Rep. Joe Kennedy: No Sports Competitions for Women or Girls, Only for ‘Human Beings’

Neil Munro / Breitbart News
Neil Munro

Rep. Joe Kennedy decried sports leagues for only women and girls and said sports competitions must be for all “human beings.”

Kennedy, who chairs the Democrats’ transgender equality task force, dismissed women’s sports when Breitbart asked him during a brief interview on Capitol Hill what he would say to women and girls who lose sports competitions to “transgender” men and boys who say they are females.

“Human beings are human beings, man, that’s exactly what I’d say,” he said April 9, adding: “Human beings are 100 percent entitled to compete with whatever sport they want to compete with. Human beings are humans beings … That’s your problem.

Kennedy’s dismissal of women’ sports came as Democrats continued to denounce President Trump’s policy of restoring the biology-based legal distinctions between men and women.

On Friday, for example, the Pentagon formally ended former President Barack Obama’s controversial policy of classifying men as women if they say they are women. Instead, Trump’s Pentagon has rewritten Obama’s regulations to recognize that biology is the “bright line” between female and male servicemembers. Trump’s reliance on biology — not on the idea of “gender identity” — allows his deputies to preserve institutions and rights for women and girls.

Kennedy’s dismissal of sports reflects his role as chairman of the transgender task force, which is pushing the progressive claim that men and women are interchangeable and should be treated by government and Americans as a member of whatever sex or sexual groups they prefer. In practice, this ideology would allow men — who tend to be bigger, stronger, and faster — to enter and use any sports institution created for women.

In contrast, conservatives and voters say men and women are legally equal, but also are complementary and different. Government should support the civic and cultural institutions which Americans evolved to help the two sexes compete and cooperate on a level playing field, especially when creating the next generation of Americans, conservatives say.

The progressives’ effort to blur distinctions between the two sexes is allowing a growing number of men to compete against women in sports, including weightlifting, cycling, running, soccer, and fighting. This blurring is allowing men to literally beat women, to exclude women from competitions, to win prizes from women, and to break records earned by women amid growing political and media intimidation of women by progressives and by the men who say they are “transgender.”

“They bully women while claiming to be victims of bullying,” said Beth Stelzer, founder of Save Women’s Sports. “Women are afraid if we speak up we will lose our sponsorships, opportunities, relationships, and even our jobs,” she said at an April event organized by the Heritage Foundation. If men are allowed to compete in women’s’ sports, “there will be no longer women’s sports,” she said.

The transgender ideology will erase opportunities for women and girls in sports, and may try to redefine strong girls as masculine and therefore as men, said Jennifer Bryson, founder of Let All Play. “I do not want to see girls who are playing soccer who are tough face pressure to adopt gender ideology and say they are boys,” she said at the Heritage event.

Polls show the transgender ideology is deeply unpopular, especially among women and parents.

In 2017, Obama told National Public Radio (NPR) that his promotion of the transgender ideology made it easier for Trump to win the presidency. Multiple polls show that most Americans wish to help and comfort people who think they are members of the opposite sex, even as they also reject the transgender ideology’s claim that a person’s legal sex is determined by his feeling of “gender identity,” not by biology. A U.K. survey shows a similar mix of some sympathy for people with lopsided opposition to the ideology.

The transgender movement is diverse, so its different factions have different goals and priorities. It includes sexual liberationists, as well as progressives, plus feminists who wish to blur distinctions between the two sexes, and people who glamorize the distinctions between the two sexes. It includes high-profile children, people who are trying to live as members of the opposite sex, people trying to detransition back to their sex, men who demand sex from lesbians, masculine autogynephiles who say they are entitled to women’s rights, wealthy donors, politicians, political professionals, and revenue-seeking drug companies and medical service providers.

Transgender advocates claim that two million Americans say they are transgender to a greater or lesser extent. But very few people who describe themselves as transgender undergo cosmetic surgery of the genitals. Only about 4,118 Americans surgically altered their bodies in hospitals from 2000 to 2014 to appear like members of the opposite sex, according to a pro-transgender medical study.

Yet the gender ideology is rapidly gaining power, aided by huge donations from wealthy individuals and medical companies. In February, for example, an Ohio judge forced parents of a teenage girl to give up custody so she could begin a lifetime of drug treatments and surgery that would allow her to appear as a male.

The progressive push to bend Americans’ attitudes and their male-and-female civic society around the idea of “gender identity” has already attacked and cracked many of the popular social rules that help Americans manage the cooperation and competition among and between complementary, different, and equal men and women.

These pro-gender claims have an impact on different-sex bathrooms, shelters for battered women, sports leagues for girls, hiking groups for boys, K–12 curricula, university speech codes, religious freedoms, free speech, the social status of women, parents’ rights in child-rearing, children’s safety, practices to help teenagers, health outcomes, women’s ideals of beauty, culture and society, scientific research, prison safety, civic ceremonies, school rules, men’s sense of masculinity, law enforcement, military culture, and children’s sexual privacy.

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