As Big Tech Censors Half of America, ACLU Instead Makes a Stand to Put Men in Women's Sports
Free speech is under unprecedented attack by an unholy alliance of Big Tech, corporate oligarchs, the establishment media and government Democrats.
Tech giants are purging conservative voices — and even liberal voices who challenge establishment credos, as the New York Post pointed out — from their platforms. Large corporations like Bed Bath & Beyond, Simon & Schuster, Disney, Amazon and Bank of America are turning on clients and customers who espouse conservative views.
The establishment media is floating the apparent need for a government “reality czar” to suppress “disinformation,” and New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes is suggesting over Instagram that a House “truth and reconciliation” committee be created to “rein in our media environment.”
Rather than tackle this frontal assault on first freedoms, the American Civil Liberties Union — which bills itself as “the nation’s premier defender of the rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution” — has largely been silent.
In fairness, the ACLU acknowledged that such trampling of free speech was concerning, but it did little else — which was about as helpful as a lifeguard who blows his whistle at a drowning swimmer, but stays in his chair.
The ACLU undoubtedly pumped the brakes on this issue because those in the crosshairs are primarily conservatives. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, right?
Instead, the ACLU has chosen to take on a far more sinister and dire threat to our constitutional liberties: state laws prohibiting so-called transgender “girls” (i.e. males who identify as females) from playing on female-only school sports teams.
Likely in response to President Joe Biden’s recent executive order that sets the stage for schools to be barred from denying students access to sports based on their gender identity, the ACLU posted a series of tweets claiming to “debunk” what it describes as “four myths” surrounding this civil rights bogeyman, er, bogeyperson.
The first of these purported “myths” is that “sex is binary, apparent at birth, and identifiable through singular biological characteristics.” The truth, according to the ACLU, is that “there are no set hormone ranges, body parts, or chromosomes that all people of a particular sex or gender have.”
FACT ONE: Trans girls are girls. pic.twitter.com/R5OWNl5ooI
— ACLU (@ACLU) February 3, 2021
There are no gender-specific body parts? Get ready, this cinematic classic is about to be flagged by Facebook’s inquisitors:
The second “myth” that the ACLU attempts to debunk is that “trans athletes’ physiological characteristics provide an unfair advantage over cis athletes.” According to the ACLU, “in many states, the very same cis girls who have claimed that trans athletes have an ‘unfair’ advantage have consistently performed as well as or better than transgender competitors.”
FACT TWO: Trans athletes do not have an unfair advantage in sports. pic.twitter.com/1aTLqi6A8i
— ACLU (@ACLU) February 3, 2021
The ACLU provides no data or statistics in its tweets to back up this assertion. Instead, in a commentary piece from which it seems that the recent tweets were drawn, Chase Strangio, the ACLU’s deputy director for transgender justice, and Gabriel Arkles, a senior staff attorney, wrote that “22 percent of trans women who were perceived as trans in school were harassed so badly they had to leave school because of it. Another 10 percent were kicked out of school. The idea that women and girls have an advantage because they are trans ignores the actual conditions of their lives.”
That may be so, but the issue is not whether men who identify as women have the upper hand in life, but whether they have a competitive edge when pitted against actual females in the athletic arena. Strangio and Arkles, by moving the goalposts, avoid addressing this point.
That’s hardly surprising, though, since the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights effectively determined, based on hard data, that males who claim to be female do have a marked competitive advantage over biological women when it comes to athletics.
In fact, it was for this reason that the OCR declared in a May 15 letter that the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference’s decision to allow transgender female athletes to compete in women’s sports violated Title IX, which prohibits discrimination based on sex in federally funded educational programs.
When lecturing us about the “facts,” the ACLU conveniently ignored that one.
It also disregarded criticism by LGBT activist and tennis champion Martina Navratilova that challenges its thesis. In a 2019 Op-Ed for the U.K. Sunday Times, Navratilova said that allowing transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports is “insane and it’s cheating.”
Navratilova repeated that sentiment recently, telling BBC Radio earlier this month that the physical advantages held by men who identify as women and who had gone through male puberty are “pretty obvious,” and that allowing them to compete against biological women “clearly would not be a level playing field.”
Of course, she’s right. When athletes use performance-enhancing drugs like HGH or anabolic steroids to augment their own strength to exceed that of their competitors, they are universally, and properly, condemned as cheaters. When athletes instead reduce the strength of their pool of competitors — such as when men elect to participate in girls’ sports — the left celebrates it.
This is intellectually dishonest; in both cases, the athletes are manipulating the field of competition to their advantage.
The ACLU next claims it is a myth that “the participation of trans athletes [in women’s sports] hurts cis women,” and argues that excluding such athletes from female-only school sports teams “invites gender policing that could subject any woman to invasive tests” to check that a female athlete is truly biologically female.
FACT THREE: Including trans athletes will benefit everyone. pic.twitter.com/H0Fpt8xb4X
— ACLU (@ACLU) February 3, 2021
This Twitter user’s rejoinder sums it up nicely:
How does a female athlete benefit when she’s on the bubble to go the Olympics, and a trans woman takes one of the only spots?
Or when a sports scholarship goes to a male?
Or when some giant bloke runs her over in rugby? https://t.co/06d9JHI2n5
— ????????? ????? ❤️?? (@christophelston) February 3, 2021
As for the ACLU’s contention that invasive “gender policing” would result from maintaining truly single-sex sports teams, coaches have never had to conduct unannounced genital checks to maintain a female athletic league, and there’s no reason that they’d have to start now.
The fourth and final alleged myth, according to the ACLU, is that “trans students need separate teams.” Instead, says the civil rights group, “trans people … may experience detrimental effects to their physical and emotional wellbeing when they are pushed out of affirming spaces and communities.”
FACT FOUR: Trans people belong on the same teams as other students. pic.twitter.com/iTV7lHI7UV
— ACLU (@ACLU) February 3, 2021
This argument cuts both ways. Biological females who lose sporting competitions — and the many benefits that accompany success in athletics — because they are up against biological men will also experience deleterious effects to their wellbeing.
The ACLU never explains why the wellbeing of biological females, who, according to the U.S. Census, comprise more than half of the U.S. population, should be subordinate to the wellbeing of biological men who self-identify as women, and who, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, make up less than 0.56 percent of the U.S. population.
The left has moved aggressively to crack down on any speech that challenges progressive canons, and it justifies doing so based on the supposed need to prevent the spread of “disinformation.”
Yet the ACLU’s tweets about transgender persons on single-sex sports teams fall decisively into that category. They are opinions masquerading as facts. But because they promote woke orthodoxy, Twitter’s truth-checkers are nowhere to be found.
Make no mistake, ACLU’s leftist political agenda, and its bottom line, benefit from the suppression of facts on this issue.
And it’s for this reason that the ACLU is staying largely silent on the embargo on open dialogue by the confederation of Silicon Valley, corporate boardrooms, the establishment media and government Democrats.
But don’t expect the nation’s “premier defender” of constitutional rights to tell you that.
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