Sometimes, Donald Trump hits the common-sense nail smack-bang on the head.
After years of cowardly public officials pathetically tiptoeing around the increasingly farcical, and grotesquely unfair, issue of biologically male trans athletes competing in women’s sports, the former and quite possibly next president of the US spat out a potentially very consequential truth bomb.
“You just ban it,” he said during a Fox News town hall on Wednesday, to huge cheers from the audience. “The president bans it. You just don’t let it happen.”
No dithering, no equivocation, no pandering to the virtue-signaling woke brigade, no passing the buck to sports authorities.
Trump just said what he’d do if he wins back the White House, in his normal blunt manner.
And frankly, if I were an American woman wondering which way to vote on Nov. 5, amid a constant bombardment of Democratic claims that Trump wants to destroy women’s rights, that single moment in this presidential race might tip me his way.
Because it’s the only solution to what has become an existential crisis in women’s sports.
Trump spoke out after footage emerged of an already controversial San Jose State University trans volleyball player named Blaire Fleming spiking the ball so hard into a San Diego State junior female player that she was knocked over.
There’s a dispute over whether the ball hit her in the face or shoulder, or, as slow-motion replays seem to confirm, both.
But what there can be no dispute over is the ferocious power that Fleming unleashed, and the shocking impact it had.
Nor the fact that the crowd gasped loudly when it happened.
Nor that the commentators felt compelled to comment on the victim’s startled, pink-faced state afterward.
As Trump said: “I saw the slam, it was a slam. I never saw a ball hit so hard, hit the girl in the head … it’s a man playing in the (women’s) game.”
For once, he wasn’t being hyperbolic.
One of Fleming’s own teammates, Brooke Slusser, has filed a lawsuit, along with a group including swimmer and women’s rights activist Riley Gaines, in which she states that Fleming is a biological male who spikes the ball at 80 mph — “faster than she had ever seen a woman hit a volleyball.”
Slusser adds: “The girls were doing everything they could to dodge Fleming’s spikes but still could not fully protect themselves.”
How the hell is this madness happening?
Have we learned nothing from the dangerous farce of women’s boxing at the Paris Olympics, where one contestant quit after just 46 seconds in the ring against a fighter reportedly born with male XY chromosomes because she’d never been hit that hard and feared for her life?
Make no mistake, if this is allowed to continue, very soon a woman is going to die playing against trans athletes with vastly superior natural strength and power.
That’s why Trump is so right to say he’ll ban it.
And he has the support of a large majority of Americans.
In a Gallup poll in June, 69% of adults said they believed trans athletes should only be allowed to compete on sports teams that match their sex assigned at birth, up from 62% in 2021.
Yet despite the self-evident unfairness and inequality of this sickening assault on women’s rights, anyone who dares question is it branded transphobic.
Tom Temprano, a spokesperson for the laughably named Equality California, told ABC: “This is actually not about sports, it is not about these athletes, this is part of a coordinated nationwide right-wing attack on the LGBTQ+ community. It’s not leadership, it’s not what our elected officials should be doing, it’s peddling hate and it’s shameful and I think it’s also important to remember how harmful these attacks are for LGBTQ+ people.”
What a disingenuous load of claptrap.
It’s absolutely about sports, and the athletes.
And ironically, the really hateful and shameful part of this debate is the likes of Temprano trying to silence any dissent by categorizing it as an attack on the LGBTQ+ community.
Further, what Trump’s doing is showing proper leadership.
As are the female volleyball players who are joining forces to boycott this nonsense.
This week, the University of Nevada’s women’s team said they won’t play against San Jose next week if Fleming plays.
They will become the fifth women’s university team to do so, along with Boise State, Southern Utah, Utah State and Wyoming.
I completely support their courageous stand.
It’s long overdue that all female athletes simply sit down and refuse to compete against biological males.
That would stop this insanity dead in its tracks.
And for all their talk of being the party of women, where are the Democrats on this? In the tank for trans athletes, that’s where.
President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris both supported a recent rewrite of Title IX, the 1972 law that bans discrimination based on sex in educational programs, which added “gender identity” to the list of sex-based protections in federal law.
In other words, if you’re a biological male like Blaire Fleming and you say you’re a woman, you get to play sports against biological females and smash 80-mph balls into their heads.
It’s not transphobic to say this is disgusting.
It’s a fact.
