Welcome Back, Old Sport

(We missed you when they were letting dudes in dresses into the locker room.)

When I met my husband, he owned and operated the Santa Barbara Triathlon, a gig he lived and loved for the next twenty-five years. If you’re a nonathlete like me (for whom running ranks somewhere between root canal surgery and birthing a fully grown porcupine on any fun scale), you may not know how triathlons work. The gist is simple: Individuals or teams compete in three sequential sports—in this case, swimming, biking, and running—most of them with a goal of completing the course in the shortest amount of time. (I say most because certainly there are folks who sign up for the personal challenge or to tick something off of a bucket list, but the serious athletes are there to win.)

Triathlon participants are typically grouped by five-year age brackets (20-24, 25-29, etc.) and each bracket has a first, second, and third place winner. Importantly, your age is written in fat black sharpie down the back of your calves—a practice known as body marking, which is the very best position if you ever get asked to volunteer at a triathlon, by the way—so the other athletes can identify the age-groupers they are competing against on the field. An absolute stud-athlete friend of ours used to joke about how stoked he was every time he was about to “age up” into the next group, because after a certain birthday, being the youngest guy in your bracket gave you an admitted advantage—something you’d earned after just competing as the oldest guy in your bracket the year prior.

Do you know what these competitors didn’t do? They didn’t lie about their age just so they’d have a better shot at taking home a coveted First Place tile. Never once did a twenty-two-year-old triathlete don a grandpa suit or claim that he “identified” as an octogenarian so that he could smoke a bunch of old dudes; if he had, my Race Director husband would have ripped up his bib and called him a pathetic loser told him to take a hike.

Nobody in that world pretended to be something they weren’t, of course, because what’s the point of winning when the deck is obviously and overwhelmingly stacked in your favor? It would be like letting Elon Musk enter a third-grade bottle rocket building contest or having to give the $500 amateur karaoke night kitty to Ariana Grande. Even though I could wipe the floor with my neighbor’s six-year-old kid in any essay-writing competition, what sort of hideous human being would I be if I challenged her to one?

Maybe I should ask one of the desperate, shameless, pitiful biological men who have the audacity to compete in women’s sports.

If what were they thinking was a competition, these penis-sporting mortals would be tied for first place with the guy who had a KitKat wrapper tattooed onto his skull.

Talk about poor sports. For fun, I asked ChatGPT to define the phrase:

I grew up in the age of Title IX, the federal law enacted in 1972 that mandated equal opportunities for girls in sports. Before its implementation, female participation in athletics was pretty minimal, due to the fact that we had little access to sports programs, facilities, or scholarships. Title IX led to the number of female high school athletes in the United States skyrocketing from around 300,000 in 1971 to over 3 million by 2019. Before Title IX, girls who wanted to play soccer or baseball were either relegated to bench-warming positions if they were lucky or forced to form their own (resource-less) teams and then find another group of girls to play against.

This isn’t and never was about access to physical activity or even being part of a team. Research shows that ninety-four percent of female executives have participated in organized sports, indicating an undeniable correlation between athleticism and professional achievement.

“When girls play, they lead, and leadership is critical for our women to be able to succeed on and off the court—on the field and in the boardroom,” said Danette Leighton, CEO of the Women’s Sports Foundation, founded by tennis legend Billie Jean King in 1974. “The more we develop that for both men and women, the better we all are.”

For decades, forward thinkers fought for girls to have access to not just a level playing field—because no such thing exists in coed sports—but a playing field of their own. And then the woke establishment upended that bigly, allowing athletically-superior cross-dressers biological non-women to jockey for the best positions and take home the most trophies. If you dared to oppose this, you were a right-wing bigot. Not inclusive. Transphobic. “These female athletes just need to work harder,” commentators said out loud, “and not blame others for their lack of success.”

In the latest in a string of spectacular wins under the new administration, those horrific days just went the way of chain smoking and rotary phones. Yesterday, which just happened to be National Girls & Women in Sports Day, President Trump signed one of my very favorite executive orders—the one that bans biological men (remember when that phrase was redundant?) from participating in women’s sports. [Let’s all just try to get past the unfathomable fact that we needed this EO in the first place and rejoice in its signature, shall we?] In a briefing just before the signing, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt gave the following statement:

"This common-sense action from President Trump ends the disgusting betrayal of women and girls by the previous administration, who for years catered to radical activists who wanted biological males to be treated as women in workplace, showers, competitive sports, prisons and even rape shelters. Gender ideology insanity is over."

In honor of NGWSD, XX-YX Athletics (a brand I’d never heard of but will now be my go-to if I ever need to buy anything sporty) has launched an ad campaign called Real Girls Rock, which achingly depicts the realities of athletic training and the resilience that sacrifice builds. Watch it and weep (and then share).

Here’s the hysterical part: Right this very minute, progressives are sobbing into their pride mugs about the unfairness of Trump’s latest bigoted move. How dare he be so anti-trans, after all they’ve been through to get where they are? Doesn’t he realize this is going to set them back… generations? Boo-hoo-hoo and a bottle of kombucha. Let the rage-tweeting begin.

A rhetorical question for my ultra-liberal friends: Do you find it the tiniest bit ironic that in your quest for inclusivity, you’ve excluded a full half of the population from fair competition? Maybe next time you’re at the grocery pump*, you can pick up some common sense with your kale chips.

It’s called irony.

*Also amusing is the fact that the left is losing it over Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s single verbal stumble since being thrust into the blinding public spotlight. Shall we revisit Karine Jean-Pierre’s Nordstrom Pipeline or the ten thousand million new jobs Biden allegedly created, or do you maybe want to let this one go?

RUN DON’T WALK (or crawl, I don’t judge) TO GET THIS BOOK.