May 1, 2023

Future historians may look back on 2023 as Peak Trans Women insanity. The highly publicized boycott of Bud Light beer over Anheuser-Busch’s choice to feature the trans “influencer” Dylan Mulvaney may have garnered the most publicity, but it is only a small part of this craze. This prominence is particularly visible in the fashion industry where leading brands such as Chanel, Versace, and Victoria’s Secret now showcase biological men dressed as glamorous women. Even Sports Illustrated, a magazine targeting sports-minded men once portrayed the transgender model, Leyna Bloom, on its cover. Thirty-sex transgendered women are currently earning a living as fashion models.

‘); googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1609268089992-0’); }); }

While portraying trans women in glossy magazines may attract more notice, more consequential is how biological males are replacing women in sports. It’s hard to know the numbers here, and some estimates put the figures on the low side (e.g., a 100 or so at the college level, five for K-12 ), but the impact extends beyond the raw numbers since biological men frequently dominate and thus deprive biological girls of financial rewards such as college scholarships or trophies.  A gay-oriented website summarizes this pattern with the headline,  “These 20 trans women have won national or international competitions or championships.” Who can forget the mediocre male swimmier Lia Thomas winning swimming championships as a female? Meanwhile, a trans weightlifter will even compete in the upcoming Olympics and do so as a woman. A transgendered athlete recently defeated 14,000 female competitors in the London marathon.

Far less publicized is that state prisons now contain 5000 men who identify as women while some 1300 are inmates of federal prisons.

What is going on? Is America experiencing a mass psychosis where men wake up as “women” and demand to be treated as females? Has our water supply been massively contaminated by estrogen? Or are we just experiencing a harmless fad like purple hair?

‘); googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1609270365559-0’); }); }

This men-becoming-women trend is the other side of what occurred decades back as women increasingly moved into traditional male fields. In a sense, it’s a socioeconomic version of Newton’s Third Law of Motion — Newton’s third law states that when two bodies interact, they apply forces to one another that are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction. The law of action and reaction. So as women replace men, men eventually replace women in domains once thought of as exclusively female. Further add an economic element — as women limit the economic opportunities of men, men seek these opportunities in fields once dominated by women.

The celebrated entrance of women into male-dominated fields is captured by the phrase, “breaking the glass ceiling.” The term “glass ceiling” was first coined in 1978 by Marilyn Loden to refer to the subtle  barriers faced by women struggling up the corporate ladder, obstacles like the good old boy male culture. The idea exploded in popularity during the mid-1980s, and was quickly followed by laws and bureaucratic edicts banning sex discrimination in employment, collegiate sports, and financial services.

A long list of “firsts” then followed: women air force fighter pilots, astronauts, secretaries of State, NFL referees, CEOs of major corporations, and on and on. These ceiling smashing breakthroughs are widely praised and areas where women were still excluded, for example, as Navy SEALs, were targeted for “improvement.” Critics were silenced and condemned as misogynistic. 

Less visible were the costs for men, especially when employment benefits are bestowed by putting a thumb on the scale to favor women. Consider, for example, the lower-level coaching and administrative jobs in men’s sports that are often the steppingstones to high-paid, top positions. A recent Christian Science Monitor story  recounts how women now fill position in baseball, men’s basketball, and football. In fact, both major league baseball and the National Basketball Association have 12 full-time women coaches and even the NFL employs eight full-time female coaches.

The displacement of men in favor of women is particularly notable in college sports where the federal government-enforced crusade for gender equality (Title IX) has resulted in cancelling men’s teams. This can get complicated legally, but the bottom line is twofold. First, financially pressed schools trying to trim expenses by eliminating non-revenue sports such as swimming often face opposition when the cuts are applied to women’s teams, less so when men’s sports are eliminated. Second, when schools face federal government pressure for gender equality, a “safe harbor” strategy is just to cut men’s teams to achieve participation ratios that reflect enrollment. It matters little whether female students have an interest in, say, women’s rugby, but unlike the men’s rugby team, it will survive. Beginning in the 1990s, the push for gender quality thus ended the careers if of male athletes in such sports as wrestling, tennis, swimming and diving, gymnastics, golf and cross-country.  In short, male athletes were sacrificed on the altar of gender equality.

This pattern also applies to academic hiring. Women now dominate the presidencies in the Ivy League and, more generally, women make up about 30% of college presidents. No doubt, the feminization of higher education administration will only continue as women increasingly dominate the campus. Today college women outnumber men by 14%, and while college enrollment is dropping in general, this decline is sharpest among men. Indeed, men are now merely 41% of those enrolled in higher education, and if one subtracts international students who are disproportionately male, the American male college student faces extinction. Women are now even a majority of students in medical school, long a bastion of maleness.