John Oliver has a message for his fellow liberals: supporting men in women’s sports is a hill worth dying on. This week, the comedian dedicated a segment of his show Last Week Tonight to what he called “an absolute fixation of the Right”.

Oliver admitted that 67% of Democrats support athletes playing on teams correlating with their sex rather than their gender identity. Provided with that statistic, he pretended to meaningfully engage with the research about biological males who identify as trans women competing against females. “It is obviously true that on average, cisgender men and post-pubescent boys have some specific athletic performance advantages,” he offered, before listing all the ways those advantages weren’t actually advantages at all. “It is undoubtedly true that trans women will maintain advantages in some sports,” he said later, though not in every case, in every sport.

To continue the pretence of taking objections seriously, Oliver allowed input from a professional athlete. Not a credible source, like Martina Navratilova, or the many female champions and Olympians speaking out, but instead Lance Armstrong, who is as famous for cheating as for being an athlete. Thus Armstrong’s fictitious example — what if Rafael Nadal transitions tomorrow and wipes the floor with Serena Williams? — was dismissed as a fantasy.

But what about real-life cases where men have transitioned and beat women in physically demanding sports?  Oliver explained why we shouldn’t care. In the case of Riley Gaines, the former Division 1 college swimmer who tied with trans woman Lia Thomas, the comedian insisted the worst part for Gaines was temporarily conceding her 5th place trophy. Therefore, he seems to think, we should ignore everything she said about sharing a locker room with an intact male and about the experiences of female athletes who are silenced and shamed for their objections to Thomas’s presence. Some of those girls who were forced to deny reality in the service of one male’s feelings are now suing the NCAA.

According to people with the same worldview as Oliver, women and girls are just being silly when they say they feel “unsafe”. These females can only offer vague critiques about men being bigger and faster, and the girls hurt by playing against boys could have been hurt anyway. Besides, the sports in which women claim to be treated unfairly are just dumb. The British-American presenter poked fun at a female fencer who knelt, rather than face her male opponent, and was disqualified. He and the audience laughed about girls and women in disc golf — because it’s apparently not a real sport, even though it involves throwing a frisbee long distances. Is “throwing like a girl” relevant here? Not to this satirist.

Oliver points out that Riley Gaines has accrued some advantages herself; she’s gone on to a certain kind of fame. Likely, she wouldn’t have shared a stage with Donald Trump, who signed an executive order on “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” in February, had she gone on to dental school as planned. Instead, she was forced to undress in front of and compete against Lia Thomas while Democrats and liberals refused to acknowledge that was a problem.

Trump’s support is certainly part of the reason pundits like Oliver can’t evolve. As Oliver points out, Trump doesn’t seem to understand the “concept of consent, human empathy, and all but one of his children’s names”. He actually “joked about dating his own daughter on The View.” He is dismantling democracy and imploding the constitution, and thus is not the best spokesperson for the issue. Too bad Democrats, and Oliver, didn’t listen to the many liberals speaking out, or smeared and sneered at them.

Oliver himself displayed absolutely no empathy for females dealing with men in their private spaces. Nor did he display an understanding of consent, because girls and women haven’t consented to playing against men. That reality has been foisted upon them. Sure, some are fine with it, and Oliver profiled a female cyclist who lost to not one but two males, and is, as the comedian says, downright joyful. But is this really the message we should be sending to our young women? Lose unfairly and feel joy; anything else is bigotry.

Instead of sneering, we need to talk about the endless can of worms opened by transitioning children and institutionalising the concept of gender identity. These are conversations that we’ve never had because so-called liberals insist that any of us who object are just bad people. We need to acknowledge that, while our bodies are malleable to some extent through drugs, surgery, diet and exercise, our sex is not malleable. “Being trans can mean seeing your body as a barrier to living life as your authentic self,” Oliver said. One wonders, though: what is authentic about denying the reality of sex?

It’s not hateful to insist that a man who identifies as a woman, or who wants to wear women’s clothes, is not a woman. The Left must stop demonising those who have shifted their view on this issue, such as California Governor Gavin Newsom or New Hampshire State Representative Jonah Wheeler. Progressives might call them “bigots”, but most of the country agrees with them.

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Lisa Selin Davis is the author of Tomboy. She writes at Broadview on Substack.

LisaSelinDavis

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