At The Daily Wire, Kelley Paul opines that "[Joe] Biden is asking women and girls to be gracious and smile politely from the sidelines as they accept third, fourth, or fifth place as biological males dominate the competition, sweeping up girls athletic state championships and college scholarships."  Feminist watchdogs are oddly silent about the uniform cultural, corporate, and media demands that these girls are better seen and not heard if they challenge the status quo.

"I lost out on countless opportunities to get placements, get titles, and qualify for further meets to display my talent to college coaches," says high school track star Selina Soule.  This happened because some boys decided they wanted to live outside the biological assignment that nature provided and to compete athletically against girls.

When males compete against females, we tend to point to glaring examples of disparities at the highest levels of the sport, but doing so misses the point for girls like Selina Soule.  For example, Kelley Paul notes that 300 high school boys in the United States have logged better times in the 400-meter run than the fastest woman in the world.  These comparisons suggest that biological differences between the sexes favor men when it comes to athletic competition, but that doesn't provide context when it comes to high school girls like Selina Soule. 

If you've managed to run a 400 in fewer than 49.26 seconds as a high school boy, not only are you faster than the fastest woman in the world, but you're objectively excellent in your field of competition.  But for high school boys to be objectively faster than most high school girls, it doesn't take excellence in your field of competition.  I know this from personal experience.

During the spring semester of my sophomore year of high school, I decided to run track in the football offseason to stay in shape.  I successfully tried out as a distance runner because my timed mile-runs in football conditioning (four laps around the track, or 1,600 meters) were a little over five and a half minutes.  By the end of the season, I had a handful of medals for the 1,600- and 3,200-meter runs on our junior varsity squad and had run a couple of varsity meets without ever placing.  Practices were grueling, but the meets and memories were fun.  The following year, I took up golf in the offseason.

That was my high school track career in a nutshell.  By the end of that season, my 1,600 runs were nearing the five-minute mark.  The high school girl who won state that year (1995–1996) in my conference size in Texas ran a 5:07.  The boy who won state that year ran a 4:19.

I was not objectively excellent in track.  I was average in my field of competition, at best, and nowhere near the pinnacle of achievement in my state.  But if I suffered under the delusion that I was, in reality, a girl, and had a social and political status quo enabling my delusion, as happens in Connecticut today, I might have been considered an elite athlete in my state.  And if suffering under this delusion while achieving athletic success has the potential to earn attention and accolades, doesn't that incentivize more confused young boys to do it, and don't more innocent young girls get harmed in the process?

I remember our high school's girl team track stars that year.  They enjoyed wide respect as the best track athletes representing our school, and they were celebrated.  They worked extremely hard to get there.  But it would have been unimaginable for us to think that boys competing against them would somehow be fair.

Demanding that we view athletic competition between boys and girls as "fair" should be a horrifying real-world manifestation of Orwell's dystopian vision of a government that demands an acknowledgment that "two and two make five."  And there are real victims in this fantasy world that progressives are building around us.  As Kelley Paul writes:

Where is the empathy for the young women who have devoted their lives to athletic training, only to see their hopes and dreams unfairly dashed? Indeed, the response is usually quite the opposite: women and girls who speak up for their rights in sports are often maligned as selfish, hateful, or worse[.] [snip]

In the words of the young Connecticut athlete Selina Soule, "It's very frustrating and heartbreaking when us girls are at the start of the race and we already know that these athletes are going to come out and win no matter how hard you try." It's past time for feminists to stand up and say that girls shouldn't be bullied into accepting third place in races they've won.

Hear, hear.  And if the glaring disparities between objective measures of men's and women's sports shrink due to transgender athletes breaking records, we shouldn't celebrate.  We should simply observe the reality that otherwise average male athletes are robbing girls of their rightful opportunities to be objectively excellent in their own field of competition.

Image: Boy wins girls' race.  YouTube screen grab.