I spent more than 20 years of my life covering sports at the high school, college and professional levels. Sports was a significant part of my life until I decided to care a little more about politics and a little less about games.
One of the best things about sports is that everyone involved in competition knows the rules going into it, starts at the same spot or score and is given an equal opportunity.
A key element to sport is fairness. One football team, for example, doesn’t get five downs to make a first down while the other only gets four. One baseball team doesn’t get four strikes while the other team gets three. One basketball team doesn’t play on a 10-foot hoop while the other plays on an 8-foot basket.
When a sport isn’t “co-ed,” there is a separate team for boys and a separate team for girls due to obvious reasons. One of those obvious reasons — fairness.
Men have biological advantages that females simply do not have. This isn’t to say a female athlete couldn’t beat a male couch potato in a sport, but nobody in their right mind would bet on the best WNBA player to compete let alone beat the top NBA player.
It just wouldn’t happen. It just wouldn’t be fair.
Some people, for some reason, will get upset when the obvious is pointed out — that men have advantages over women. Yet that fact is littered throughout sports.
For example…a women’s basketball is smaller than a men’s basketball. A shotput for men weighs about 16 pounds. A shotput for women weighs 8.8 pounds. And in volleyball, the men’s net is set at 7 feet, 11 inches while it is 7 feet, 4 inches for women.
Why are there these differences? Because there are differences between the sexes or genders.
Now, I know there is a rare instance where a female may decide she wants to play football and go out for the football team. Usually, that female is a kicker and doesn’t have to deal with much of the physical demands football requires.
But here’s the deal, that is one female taking on risk for herself in a sport designated for boys. If she wants to take that risk, then it is on her.
However, when a male decides to invade women’s sports, the women are taking on the risk without choice because they are simply trying to compete in the sport designated for them.
And let’s be clear about something — a person who is born a man is a man for the rest of their life. It doesn’t matter what their hormone level is or what pronoun they prefer — if they’re born a man, they are a man. Full stop.
At no point in human history would this ever not be considered a basic fact. We still find human remains to this day and run them through various tests to determine whether an individual was a male or a female. We never consider “gender identity” before labeling a male or a female.
Yet on Monday a federal judge ruled that a “transgender woman” man can compete in the Mountain West Conference Women’s Volleyball Tournament. While players and an assistant coach filed a lawsuit over “Blaire” Fleming’s participation on the San Jose State women’s volleyball team, the judge ruled in favor of allowing Fleming to play.
You know, when a player was dominant, we used to say a dominant male player looked like “a man among boys.” In 2024, the reality is that a dominant female player may be dominant because the player is actually “a man among women.”
Former Des Moines Register sports columnist Sean Keeler wrote an opinion for the Denver Post supporting Fleming playing in women’s volleyball.
Keeler wrote “stick to sports” prior to listing women’s volleyball teams who chose to forfeit rather than player a women’s volleyball match against a women’s volleyball team with a man on it.
Keeler said some of the schools were giving in to political pressure in an election year because they played against San Jose State and Fleming in previous years. But who knows when the schools became aware of the fact Fleming is transgender.
Keeler then credited Colorado State for playing against San Jose State and putting the “pursuit of a conference championship” over “cheap political points.” He wrote that Colorado State was a team of “critical thinkers” who were “leading with kindness.”
He then said it’s easy to forfeit on principle when a team’s record isn’t excellent. While Keeler said the paper’s policy is not to publish names of transgender athletes without their consent, he had no problem naming Fleming’s teammate as a plaintiff in the lawsuit accusing the NCAA of violating Title IX by letting the boy play with the girls.
While Keeler may root for his idea of kindness, whatever it is, one has to wonder what kind of kindness it is for a man to decide he can identify as a woman and play women’s sports. Is it kind for that man to take a spot on the team from a woman? Is it kind for that man to take a scholarship from a woman? Is it kind for that man to occupy one of the six spots on the court designated for a woman?
Or does that not matter? Is kindness only required of everyone else? Of all the female athletes who have spent their lives working their tails off to play at the highest possible level in college? The ones who put blood, sweat and tears into the sport they love from the time they were a little girl — because they’ve always been girls.
Why don’t we consider their fairness? Their happiness? Their opportunity? Why do we focus on the guy?
I am amazed and ashamed of sports journalists at the same time who refuse to take the obvious, common-sense stance on this issue. Sports, unlike politics, can’t be molded into what we want to make it. One team wins, the other loses. We don’t discuss redistribution of points. We don’t believe two teams should finish a game “equal.”
There’s a winner. There’s a loser.
It is as basic an idea in sports as there are men and there are women.
I would love to know one time any serious sportswriter ever watched a female athlete perform in a sport and thought to themselves, “Yeah, she could compete with the top men in the country.”
I’m sorry. That has never once happened. Caitlin Clark was special, but Caitlin Clark’s story doesn’t happen if she’s competing against men.
We know this. Anyone with a lick of common sense knows this. And if they don’t want to admit it, let’s do an exercise.
Let’s look at the results of a 4×100-meter relay race. This is a race where four people each run 100 meters.
The NCAA Division I National Championship time this year was 42.34 seconds by Ole Miss. The Iowa High School Class 1A boys’ state championship time was 42.33 seconds by Lisbon. Class 1A is the smallest class in Iowa High School Track and Field. If we looked at the Class 4A results — Iowa’s largest class — every single team that ran in the eight-team final finished faster than Mississippi’s national title-winning time.
Now, if we compared apples to apples and looked at male college runners against female college runners, here is what we would find.
In the 4×400-meter relay, Arkansas ran an incredible 3:17.96 to set a new record and win the national title in the women’s race. And while that was an incredible run for the Razorbacks, it would have been almost 15 seconds behind ninth-place Alabama in the men’s division.
In fact, that record-setting time would have been nearly seven seconds behind the slowest time of any of the men’s squads at nationals.
I can’t speak for every sportswriter out there, but I do think it’s easy for us to forget about the things we don’t see that are required of these female athletes. We don’t see the practices. We don’t see the drills. We don’t see the weekend tournaments growing up. We don’t see the sweat, the tears or the blood until they start competing at the varsity level in high school.
And even then we don’t see the extra time put in the gym shooting a basketball or spiking a volleyball.
But female athletes work extremely hard to try and achieve their dreams in sport. Those dreams shouldn’t become nightmares because men identify as women and now suddenly if they can get the right hormone level reading they’re treated just the same as an actual woman.
That isn’t right.
Then the only recourse given to these women is to stand on principle — that their womanhood is determined by much more than a hormone level — and refuse to compete against a women’s team with a man on it. Or go out and accept the lie that men can become women and men who identify as women have just as much a claim to femininity and female athletics as an actual woman does.
We should be ashamed we’re even debating this. We should be embarrassed this is even a conversation. We should be distraught over the fact that our daughters are having dreams dashed by men pretending to be women.
And we should stop, take some time to reflect on biological realities and wonder how on earth we, as men, as dads and husbands, are allowing this to happen to our daughters and our wives.
Yes, most of these female athletes are more than capable of standing up for themselves. But when something is this absurd, they shouldn’t have to. We should be there as men protecting them and the integrity of their sport so that they too can have and achieve dreams in sport.
Yet some men are fine with men who identify as women taking those opportunities, those dreams from girls.
They can call it kindness. They can call it leadership. They can call it tolerance. They can call it acceptance. They can call it inclusivity.
But at the end of the day, it is insanity. It isn’t right. It isn’t fair. And it doesn’t represent anything sports are supposed to be about.
It is embarrassing that we’re having this discussion, and you should be embarrassed to be this wrong about everything. Despite your delusions, the reality is that trans women are women. As wonderful as Caitlin Clark’s run was for women’s sports, this sad saga has exposed just how many men don’t take women’s sports seriously and think we need them to “protect” us.
We don’t, and frankly, we don’t want it. When you take a stance like this, you’re not defending the hard work women put in as athletes. You’re undermining and patronizing us, and it’s frankly offensive.
This woman has done nothing wrong. She’s not anything special as a volleyball player, and if not for her teammate, you would never know she was trans. This has been shameful on the part of you and so many others who don’t consider us to be athletes at all. In your eyes, we suck at everything and could never hope to compete against a trans woman. Please.
If you care about us at all, stand with Sean Keeler, Nancy Armour, Ann Killion and other true champions of women’s sports. Otherwise, kindly shut up and stay out of this.
Jacob, I agree with you. As a grandfather of 16 granddaughters that are athletically active, I enjoy all their competitions we can make. We have girls wrestling, basketball, volleyball, softball, track and X country, one even up by you at Dort. We have driven 3 1/2 hours to Fort Dodge to watch them run a 20 minute race, and it’s all worth it. But if there was a bio-male competing against them we wouldn’t drive 5 minutes to watch that. However I don’t believe in keeping transgenders from competing in sports. They should be in a league of their own, like wheel chair competitors at special events. I also read that some volleyball athletes just recently kneeled for the National Anthem. I owe them the same respect as they show for our country, none. This nonsense needs to be stopped before it spreads, common sense must prevail.
I can’t stop laughing at your assertion that trans women are women.