports. They often believe they have no chance to distinguish themselves in women’s sports, because women’s sports is no longer women’s sports—at least if the Democrat elites get their way.
Moving on, Oliver goes on to talk about how
in our post-election show I said there are vanishingly few trans girls competing in high school sports anywhere and, even if there were more, trans kids, like all kids, vary in athletic ability and there is no evidence that they pose any threat to safety and fairness.
He goes on to complain that J.K. Rowling called him out for that prior statement and I will share that post. She was responding to video posted by this pro-gay, anti-transgender account:
John Oliver claims that there is no safety threat having male students compete against girls.
— Gays Against Groomers (@againstgrmrs) November 15, 2024
Payton McNabb suffered severe head injuries after being spiked in the face by a male competitor during a high school volleyball game.
She now has 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝗮𝗹𝘆𝘀𝗶𝘀. pic.twitter.com/KWSLNy1bJN
And Rowling said this in response:
Nothing about this feels good, because John Oliver generously gave his time for my charity Lumos and I liked him very much when I met him, but God knows, if you ever need an example of motivated reasoning and confirmation bias, this video's for you. An undoubtedly intelligent… https://t.co/3IS4onzXq0
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) November 17, 2024
Here’s the cut off text, with mild censorship because Rowling said a naughty, naughty word:
An undoubtedly intelligent person spouts absolute b******t to support something he wants to be true, but isn't.
According to the UN, female athletes have lost nearly 900 medals to trans-identified men competing against them in women’s sporting categories. Girls have been ousted from teams to make way for boys. Women have suffered serious injury playing against trans-identified men (see Payton McNabb, mentioned below).
Again and again I've come up against men who argue exactly what Oliver does here, using the very same talking points. With a straight face, the 'believe the science' guys will say 'actually, we don't yet have enough data to say whether men and boys are stronger and faster than women and girls'. The 'be kind' crew can't see what the issue is. 'Why are you bothered, it only affects a tiny minority of females?'
To prove to their progressive credentials - and (coincidentally, I'm sure) indemnify themselves against repercussions from cultural elites in the media, academia and publishing who've showed themselves more than ready to kick people to the kerb for failing to mouth the approved mantras - people with a lot to lose are currently prepared to make idiots of themselves. They'll stare unabashedly into a camera and insist that their audiences' eyeballs are incapable of seeing what's plain as day, and that there's something wrong with the great unwashed for believing that girls are being robbed of opportunities and put at physical risk.
If you want to tell the world you're happy to watch females suffer injury, humiliation and the loss of sporting opportunities to bolster an elitist post-modern ideology embraced by a minute fraction of the world's population, fair enough; you're allowed your opinion. But if you've just told girls they don't deserve fair sport, maybe rethink using all too real and common sexual predation against young women as a punchline for your 'edgy' closing joke.
Well, that’s going to leave a mark. And, of course, Oliver doesn’t bother to actually read that whole passage out loud on his show or to otherwise present that text in a way that would allow his audience to read it, because God forbid his viewers realize that she landed a few haymakers.
But that is his major thesis, sort of. Let me quote him again:
…trans kids, like all kids, vary in athletic ability and there is no evidence that they pose any threat to safety and fairness.
Except, in truth, he almost immediately backs off that statement and moves the goalposts, while pretending he is standing his ground. He doesn’t say this explicitly—people moving the goalposts rarely acknowledge it when they are doing it. But in context, in that original segment, he is talking about how Kamala Harris should have handled the political issue in 2024. That issue includes the problem of people who just say one day they are a member of the opposite sex, without submitting to surgery or hormone therapy. But in this new segment, he dropped those kinds of transgender people like Disney drops its social justice agenda when trying to sell its movies in China. He doesn’t even attempt to claim that it is okay for a boy to play in women’s sports if he only says he is a girl. He doesn’t quite explicitly say this, but his entire defense is of men who claim to be women who are receiving hormone therapy, which is only a subset of this issue. He just hopes you don’t notice that he has moved the goalposts, an implicit admission that even he can’t defend the words he wanted Harris to say.
Now, to be fair, in doing so, he does make one valid point. When you talk about transgender people in sports, and you are talking about the evidence that it is unfair or unsafe, you have to make sure you are comparing apples to apples. So, evidence that normal boys have a physical advantage or present a safety risk, might not apply to a boy who is taking hormone therapy. He then goes on to discuss one study after another and ultimately decides that there just isn’t enough evidence. The problem, he says, is that there really hasn’t been enough research to tell us if men and boys who have received hormone therapy have an advantage or present a danger, when they are allowed to play with women and girls.
Now, in the Shapiro video, his response is to say ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.’ Meaning that Shapiro is saying just because we might not have scientific studies showing that men and boys who have had hormone therapy have an advantage or present a safety risk doesn’t mean they don’t have an advantage or present a safety risk.
But I think the problem is more basic than that. When we talk about evidence, and how much evidence we have, you need to start by asking ‘evidence in order to prove what?’ In other words, what is the default, and who has the burden of proof to show that we should not stick with the default?
That circles back to the question I was asking early on: Should there be sex segregation in sports and if you think there should be, why do you believe this? If you believe that the sex segregation in sports is largely justified because you believe there is physical advantage men enjoy over women that threatens fairness and safety, then the default and the burden of proof is obvious. The default is segregation by sex. If a man wants to deviate from that default by playing in a women’s sports league, it is his burden of proof to show that this is safe and fair to the women he will be playing against, not our burden to show it is unfair or dangerous.
In other words, ‘first do no harm.’ The man pretending to be a woman can still play with the men, but if he wants to play with women, he needs to prove he is not doing them harm by either having an unfair advantage and robbing women of accolades, or by actually placing them in danger.
(And in that context, ‘fair’ means that this man would the exact same advantages and disadvantages as if he was born exactly the same, except he was born as a woman. That is, he is exactly the same, except he would have XX chromosomes instead XY.)
And of course, Oliver might come back and say ‘what about the harm to these trans adults and children?’ After all, Oliver only seems to care about trans people in all of this. To that I circle back to a point he keeps making: We are only talking about a few people. And to quote one of the greatest movies of all time:
(Man, that scene gets me every time.)
Or if you don't feel like clicking 'play,' this is the exchange:
Spock: Do not grieve, Admiral. It is logical. The needs of the many, outweigh...
Kirk: The needs of the few.
Spock: Or the one.
So, when I have to choose between potentially creating an unfair and dangerous situation for every actual woman or girl in sports, versus Oliver’s admittedly small number of transgender people, I go with Mr. Spock on this one.
And here’s the thing that Oliver ignores and Shapiro misses. If you assume John Oliver’s presentation is an accurate reflection of the academic literature, there is almost no chance that bringing men into women’s sports would be fair. Oliver went as far as to claim that sometimes a fake woman (what he calls a trans woman) might be at a disadvantage. I am dubious of that claim but what seems clear is that it is almost impossible to believe that with all these changes that are being made, a so-called ‘transgender woman’ who received hormone therapy would be equal to an actual woman. I tend to think these men would still be at an advantage, Oliver bizarrely thinks it might sometimes be a disadvantage, but I don’t see how anyone can claim that a so called ‘transgender woman’s’ body would end up exactly where he would be if he had just been born a woman. So even if you believe everything Oliver said about the academic literature—including at least two studies carried out by so-called ‘transgender women’ (as if there is no danger of bias in such literature)—the best you can say is ‘we don’t know what the effect of this will be.’
Therefore, if you believe (like I do) that the default is only actual women to be allowed to play in women’s leagues and it is burden of these transactivists to prove that so-called ‘transgender women’ can safely and fairly play in women’s leagues … then Oliver’s presentation fails to meet that burden of proof.
Also, we also know for a fact that at least one study on puberty blockers was suppressed by the author because it had the wrong outcome—which for those paying attention, is the exact opposite of how science is supposed to be carried out. So even if you assume Oliver is honestly and fairly reviewing the science, the ‘science’ itself might be slanted.
Also, also, there is good reason to wonder if John Oliver’s researcher has a bit of a bias problem himself:
Shocking reason John Oliver is so fixated with defending trans athletes on his woke HBO show https://t.co/FGHrkAwG2q
— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) April 8, 2025
Also, also, also, if you believe that Oliver’s researcher is being fair and is honestly representing the research and the research is not itself biased, then Oliver has managed to prove once again that we have no idea what the long-term effects of medically transitioning children will be. So, while trying to defend medically transitioned athletes, he managed to show that children shouldn’t be transitioned at all!
Because after all, we should ‘first do no harm.’ That is supposed to be a bedrock principle of good medicine and I have never seen any group of people so thoroughly violate that maxim than the transgender movement—especially doctors who should know better than to experiment on children who by definition cannot consent to these unnecessary procedures.
Next, at about the seven-minute mark, Oliver addresses one particular breed of hypothetical:
The thing is hypotheticals like that circulate constantly and often center around someone transitioning to gain a competitive advantage. But as this trans researcher points out, that is an absurd proposition.
Then he has a truly ‘trans’ researcher—meaning a man who thinks he is magically a woman named Joanna Harper—who tells us that
Trans women don’t transition for sports. No one has ever said, ‘Oh yeah, I think I’d like to be a woman so I can do well in women’s sports. When you go through a gender transition um, you lose so many things in life. My own mother said she never wanted to speak to me again. You know, I lost friends, family, got divorced. You go through all of that just to win a medal in sports? No. Trans people transition because it is the only way that we can live happily.
And Oliver takes this as some kind of scientific proof that no one transitions to gain an advantage in sports. Shapiro, for his part concedes that point, and then argues that people do it for more than one reason and that why a person transitions doesn’t matter when we are focusing on the issue of fairness and safety. And that is valid as a response, but …
But unlike Shapiro, I’m not ready to concede that no one ever transitions just to gain an advantage in sports. I can think of at least one person I strongly suspect did it for exactly that reason—although I won’t name names because I am not 100% sure.
So, I want to stop and question what Oliver just said about nobody ever transitioning just for an advantage in sports. First off, Harper’s reasoning is extremely specific to Harper. For instance, he complains that he got divorced after he decided he was a woman—but how many young athletes are going to be married in the first place? And Harper is on the oldish side. Back when he decided he was a woman, social attitudes were probably very different—a young person transitioning today is not guaranteed the same hostile reception that this researcher had when he transitioned. Indeed, many of us believe that kids are being encouraged to claim they are transgender today.
And notice how Harper sells the issue short. ‘Just to win a medal.’ Is Harper the only person in the world unaware of how much money there is in sports—as well as other benefits? And whenever a person can get a benefit from doing something honestly, you can bet someone will do it dishonestly if they think they can get away with it.
Seriously, this is one of the worst tendencies leftists and Democrat elites have: They ask us constantly to ignore human nature.
For instance, during the Kavanaugh hearings they expected us to ‘believe all women’ claiming that women just don’t lie about rape, even though it is a documented fact that some women have indeed lied when accusing men about rape. If you don’t believe me, look into the Duke Lacrosse case.
Or they claim that we can go on the honor system when running our elections. No one will ever try to vote illegally and no one will ever try to hack our voting machines, they assure us. Never mind that because of the massive regulatory state the Democrats have instituted, the government controls the fate of trillions of dollars—and some people would want to get control over that. No, let’s ignore what we know about human nature and just pretend no one wants to cheat. I’m not saying that cheating has ever changed the outcome of an election in modern times (although it definitely has in the past), but it is insanity not to guard against the possibility.
This is why I have never objected to people requiring proof that I am indeed disabled before I am entitled to accommodations. I never thought for a moment I could expect anyone to just take my word for it and the ugly truth is that there are people out there who do try to fake a disability to get an accommodation. Again, everyone knows that any time there is a real or perceived advantage to faking a condition, you will find someone faking that condition if they think it might work. That’s just human nature. It makes things harder for those of us who are honest, but that’s life sometimes.
So, no, I don’t accept that no one uses transitioning to cheat based on one person’s anecdotal word. Indeed, I tend to think that it is almost a mathematical certainty that some man will give it a try, sooner or later.
Further, it is pretty hypocritical for Oliver to say this, because later on when discussing research on transgender athletes, John Oliver says that two of the studies he examined have only one subject in order to discredit them. Based on this fact, he said ‘you probably shouldn’t draw broad conclusions off a sample size of one.’ Which is absolutely correct, but he failed to apply his own principles when talking about whether or not anyone ever transitioned just to get an advantage in sports. There, he is happy to draw the broadest conclusion off of a sample size of one.
Indeed, throughout the presentation he brings up several women who said that they didn’t mind losing to a man pretending to be a woman. You could count the number of women who said that on one hand, but he presented them as if they are represent all women. And that ignores the allegations that some women are being intimidated into silence if they want to speak out against men in women’s sports:
Lia Thomas' teammate breaks her silence.
— The College Fix (@CollegeFix) June 7, 2023
'If you see something unjust and something wrong, you can’t be quiet about it.'https://t.co/gZ2w2giNQI pic.twitter.com/Cow9EcSRpM
So, a large sample size is important to John Oliver, except when it isn’t.
And, of course, Shapiro also is correct to say people might have more than one motivation. And it’s correct to say that even if they didn’t transition to gain an advantage in sport, that doesn’t erase the problem if they have an advantage or if they present a danger.
Next, John Oliver goes on to say that
it is not the case that any man is going to be stronger or more athletic than every woman.
Which is a dumb point to make because everyone already knew this. A guy with cerebral palsy is not likely to beat the average WNBA player in one-on-one basketball. Thank you, Captain Obvious.
Of course, the point of him playing dumb on this point was to allow him to make fun of when Trump said that there was no way Riley Gaines could beat him because of his size. You can watch that moment here, and I would suggest you look at Trump’s face and Ms. Gaines’ face as he says it:
If you watch their faces, it is obvious that he is joking, and she understands that he is joking. He is making a hilarious, ridiculous comment and John Oliver and his audience pretended that he said something serious. The mind boggles.
Then he goes on to belittle Riley Gaines directly. He shows video of her complaining that she and William ‘Lia’ Thomas tied for fifth place and then when it came time to actually give out a trophy for fifth place, they gave it to Thomas, while Gaines only got a sixth-place trophy. Oliver belittles this, pretending that she still got fifth place actually, and by arguing that he doesn’t think that trophy looks very different, but that’s not what the actual news (as opposed to his ‘joke news’) says about it:
She tied. They gave the trophy to him because they thought it looked better than giving it to her.https://t.co/nYIlv1W2L9
— Mike Rahilly (@Alacrity59) August 31, 2023
From the article:
Even though the two swimmers tied, Thomas is listed ahead of Gaines on the official results page, which indicates that Thomas touched ahead of Gaines by less than one hundredth (too small a margin to be absolutely certain).
Funny, Oliver’s crack transgender researcher missed that that detail. But then he says the truly obnoxious thing:
So just so we are clear, Lia Thomas didn’t take anything from Riley Gaines. In fact, you could argue that she gave a lot to her as Gaines later decided to forgo dental school in order to be an activist and speaker. She now has her own advocacy center and has personally lobbied multiple legislatures for bans…
By that logic, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. should have thanked the segregationists and Klansmen for giving him a career in civil rights. Indeed, by that logic, James Earl Ray did him a favor by making him a martyr!
Seriously, these leftists…
Then he gets into the issue of safety. And not being content with belittling one woman’s experience he goes after Payton McNabb as well. As you might recall, Ms. McNabb was partially paralyzed by a boy pretending to be a girl in a high school volleyball tournament when he spiked the ball and struck her. Oliver explains that there is no safety concern involved in a man playing volleyball with women by playing a local news segment that said:
But her transgender teammate's stats don’t appear to give the Spartans a dramatic upper hand. The San Jose State women’s volleyball team is ranked 119th nationally.
Seriously, that’s what he offers to respond to her story. Well, his team didn’t do that well—as if that proves anything about the man in question.
Eventually he did say something about this unidentified dude who spiked the ball at McNabb and the issue of whether or not this guy presented a safety issue. And he did it by … fact checking a lawsuit that grew out of this unidentified man’s participation. Mind you, Oliver didn’t even claim that McNabb filed the suit—and reporting suggests that it was filed by some coach. In any case, Oliver states that the complaint in this lawsuit incorrectly alleged that this transgender volleyball player was spiking the ball at 80 miles per hour. Then ESPN took the extraordinary step of fact checking this—doing the work of the defense for them. They did video analysis of several viral videos of spikes by the same player—but not necessarily the one that actually injured McNabb—and clocked the ball at only an average of 50 miles per hour. After this report, the lawsuit was amended to reflect the ESPN report. Oliver treats that as some kind of big ‘gotcha’ when any lawyer alive will tell you mistakes like that happen all the time. Lawyers write these complaints and thus they are always dealing with second-hand and sometimes third- and fourth-hand information and inevitably mistakes are made. And it really happens all the time.
Then Oliver claims that these spikes by this man were ‘nowhere near record-setting which may be why she didn’t rank in the top 150 in hitting percentage in the NCAA.’ Naturally, the ‘she’ in that sentence is the man claiming to be a woman.
But there are several problems with this claim. First, once again, Oliver is vague about what he is talking about—just as he was when talking about how much money Republicans spent on ads on the transgender in sports issue. In this case, he doesn’t talk about what record he is looking at. Does he mean the record for all volleyball spikes in history? All women’s? Among all of the NCAA women?
And he says that this person is not in the top 150 in hitting percentage. Except, hitting percentage doesn’t relate directly to how fast or hard you are spiking the ball. The formula for that is:
(Kills – Errors) / Total Attempts
‘Kills’ is defined as a successful attack. This ‘hitting percentage’ formula has a lot of uses and it is surely influenced by the power behind a spike, but it is not a direct measure of that factor.
And as far as saying that this trans player wasn’t even in the top 150 in the NCAA… well, according to the NCAA there are ‘5,500 Women’s Volleyball student-athletes across the country’ as of now, and I doubt the number was much lower back when McNabb was injured approximately three years ago. If there were just 4,000 such players back then that would put him higher than approximately 95% of them.
But it gets worse. I tracked down what ESPN actually wrote on the subject…
Inside San Jose State's polarizing volleyball season https://t.co/VISjPvsZSt
— 56 Degrees of Separation (@56dos_golf) February 16, 2025
… and it paints a very different statistical story:
The player who is said to be transgender leads her team in kills (297) and is third in hitting percentage (.251). She is fourth in the Mountain West in kills per set with 3.96. She does not rank in the top 10 in the Mountain West in hitting percentage or in the top 150 in the NCAA. ESPN used camera calibration software to analyze video of five of her spikes in five different games, including the spike shared by Gaines from the Iowa game (51 mph) and another that went viral against San Diego State (60 mph) to estimate their velocity. The average speed of her spikes was 50.6 mph. The fastest was estimated to travel 64 mph.
By comparison, the official Olympics website lists the world record women’s volleyball as follows:
Top 5 fastest spikes in women’s volleyball
Paola Egonu (Italy) - 112.7 km/h (vs Brazil, 2022)
Tijana Bošković (Serbia) – 110.3 km/h (vs Turkey, 2021)
Kiera Van Ryk (Canada) – 108.1 km/h (vs. USA, 2021)
Tijana Bošković (Serbia) – 107.5 km/h (vs Russia, 2021)
Tandara Caixeta (Brazil) – 106.9 km/h (vs People’s Republic of China, 2018)
This unidentified dude's average spike of 50 miles per hour translates into 80.47 kilometers per hour. His highest recorded spike at 64 mph translates into just a hair under 103 kmph (102.998 kpmph according to Google), which is almost high enough to break into the top 5 of all time in the Olympics, if we pretend he is a woman.
And, of course, all of that lays bare that John Oliver was playing a bit of a deceptive game with these numbers, proving the old adage that there are lies, damn lies and statistics. Previously Oliver correctly said that you have to compare like with like: Apples with apples, not apples with oranges. That was a valid point when saying what research was relevant, but when it came time to compare speed of volleyball spikes, he compared this unknown man’s average to some unnamed world record. But when I compared this man’s fastest spike (that we know of) to world record holders at the Olympics, Oliver's claim that this unidentified man’s speed was ‘nowhere near record setting’ falls apart.
And do you remember when I assumed that Oliver and Company are presenting information in an even-handed fashion? Well, I guess I can’t do that anymore. Oliver is plainly massaging his data.
Next, Oliver says:
And yes, if trans kids were injuring cis kids at much higher rates then we could have safety concerns to address. But there’s no evidence that’s the case.
But again, he’s admitted that there is very little data on the topic of transgender people in sports. So what he’s really saying is ‘let’s run a massive experiment on our children and see how it works out.’ And I will give the same response I did on the subject of fairness. The default is that you play with your sex. If you want to deviate from that by having a man play in a women’s league, it is your job to prove it will be safe for the women—not our job to prove it is unsafe. First do no harm.
And then, pretending that he has proven his case (he hasn’t) he says this:
And at this point, it is worth asking what is really behind this vitriol?
Yes, get ready for an allegation that ‘my side is as pure as newly-fallen snow, and your side is driven by advantage’ tinfoil hat nonsense. He concedes that some people have honest concerns…
But in many other cases, the opposition comes from a much more toxic place. It is not just about denying trans women the right to play it is about denying them the right to exist.
To prove this, he quotes Speaker Mike Johnson as saying this:
We know from scripture and from nature that men are men and women are women and men cannot become women.
In response, Oliver spends several seconds in a tirade against Christianity (this is at about the 25:47 mark):
That’s right, as scripture tells us, men are men, and women are women and God is his own son, and some mothers are virgins, and some mothers-in-law are pillars of salt, some daughters are sex partners, and colorful coats are dream-tellers, and brothers are murderers but also brothers are backup husbands for wives and babies can be for splitting in half and water is wine and also with you, sorry, [sings, hymn style] and with your spirit.
And he says this in the same month as Easter. So, for all his complaining that opposition to men in women’s sports is coming from a toxic place, he reveals not only a toxic hatred of Christianity, but a complete ignorance of its doctrine—although, to be fair, hatred is often born out of ignorance. On the off-chance that John Oliver is reading this, let me straighten him out. Several of the events in the Bible he mentions are miraculous and not meant to be seen as everyday occurrences. Mary giving birth despite the fact she was a virgin is a miracle, not an everyday occurrence. He also misses the obvious point that the Bible often depicts behavior—such as Cain killing Abel—without endorsing this behavior, because duh.
And no, John Oliver, King Solomon was never going to actually split that baby—how dumb can someone be? The entire point of the story is he was tricking the women into exposing which of them really loved the baby, with the entire story told as an example of Solomon’s wisdom.
And of course the most irritating part of this is that Oliver is perfectly happy to blaspheme against Christianity (and to a lesser extent, Judaism), but he would never dare do that to Islam, because as much as he calls us ‘toxic’ he knows that we won’t try to stab him to death, like some Islamofascist nutjob did with Salman Rushdie a couple years back.
But more basically, Speaker Johnson might not buy the idea that a man can become a woman or something like that, but Oliver points at absolutely nothing Johnson has done or any policy Johnson has proposed or advocated for that would cause transgender people to cease to exist. I mean, how do you stop transgender people from existing? Well, to be coldly logical, you would have to kill all the people who are currently ‘transitioned’ or forcibly convert them back to their actual sex and you would have to prohibit anyone from getting getting sex change surgery in the future.
Now, I won’t say no one wants that. There are about 330 million Americans and you will probably find at least one person advocating for every dumb thing imaginable. But there is no evidence that Mike Johnson wants anything like that, or that any significant voice in American politics wants that. Generally speaking, the conservative consensus on the medical front is that if you want to get a sex change or hormone therapy or whatever, and you are an adult giving informed consent, that’s fine. What we object to is doing this to minor children. What we object to forcing the American taxpayer to pay for what amounts to cosmetic surgery. But if everyone is a consenting adult and the taxpayer isn’t paying for it, most conservatives don’t think the law should stop them. Most conservatives would usually say ‘your body (and your money), your choice’ on most topics, except when it involves hurting another person without their consent.
(And most conservatives think that an unborn baby is ‘another person.’)
So, no policy Mike Johnson has advocated, implemented or proposed—or indeed anything most conservatives have advocated, implemented or proposed—would make it so transgender people no longer exist … except in the hysterical way that transgender people think that disagreeing with their ideology threatens their existence. You see them do this all the time. For instance:
“yOuRe ErAsInG our RiGhT tO eXiSt”
— Hazel Appleyard (@HazelAppleyard_) April 17, 2025
We’re just asking you to use the men’s room, Richard. pic.twitter.com/9Q1J12w44t
Honestly, I have never seen any political or ideological movement that is so fragile. If anyone doubts the validity of transgender theory, then they pretend their entire existence is threatened. Online, they almost never want to debate and indeed, demand censorship of anyone who disagrees with them. Do I have to remind you that The Babylon Bee was suspended from Twitter for writing this?
The Babylon Bee's Man Of The Year Is Rachel Levine https://t.co/mZdcXbUnmf
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) March 15, 2022
And again, this is not academic to me. I was born in 1972. Through much of my life, people didn’t even know that learning disabilities were a thing, and I have dealt with people who doubted that learning disabilities exist at all, and have doubted that I had them, throughout my entire life. These people didn’t deny my right to exist. They often denied rights to certain legal protections, but that was as far as it went.
And when people expressed those attitudes, I didn’t just demand obedience. I made my case, calmly, and very often won people over to my side. And even when I didn’t, it didn’t send me into a total breakdown. I won’t say it never angered me, but you never saw me in hysterics the way transactivists often are, nor did I claim that they were denying my right to exist. I knew the truth, whether someone else wanted to acknowledge it or not.
Because I am strong-minded enough to be confident that I know the truth because I have seen the evidence—both in terms of scientific evidence and a million moments of my own life. I know I have these disabilities just as much as I know my eyes are blue.
(And for the record, I know I am not presenting the evidence to any skeptical readers who happen to be reading this right now, because, well … this is already an enormous post as it is.)
Sadly, Oliver goes on, claiming that it is bigotry to deny that trans women are women and specifically attacking Riley Gaines for refusing to go along with this ideology. Which means he apparently thinks the entire United Kingdom’s Supreme Court is bigoted. Indeed, he calls her a transphobe for this belief, stereotyping people who disagree with him as being driven by irrational fear.
And here’s the thing. I obviously don’t buy any of this transgender nonsense, but even if you do, even if you believe a man can become a woman and vice-versa, everything I said about transgender sports is still true. If you want to call actual women ‘biological women’ (I reject that term) and pretend ‘trans women are women’ that doesn’t change the fact that the default should be for women's sports to only be open to ‘biological women’ and it is up to ‘trans women’ to prove their inclusion would be safe and fair, not for everyone else to prove that it would be unsafe or unfair. And his presentation on the research he uncovered (assuming he is presenting it fairly, even though I shouldn't assume that) does tend to show that there is just about no way that a ‘trans woman’ could end up being physically equal to actual women.
But it is more nefarious than that, according to Oliver:
The thing is this current uproar is rooted in a very intentional political strategy by the right to find a new issue after losing the war over same-sex marriage.
Mind you, we lost that ‘war’ when leftists convinced the Supreme Court that an amendment advanced by evangelical Christians in the Nineteenth Century at a time when gay sex was a crime somehow included a right to gay marriage—not by actually persuading the American people that they were right. But he goes on:
Conservatives’ embrace of this issue came after the failure of so-called ‘bathroom bills’…
…we haven’t failed, because we are not done trying…
…around the country, which were widely criticized. The president of the American Principles Project, a socially conservative advocacy group has openly said that ‘we pivoted to the sports issue and it’s been wildly successful.’’
All of which doesn’t amount to a confession of cynicism as Oliver suggests. At most it is a confession that Republicans push the message that wins the most votes, which is kind of how a democracy is supposed to work. Then he quotes this person, Terry Shilling, as saying…:
…what it did was, it got opponents of the LGBT movement comfortable with talking about transgender issues…
Now first off, I was today years old when I heard of this organization or its president. I always love it when the left cites something a supposed big conservative said and I am like ‘who is that?’ But in any case, I found the full quote…
Republicans build momentum as they drive anti-LGBTQ legislation nationwide https://t.co/smsRWqKzdE
— Fulvio Meloni (@MeloniFulvio) April 22, 2022
…and it is pretty inconvenient for Oliver:
‘The women’s sports issue was really the beginning point in helping expose all this because what it did was, it got opponents of the LGBT movement comfortable with talking about transgender issues,’ Schilling said. Transgender women competing on female sports teams ‘was inherently unfair, obviously unfair to not just politicians but Americans,’ Schilling said.
Which kind of blows up Oliver’s suggestion that the American people are just being hypnotized into opposing men in women’s sports by Republican ads, as opposed to the American people being against it and the politicians figuring out that they shouldn’t be on the wrong side of this issue.
He goes on to argue that even though the transactivists have supposedly won on the bathroom issue, gasp, conservatives are coming back to this issue, because talking about transgender in sports somehow gave them permission to talk about it. To quote him:
Because it does seem like right now that you can basically say anything you want …
To break into his tirade for a moment, um, shouldn’t you be able to say anything you want? Isn’t that what America is supposed to be about? Even when someone says something truly bigoted, I prefer for people to speak their mind so we know who the bigots are.
Back to his tirade:
…about trans people as long as you tag on ‘in sports’ after it.
‘I don’t think trans women should be allowed… in sports.’
‘I don’t think trans women are women … in sports.’
But it is noticeably how fast the ‘in sports’ part can drop off once people feel permission has been granted…
To break in, again, except that’s not really how people talk about the issues. No one says that ‘trans women are not women in sports.’ They typically deny it either entirely or not at all. Further, no one is saying so-called trans women (men saying they are women) shouldn’t be allowed to play sports at all, just not with women. And as I just said above, there is no significant movement among conservatives to stop trans people from existing. He is pretending to make this insightful attack on how his opponents speak, but he apparently has no idea how we actually talk, turning the entire thing into a straw man.
And as far as the part about ‘permission being granted,’ I think he is telling on himself and how susceptible he is to groupthink. I don’t need anyone’s permission to speak my mind.
He goes on, still part of the same tirade:
…to the point that some leading voices in this movement are now circling back to bathroom bans, an issue that a decade ago people felt was a bridge too far.
So right, he thinks that somehow the left won on this issue and we stopped talking about it … and like, again, welcome to earth John Oliver… what color is the sky on your planet? No, for conservatives the question of women’s right to privacy never went away and we never stopped fighting—and I never will. Then he complains about this post from McNabb:
A man using the girls bathroom at Western Carolina University. Unreal pic.twitter.com/yPXXBN8Aqd
— Payton McNabb (@paytonmcnabb_) May 2, 2024
Oliver again attacks this woman who was partially paralyzed by a man, saying:
Which is really nasty. And for the record, ambushing strangers just minding their own business is not what girls’ bathrooms are for.
Except the man in the video was not minding his own business. He was invading the privacy of any woman who happened to be in that restroom. He would only be minding his own business if he was in the men’s room.
Then he goes on to complain that this has led adults being encouraged to ‘police the bodies of literal children’ and complains about people questioning the sex of different alleged girls in sports. But that is like blaming the TSA for x-raying our shoes at the airport, instead of Richard Reid who created a ‘shoe bomb’ and attempted to blow up an airplane. No, John Oliver, it is transactivists who have made this an issue, not regular Americans.
Furthermore, Oliver endorsed plenty of policing of the bodies of children himself, endorsing rules that require a ‘transgender woman’ (in other words, a man) to have received hormone therapy for a minimum number of years before he can play with women. How are you going to do that, John, if you don’t police people’s bodies?
Unfortunately, he goes on, circling back to ‘won’t somebody think of the children?’ I mean only the trans children because the regular children don’t seem to matter very much to him. He says:
But obviously the bulk of the damage here is being done to trans kids. Because one thing we know for sure is that for all kids, the benefits, physiological, social and emotional, of participating in school sports are wide ranging.
Well, first off, what he claims is obvious—that most of the damage is being done to trans children—isn’t actually obvious. As I outlined above, this really might destroy or seriously degrade women’s sports overall, harming regular women and girls the most.
Second, no one is saying a man who says he is a woman can’t play sports at all. We are saying he can’t play sports with women.
Then he parades out a group of apparently transgender kids, including that rarest of unicorns: A girl who pretends to be a boy and plays in boys sports. All of this is done in a blatant appeal to emotion.
And that’s probably as a good a time as any to address one outstanding point. Early on John Oliver complains that many of the transgender sports bans apply equally to women trying to get into men’s sports, as it does for men trying to play women’s sports and he seemed mystified by that. And you might have noticed that I have spent this entire piece talking only about men in women’s sports and not women in men’s sports.
That is because I truly believe in what I half-jokingly call ‘justified sexism.’ Men and women are different and I believe the law can and should acknowledge that. For instance, one of the major reasons why I support sex segregation in private spaces or in prison is because the vast majority of people convicted of rape or sexual assault are men. For instance, the United States Sentencing Commission states that ‘93.8% of individuals sentenced for sexual abuse were men.’ Obviously saying 'the vast majority of rapists are men' is not the same as saying 'the vast majority of men are rapists.' Still, that alone is more than enough reason to justify sex segregation in bathrooms, locker rooms and prisons.
And I think justified sexism also justifies saying that men should be kept out of women’s sports, but women should not be kept out of men’s sports. I justified keeping men out of women’s sports because I think men enjoy an advantage over women in most sports. If there is any sport where women enjoy natural, inherent advantages over men, I’m not aware of it. So, some blatant sex discrimination is fully justified—and ironically, John Oliver seems to agree. That is, in my perfect world, men would not be allowed to play in the WNBA, but women would be allowed to play in the (male) NBA. Yes, I already told you I think women are at a disadvantage in that sport, but I have always believed that if a woman wants to try, she should be allowed to. She shouldn’t be given any special consideration (beyond having a separate locker room from the men), but if she can ‘wear the pants’ I say let her.
And if you think that ‘let her try’ attitude is influenced by my experiences with disability discrimination, you’d be right. I have dealt with people who has tried to stop me from being a lawyer, because they think I couldn’t be a lawyer, therefore, they wouldn’t even let me even try. So, my default attitude is to let people try. I mean, years ago when Muggsy Bogues said he wanted to be a basketball player, I’m sure that there were a lot of people who were skeptical of him, too. Thankfully, someone let him try and he had a successful career in the NBA and even ended up in the original ‘Space Jam.’ I, for one, am glad they let him try.
So, I philosophically disagree with these states banning women from playing on men’s teams … but I also understand why they do it. If they also discriminated by sex by letting women play in men’s sports but not vice-versa then the courts might strike down that rule and end sex segregation in sports completely. So, they don’t do what I philosophically believe is the ultimate right decision, because they are concerned it might be a bad legal strategy. And I think they might be right on the topic of strategy.
Now, a minute ago, I dinged Oliver for pretending that the only way for a transgender person to play sports is with the opposite sex. But late in the show he finally acknowledges this argument by quoting a transgender girl (actually a boy) named ‘Ember’ who
Others have said I should just say baseball with the boys … but the fact is that for me, playing on a boys team would be a lie.
And I will point out that once again, John Oliver is willing to rely on the word of one transgender person … when it is convenient to him.
But even if this teenage boy spoke for all transgender people, that would be placing his feelings, before the feelings of every actual girl, as well as those girls’ opportunities, and their safety. And if the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, the ‘feelings’ of the few matter even less.
He also cites when Ember complains that her playing field is not as good as the fields boys play in, with no evidence that he fact-checked her. But, assuming it is true, that is a complaint about sex segregation itself and it is a pretty inevitable result of such segregation. Separate is not equal, but equality is not the point in this case. The point is to create an unequal chance for women and girls to shine without having to compete with men and boys. Oliver and this ‘Ember’ complain about the playing field, while advocating essentially for the destruction of women’s and girls’ sports.
And then from there Oliver talked about a bill designed make it harder for school personnel who might have been accused of sexual misconduct—to move from district to district and the bill was defeated—and what this has to do with transgender in sports is beyond me. One state didn’t pass a law—most likely because of the influence of the teachers’ unions (a major Democratic constituency) and therefore… what? Payton McNabb deserved to get smacked by that volleyball?
In any case, that is about where his incoherent rant leads us in the end.
He seems to agree there should be some segregation between men and women in sports and he even seems to understand why it exists: Because of physical advantages that men have, that are biological in nature, that translates into unfairness and often into physical danger when men play with women. But he doesn’t get that this means that the default is women playing with women, and men being excluded. He also doesn't understand that it is the transactivists’ burden to prove that men claiming to be ‘transgender women’ can play in women’s sports without it being unfair or even dangerous to actual women. So he doesn’t understand that when he says that there isn’t enough evidence, he is admitting that he can’t meet his burden of proof. In fact, he doesn’t seem to comprehend that his side has the burden of proof.
Having failed to prove that men playing with women is safe and fair, he resorts to emotional arguments. Don’t you know that Republicans are using this argument to win elections? So as good Democrats we must put aside our personal feelings oppose them. Also, some people opposed to men playing in women’s sports doubt the entirety of transgender ideology and, therefore, somehow, denying men the right to play sports with women if they claim to be ‘transgender women’ will make it so transgender people cease to exist, because reasons. And of course, won’t somebody think of the children? Of course, he only thinks of the transgender children. The millions of normal girls who object to playing sports with boys are ignored.
And all to try to talk us into running a massive experiment where women and girls risk lost opportunity and debilitating injury, and to toss aside the maxim ‘first, do no harm.’
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