Known more for being behind the curve, it’s refreshing to see something showing Louisiana ahead of it, providing a lesson on how to deal with current controversies.
That happened earlier this week as a result of hearings on Capitol Hill. The Senate Judiciary Committee, controlled by Democrats, decided to hold a hearing entitled “Protecting Pride: Defending the Civil Rights of LGBTQ+ Americans,” which promoted giving privileged position to a small minority at the expense generally of women and children.
It backfired when it came to a discussion about the relative physical capabilities of biological males who assert they are “female” or who have made a medical transition through drugs and/or surgery to take on some female biological aspects, relative to natal females in sports competitions. Republican Sen. John Kennedy had an interest group leader, clearly in over her head, claim that perhaps the greatest, perhaps aside from her sister Venus, female tennis player of all time Serena Williams routinely could defeat typical male professionals.
In fact, as pro-equality crusader and ex-collegiate swimming champion Riley Gaines later noted in testimony, the Williams sisters had issued such a challenge early in their careers when they already had started winning titles: that they could beat men outside of the top 200 professionals. So, a 50-year-old man ranked just outside of that took them up on it, and defeated both.
Years later, on a talk show, Serena herself at the height of her career observed the vast difference between male and female champions of her sport. “It’s completely different sport. The men are a lot faster, they serve harder, they hit harder. It’s a completely different game. I love to play women’s tennis. I only want to play girls because I don’t want to be embarrassed.” She opined that the top male in the world then, Andy Murray, could beat her “6-0, 6-0 in 5 to 6 minutes.”
And if you’re looking for a more recent example: in the world of professional road cycling, teenaged riders compete at various junior levels, with 18 year-olds at the start of a calendar year the oldest allowed to participate. One such race was held last week in Belgium where a number of male juniors in their teens participated.
As did Lotte Kopecky, at 27 one of the premier female road cyclists in the world. With 28 career victories to her name, this year alone she has won (today) her national elite championship (the level above juniors for women) and three of the ten most prestigious races on the women’s calendar, finished second and seventh in two others, and added a stage race (six stages in this case) overall victory to boot. In fact, of the 15 times she has lined up this year, she finished out of the top 10 only twice.
Last week, in the runup to the national championships and the female version of the Tour de France in July, she wanted to get in a women’s elite race but found it canceled at the last minute, Undeterred in the quest to build her form, she heard about the GP Brieks Broodhoek men’s junior race, and got herself in it.
It was won by a 16-year-old, his first of the year. Kopecky finished 50 seconds behind him in 22nd. Anybody who suggests there isn’t a wide performance gulf between natal males and females caused by their differing physiological developments as they mature, regardless of whether a male decides to undergo medical interventions to deemphasize male sexual characteristics in favor of emphasizing female ones, is not a serious person to debate on the issue and cannot begin to justify that competitions involving males transitioning in any way to female are in any way fair to the female competitors involved.
That includes a whole range of fools, on up to Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards, who in 2021 and 2022 fought against what would become Act 283 of 2022 that prohibited biological males from competing in biological-only female collegiate and scholastic sports. At the time, these idiots bemoaned how “unfair” it was to exclude the youthful transgender competitors – who still would be free to compete in male sports – and how Louisiana would be boycotted for sports events.
That never happened. Louisiana was among the first states to pass such a law in 2021, only to have Edwards veto it and have that barely sustained. Over the next year, when Act 283 passed and Edwards, knowing this time his veto would be overridden, did nothing that allowed it to become law, 20 other states followed suit, and more have done so since.
Louisiana now also finds itself in the forefront of states trying to protect children from being goaded into undergoing irreversible medical interventions that will affect them for the rest of their lives, things that show little effectiveness in improving mental health particularly for the many who have emotional difficulties tied to a number of other medical conditions unrelated to some desire at a given time to be a different sex (a desire most commonly that evaporates within a couple of years as they mature). Again, a circus of idiots with evidence and science clearly against their view but full of ideological fury, much like the testifier Kennedy set up and Gaines finished off, will try to obstruct this progress.
(And the Democrat Pres. Joe Biden and congressional Democrats want to reverse this, reports media backed by far leftist financial forces in coverage of the same hearings. And, guess what? Somehow, they forgot to mention the humiliating episode concerning the false assertions about the Williams, happily female, sisters.)
Those who can protect children from harm must not waver in seeing that bill HB 648 through, even as Edwards threatens to veto it behind a chorus of those who put ideology ahead of children. You, not they, have the facts and moral authority behind you.
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