Trans-Lysenkoism
Florida, the eponymous home of Florida Man, has been drawing much national attention (and ire) due to its strong-willed governor (and likely Presidential aspirant) Ron DeSantis and his 'heterodox' (at least in the eyes of our cultural arbiters) policies. His prominent rejection of blanket lockdown policies at the outset of the pandemic infuriated his 'betters' and the entirety of the Best-and-Brightest, and even more so when the predicted mass die-off didn't occur.
More recently, he induced palpitations and paroxysms in signing a bill that limits LGBTQ discussion for children in public schools through age 9. Called the "don't say gay" bill by its critics, though DeSantis called out a reporter who asserted the bill said that, the outrage it spawned is, by dispassionate measures, wholly disproportional to its strictures. I think that most parents would be content with leaving sex-ed materials off the table until students have actually hit puberty.
Concurrently, DeSantis roiled the waters when he rejected transgender swimmer Lia Thomas's victory in the NCAA women's 500 yard freestyle finals, recognizing the runner up (Emma Weyant, a Florida native) as the "rightful" winner. This engendered the usual screams of trans-phobia.
No matter that every rational person knows that biologically male athletes competing against biologically female ones is fundamentally unfair.
Growing up with XY chromosomes and male hormones coursing through your body results in different skeletal structure, greater musculature, and greater aerobic capacity than growing up with XX chromosomes and female hormones. No amount of hormone suppression treatment will undo these differences. There is certainly overlap in ability - any high school track sprinter would embarrass me in a 100 yard dash, but there's a reason that sports are divided by gender.
As science writer Michael Shermer quipped:
Puberty is a performance enhancing drug.
There is nothing transphobic in observing that XY athletes have an inherent advantage over XX athletes. After all, sports sort athletes in combat sports (wrestling, boxing, MMA) by weight, and there's no reason not to accept that a 200 lb. fighter has an 'unfair' advantage over a 140 pounder.
Yet, here we are, and it's the result not of a broad "tolerance and acceptance" movement (libertarians have been at the fore of this before all the rest of y'all, so I don't want any guff about any purported intolerance on my part), but of a small subset of activists, who have made it so clear that they want to wipe out our natural cultural understanding that men and women are different that they've alienated former allies in the feminist and the LGB movements.
People who scream "Science!" in response to any assertions by the benighted against the new cultural views they're looking to impose are ignoring basic biological science. Worse, they pursue destructive 'cancellation' efforts against those who don't bend the knee and dare speak out against the illogic of this trans-athlete business.
This all echoes the Soviets' Lysenkoism of nearly a century ago:
[A] deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable .
One politically favored biologist's theory that ran directly contrary to all that was known about genetics and agriculture at the time was elevated to official state policy, because it gave the Stalin government a theory that correlated with its broader collectivist stylings, that "plants and seeds could be trained to follow socialist organizational principles." Thousands of biologists who denounced what they knew to be wrong lost their jobs or were thrown in jail. Crop yields, already ravaged by the collectivization of farms and the mass murder of the kulak peasants, declined further. Millions starved and died. Worse, Mao emulated Stalin's policies in Red China, leading to tens of millions additional starvation deaths.
I intend no equivalence between the horrors of 20th Century socialism and communism and today's efforts at cultural redefinition, but the modern colloquial meaning of "Lysenkoism" is spot-on accurate in describing the trans-activist assertions regarding biological sex differences.
We should absolutely reject the risible accusation that opposing trans-athletes in women's sports is phobic in any way, shape, or form. Not from a left-right perspective, or a conservative-progressive perspective, but from one of simple fact and objective reality. While everyone is entitled to the pursuit of happiness, granting special allowances for a small and traditionally 'oppressed' minority by ignoring all that is factually true is not "tolerance," it's destructive insensibility.
If you like this post, please share it far and wide. Scattering seeds is how we sow liberty.
If you like what I write, please subscribe (if you have already, thank you!), and please recommend the blog to your friends! While I share it as much as I can on social media, we all know those get filtered and you're not apt to see all shares.
If you really like The Roots of Liberty and want to help keep it rolling, please consider becoming a paying subscriber here at Substack, or at a lighter level as contributor to the blog via Patreon.
Thank you for your support!
Yours in liberty,
Peter.