Finally, sanity prevailed in the world of women’s sports.
Swimming’s world governing body, FINA, announced a ban Sunday on biological men competing in women’s events, unless they had “transitioned” before the age of 12.
In other words, transgender athletes who have experienced the enduring competitive advantages of a male puberty flooded with testosterone, such as greater muscle mass, lung capacity and height, will no longer have an unfair advantage in women’s competitions.
The unfairness was clear when University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer Lia Thomas started blitzing the competition. A mediocre swimmer when she competed against males, she became a superstar in the pool against women after she swapped genders.
Thomas went from 554th ranked male in the 200 freestyle to the fastest woman in the 500 freestyle at the NCAA Championships this year.
Her teammates were so cowed by the oppressive atmosphere policed by gender zealots and their craven university that they were forced into silence or anonymous griping.
But the FINA ban is a promising sign that the pendulum is swinging back to normalcy on the gender madness we have been living through, which has caused irreversible damage to a generation of children.
And it is a slap in the face to the Biden administration’s embrace of gender ideology as some sort of moral crusade.
Joe Biden probably thought his executive order last week, “Advancing Equality for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Individuals,” was a winner twice over.
It would earn him social cred in Pride Month, and it was one in the eye for that ghastly Trump 2.0, Ron DeSantis, who had signed a law banning Florida schools teaching kindergarteners about sexual orientation and gender identity.
The president’s radical order overrides state laws which protect parents’ rights and girls’ sports and it promotes transgender drugs and surgery for children.
But it will backfire on him spectacularly at the ballot box, as parents wake up to the damage of this near-decade of cruel experimentation on children.
The tide is turning as more “detransitioners,” now young adults, tell their tales of woe.
The Post told some of their stories over the weekend. Chloe decided she was transgender at 12, was placed on puberty blockers and prescribed testosterone at 13 and had a double mastectomy at 15. By 16 she realized it was all a mistake. But testosterone had masculinized her jawline, broadened her shoulders, given her facial hair and may have stolen her fertility.
She wants her troubles to serve as a “cautionary tale” for other girls — and their parents.
None of this is to marginalize those people who suffer genuinely from gender dysphoria — feeling they are trapped in the body of the wrong sex — and who have found peace in surgery and hormones as adults.
But the sharp increase in 13- to 24-year-olds who identify as transgender in the US is alarming — it has nearly doubled since 2017, according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention — as is the explosion of gender clinics for children.
Disproportionate numbers of young people who go to gender clinics are reported to be autistic or have poor mental health, which makes the rush to feed them hormones and mutilate their bodies all the more reprehensible.
What we see is that the medical profession is not proceeding with caution, as they once did in the “watchful waiting” era when most kids grew out of any gender confusion, with some just being gay.
An attempt to normalize the idea of very young transgender children appeared, shockingly enough, on Fox News recently, in a story about a trans teen who “came out as a boy” at age five. It was couched in the familiar activist mantra: “It’s better to have a live son than a dead daughter.”
This is obscene emotional blackmail, meant to frighten parents by claiming that, if they don’t go along unquestioningly with their toddler’s gender whims, he or she will end up committing suicide.
In any case, the data suggests that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones do not prevent suicides, and in fact may increase the risk, according to a report released last week by the Heritage Foundation.
Heritage compared annual youth suicide rates in states that allow children to access cross-sex treatments without parental consent to states that do not and found a gap emerged after 2010 when puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones started to be used.
By 2020, the youth suicide rate in the easy-access states was 14 percent higher than in the states where parental consent was required for treatment.
The conclusion: “Easier access to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones by minors actually exacerbated suicide rates . . . Science does not demonstrate that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones are necessary to prevent suicides. In fact, if anything, it demonstrates the opposite.”
The emotional blackmail of gender activists, blindly parroted by the media, only has served the interests of a multi-billion-dollar trans-tech industry in which cynical pharmaceutical companies pump children with cancer-causing, fertility-destroying chemicals to stop puberty, or induce cross sex characteristics.
None of it could happen without the enthusiastic participation of medical professionals who turn their backs on their central obligation: “Do not harm the patient.”
In a just world, the doctors who sliced off teenagers’ breasts and filled their bodies with damaging chemicals would go to jail. No doubt class actions are coming.
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