I’ve been saying for a long time that the transgender takeover of women’s sports is going to end only when women stop competing against them. It makes sense that this retreat from competition is happening in Brazilian jiu-jitsu (“BJJ”), which is a close-contact sport in which women can get hurt, unlike racing. At a recent women’s BJJ competition, men completely dominated the event, with some events having only male competitors.

I did BJJ for almost a decade, although I started too late in life ever to be any good, and my joints got damaged before I got my advanced belts. However, I know a lot about the sport. At the dojo where I trained, men and women rolled together. This means I have experience grappling with both men, who were holding back as hard as they could, and with women, who were not.

Even with their settings on low, the men were more formidable opponents than the women were. They had greater bone mass and greater muscle mass. Where women, because of biology, had a lot of space and softness between hip and head, men did not. They were solid, without a forgiving waistline or more delicate neck. Theoretically, I could have choked out one of my women partners; I could never have choked out the men, whether in theory or fact.

This greater mass mattered because BJJ is about finding your opponent’s soft spots—his joints and neck—and putting those spots in holds that threaten either to break the joints, cut off the blood supply to the brain, or suffocate the person. This is close contact fighting. People can get badly hurt. I knew people at the dojo who dislocated joints, ripped muscles, and broke bones. Almost invariably, those people were men grappling men—and these were friends who didn’t mean to hurt each other.

Image: Real man-v-man BJJ in action. YouTube screen grab.

In this regard, BJJ, like all martial arts, is different from the running and swimming races we usually hear about when it comes to men competing against women. A woman will lose a race against a man, but she won’t have her facial bones splintered, her shoulder broken, her hip dislocated, or any of the other gruesome injuries that are all too easy in a hard-fought BJJ round between a man and a woman.

That difference may explain why several women who were set to compete at a BJJ competition last week pulled out when they realized that they might be grappling with biological men. In fact, so many women pulled out that, eventually, it was just men (weird, creepy men) grappling with each other:

In a martial arts tournament last week, several females boycotted because of the surplus of males competing against the women.

In most of the women's divisions, there were more males than females competing. In one of the women's division, there were ONLY males left competing as… pic.twitter.com/nULMvHBDVV

— Riley Gaines (@Riley_Gaines_) October 27, 2023

You can read more here about what’s going on in the world of competitive BJJ. Again, this rests with women: Unless women boycott any sport that allows men to compete, this is going to keep happening. Women can either hang on by the skin of their teeth, hoping to take home a medal here and there, or they can band together to fully and finally expose the grotesque fraud of so-called trans-women who compete in and, inevitably, dominate women’s sports.