Female athletes will be wiped out of the sporting books if biological males are allowed to continue competing against them
The results of college swimming titles in the US do not normally make international headlines.
This year, however, after transgender swimmer Lia Thomas won the 500-yard freestyle, a fierce debate has erupted internationally over fairness in female sports. So much attention has been generated by Thomas’s performance that Florida governor Ron DeSantis was moved to release an official proclamation declaring the Florida-born woman who won second place the “rightful winner” on Tuesday.
The college titles matter to Americans because the swimmers who win them often go on to win at the Olympics. The stakes are high. In fact, two of the women who were beaten in the pool by Thomas were silver medallists at last year’s Tokyo Games.
The backlash against Thomas has been as predictable as it has been intense, but it would be a mistake to chalk it all up to transphobia. Just as there was a swift public backlash against Australian cricketers after the ball tampering scandal in 2018, the backlash against Thomas is driven more by perceptions of unfairness and cheating than by discomfort with transgender identity.
There’s no public anxiety over trans men who compete in the men’s divisions, for example, because they’re not perceived as retaining unfair physical advantages; on the contrary, they’re perceived as entering tougher competitions. The anxiety is not about trans athletes in general but the specific problem of biological males competing against biological females.
Thomas was born a biological male and competed in the men’s division in swimming but began transitioning in 2019, a process that involves testosterone-suppressing medication.
Thomas’s rank in the men’s division was 554th in the 200-yard freestyle and 65th in the 500-yard freestyle. This year, after switching to the women’s division, Thomas now ranks fifth and first respectively.
“This shows, to me, that if she had been born female, she would not be succeeding the way she is succeeding now,” 18-time Grand Slam winner Martina Navratilova has said.
Female athletes have been sounding the alarm bell over muddled and misguided rules that have allowed athletes with XY chromosomes to compete with XX athletes for years.
Last year Navratilova, with professor of law and former professional track athlete Doriane Coleman, wrote in online journal Quillette that the International Olympic Committee had shirked its leadership responsibilities on this issue by releasing vague and non-binding guidance that avoided reference to biology. The IOC instead prescribed that athletes should be excluded from women’s competitions if they possessed a “disproportionate advantage” over others.
Navratilova and Coleman have argued that such vague terminology could lead to absurd interpretations that would allow middling male athletes to participate in women’s sports, while excluding exceptional females if they were determined to have “disproportionate advantage”. Imprecise guidelines not grounded in biology are clearly not fit for purpose.
The science is clear. Before puberty, boys and girls show no real difference in testosterone levels, or athletic performance. But during puberty, male testes ramp up the production of testosterone 30-fold, which leads post-pubescent males to have circulating testosterone that is 15 times higher than that of women at any age. Testosterone does not just help developing boys develop larger muscles. It helps them develop larger bones, skeletal structures, larger lungs and hearts, and more efficient circulatory systems, and it influences psychology and behaviour.
Sky News host Rita Panahi says female competitors and swim teams would send a "powerful message" by… refusing to compete against transgender swimmer Lia Thomas. Ms Panahi said Lia Thomas was a "mediocre swimmer in the men's team" but she is now "smashing records in the women's competition". More
The gap in male and female athletic performance sits around 8 per cent to 12 per cent for most Olympic sports such as swimming and athletics but increases in sports that require power, such as weightlifting, and decreases in sports that rely on hand-eye co-ordination, such as shooting.
The current Olympic champion in the women’s 100m sprint is Elaine Thompson-Herah who ran the 100m in Tokyo in a phenomenally fast time of 10.61 seconds. But although this is an astonishingly fast time for a woman, Thompson-Herah’s time is still beaten by schoolboys, Paralympians and masters (over-35) male athletes. Statistically speaking, the 12 per cent gap in performance will mean thousands of men will have a personal best time that is faster than the fastest woman in the world.
It should not be hard for leading sporting authorities to say biological sex is real, and it affects our physiology, and we separate athletic divisions according to physiology and biology, not identity. While our culture has come to accept that gender identity is a subjective experience that should be respected, legally and socially, sport retains – and should continue to retain – special status as a discipline in which objective biological criteria matter.
If biology did not matter, then we would not ban athletes for doping, or for taking testosterone exogenously to improve their performance. If biology didn’t matter then we would not distinguish heavyweight boxers from featherweights. If biology didn’t matter we wouldn’t have the Paralympic Games for athletes with physical impairments, nor would we separate children’s sports into age divisions. And if biology didn’t matter we would not have created separate divisions for male and female athletes in the first place.
When Ariarne Titmus won the gold medal at the 400m freestyle at the Tokyo Olympics last year, she did it in a time of 3:56.69. If Titmus were to have raced in the men’s division, she would not have placed in the top 30, let alone the final. Women should not have to apologise for wanting a fair go.
If we believe women and girls should have equal opportunities to compete in fair competitions, then international authorities such as the IOC need to get serious about protecting the integrity of female sports. And the most important step that needs to be made by those in leadership roles is recognising that in sport, like it or not, biology trumps identity.
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The Public-Health Hazards Posed by Public-Health Paternalists
In his pre-COVID book Killjoys: A Critique of Paternalism (2017), nanny-state nemesis Christopher Snowdon reports on the rise and pernicious influence of what he calls “public health paternalists.” These folk are not traditional public-health scholars and officials whose concern is to protect individuals from pathogens and other health-hazards that spread more intensely as people live, work, and play in closer and closer proximity to each other. Instead, public-health paternalists are busybodies who focus on statistical aggregates, such as the percentage of a country’s population that is obese, and propose using state coercion to improve the performance of these aggregates.
Each such statistical aggregate is merely the summation of the health status of each of many individuals who are reckoned to be members of some group, such as “Americans” or “seniors.” Importantly, nearly all of these measured aggregate health outcomes emerge from individual choices that each person in the group voluntarily undertakes and that affect only each decision-maker as an individual. That is, almost none of these measured aggregate health outcomes is the result of what economists call “negative externalities,” which occur when Smith suffers damage not because of his own choices but, instead, because of choices that Jones made without regard to the negative consequences of those choices on Smith.
Whereas classical liberals, for example, refuse to classify even widespread obesity as a public-health problem, public-health paternalists do classify widespread obesity as a public-health problem. The classical liberal understands that obesity isn’t contagious; each obese person ultimately chooses to lead a lifestyle that results in his or her obesity. The classical liberal therefore understands that obesity is a private problem of personal—of individual—health, rather than a problem of public health. In contrast, the public-health paternalist leaps from the (perhaps accurate) observation that a large portion of some public is obese to the conclusion that obesity is thus a problem of public health.
As Deirdre McCloskey rightly emphasizes, the ways that we talk—our “habits of the lip”—matter. If obesity is called a “public-health problem,” the path is more surely paved to impose on ‘the public’ the responsibility to ‘solve our obesity problem’—with, of course, ‘the public’ acting chiefly through government. And because any large group of people will have within it some number of individuals who behave in ways that result in self-harm, public-health paternalists will have an easy time finding amidst the statistics several “public-health problems.” Indeed, every choice that potentially has a negative impact on the health of each individual who makes that choice is a source of such “public-health problems” even when such choices have no negative impact on any other individuals in the group.
In the minds of public-health paternalists, the body politic becomes almost a literal body. The aggregate (as described by statistics) is treated akin to a sentient entity that suffers health problems, many of which can be cured by this entity’s team of physicians—namely, public-health paternalists. And in a country with a population as large as that of the United States, the number of different health problems suffered by absolutely large numbers of individuals will be enormous, thus ensuring no end of opportunities for public-health paternalists to use the power of the state to proscribe and prescribe individuals’ behaviors.
But as Snowdon notes, public-health paternalists sense that, to justify their interventions, they need more than to point to scary statistics drawn from a large population. At least in societies with a liberal tradition—in societies that historically accord some deference to individuals to freely make their own choices—public-health paternalists must bolster the case for their officiousness by convincing the public that seemingly private decisions are not really private. Public-health paternalists thus insist, for example, that obese people are innocent victims of predatory marketing by companies such as McDonald’s, while smokers have been trapped by the vile tactics of Big Tobacco as well as by the peer pressure of simply being surrounded by friends who smoke.
According to public-health paternalists, therefore, almost no decisions that affect individuals’ health are truly ‘individual.’ Nearly all such decisions are either heavily determined by the actions of third parties, or themselves affect the choices of unsuspecting third parties.
Nothing is personal and private; everything is political and public. Because, according to public-health paternalists, a vast array of seemingly ‘private’ decisions are both the results of “externalities” and themselves the causes of “externalities,” the work of public-health paternalists is plentiful, while the power these ‘experts’ require to protect the health of the body politic is vast.
This perversion of classic public health into public-health paternalism is alarming. As public-health paternalism comes to dominate the field, persons attracted to study and practice public health will be, in contrast to traditional public-health scholars and officials, far more insistent on expanding public-health’s domain. Public-health paternalists will excel at the dark art of portraying as ‘public’—and, hence, as appropriate targets of government regulation—many activities that traditionally and correctly are understood as private and, hence, as not appropriate targets of government regulation.
How much of the overreaction to COVID-19 is explained by the rise of public-health paternalism? I suspect an enormous amount. Public-health paternalists are not only already primed to misinterpret private choices as ones that impose ‘negative externalities’ on third parties, they are also especially skilled at peddling their misinterpretations to the general public. And so although the quite real contagiousness of the SARS-CoV-2 virus renders it a valid concern of classic public-health scholars and officials, the contagiousness and ‘publicness’ of other aspects of COVID were exaggerated in attempts to justify excessive government control over everyday affairs.
The most obvious example of an activity traditionally regarded as private and, thus, not properly subject to government control is speech and writing. Of course, no one has ever denied that speech and writing have effects on others; indeed, changing other people’s minds and hearts is the very purpose of much speech and writing. But in liberal civilization the strong presumption has been that individuals are to be trusted to judge for themselves the merit or demerit of whatever expressed thoughts they encounter. We’ve long recognized, and rightly feared, the danger of allowing government officials to superintend and suppress peaceful expression.
Yet with COVID, this presumption was significantly weakened, if not (yet) reversed. The US Congress held a hearing to investigate “the harm caused by the spread and monetisation of coronavirus misinformation online to try and identify the steps needed to stop the spread and promote accurate public health information,” while high-ranking US government public-health officials tried to orchestrate an effort to discredit the Great Barrington Declaration. A Cornell Medical School official, writing in the New York Times, openly called for suppressing the speech of physicians who dissent from the prevailing ‘expert’ consensus.
Peaceful expression and the exchange of ideas are now regarded by many elites as sources of potentially dangerous ‘externalities.’ And in the minds of public-health paternalists, the only way to protect the body politic from becoming lethally infected with what public-health paternalists themselves deem to be misinformation is for government to suppress the spread of viral ideas no less than it suppresses the spread of viral molecular structures. This ominous development during COVID surely was encouraged by the rise over the past few years of public-health paternalists.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14083&omhide=true&trk=rm
*******************************************Florida Company Shows California How to Build a Railroad. Brightline, a private company, is proving that market-based rail travel is possible
When the Federal Government ordered the construction of the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s and 1960s (at a cost to taxpayers of roughly $580 billion in 2022 dollars), it all but killed America’s privately operated passenger railroads. Since then, rail travel in America has mostly consisted of government-subsidized Amtrak services of deteriorating quality that amble across the country, catering to a niche market of leisure travelers and those with no other options. On the busy Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington D.C. there is still enough demand to operate a busy, profitable service, but elsewhere Amtrak’s services are too slow, inconvenient, and infrequent to effectively compete with highways and airlines.
But with gas prices rising and traffic congestion strangling many American cities, passengers, investors, and government planners are all reconsidering railroads. Several new projects have sprung up across the country, aiming to link major cities a few hundred miles apart, where a train might provide a more convenient journey than a plane, car, or bus. Some of these projects are led by state governments, others by private companies. The contrast between the two is dramatic. To illuminate that difference, compare the government-run California High Speed Rail project with Brightline, a new private rail system in Florida.
Approved in 2008, California High Speed Rail (CHSR) was expected to deliver a 520-mile two-track, electrified high-speed railway on an all-new route between Los Angeles and San Francisco by 2029. Fourteen years later, CHSR is now only expected to have a 171-mile single-track section between Madera and Bakersfield will be operational by 2030. Meanwhile the project’s cost has ballooned to $80 billion from an original budget of $33 billion, and costs are expected to rise further to $100 billion, or triple the original budget.
Meanwhile in Florida, a very different kind of passenger railroad is already up and running. Brightline was launched in 2012 by the Florida East Coast Railway, a private freight railroad. Unlike CHSR, Brightline mostly uses existing routes, removing the need to acquire (or appropriate) large amounts of land. Instead of building the whole line before beginning any passenger services (as CHSR is doing), Brightline began construction on a 70-mile section from Miami to West Palm Beach in 2014 and opened it to passengers in 2018. This meant that Brightline already had an operational, revenue-producing service before embarking on the 170-mile northward extension to Orlando Airport. That extension is expected to open in 2023, and the entire project will cost about $1.75 billion, raised through private financing.
This equates to about $7.3 million per mile for Brightline, compared to $153.8 million per mile for CHSR (using the current $80 billion budget). Why will CHSR cost at least twenty times more per mile than Brightline? How has Brightline managed to deliver a high-speed intercity passenger rail system within ten years whereas CHSR needs twenty-two years to deliver an incomplete, scaled-down version of its original plan? Much of the answer comes down to the fundamental nature of public works projects such as CHSR.
In his Economics in One Lesson, economist Henry Hazlitt noted that many (if not most) public works projects do not even aim to address a clear need. Instead, said Hazlitt, they are justified in two ways: in terms of the jobs they create, and the end product they will produce. However, this overlooks the many alternative ways in which private individuals and businesses may have spent the money that the government instead appropriated through taxation and allocated to the project. When a private business spends money on a project, it expects a return on its investment. As such, it aims to provide a product it expects people to want or need.
However, a government agency advancing a public project doesn’t need to do this. The government can force people to pay for whatever undertaking it chooses, regardless of whether there is a real need, or whether the project is a wise solution for that need. The result of this, as Hazlitt notes, is that projects are created for their own sake, for the activity and job creation that follows, not to solve an actual need. Such a project does not deliver good value for money, as the motivation is not to produce the best product for the cheapest price, but to create a large project involving as much activity as possible.
The comparison between CHSR and Brightline is an excellent example of Hazlitt’s observation. Both projects will, if completed, provide a useful service that will benefit many people, but CHSR will do so using an astronomical amount of money that could have been put to myriad other uses. It will succeed in its goal of creating a project to generate activity, regardless of whether it ever delivers a viable or even operational railway.
A private company considering providing a new transport option must assess demand for that new service, determine the likely revenue, and therefore how much it can afford to spend creating it. Brightline did this, planning its project with a budget proportional to demand and raising that money from investors who expect a return.
Conversely, CHSR’s budget is completely divorced from the revenues it will produce, and there is no expectation for it ever to make a profit. As such, the project is massively over-engineered, with numerous large viaducts that pass over empty desert, and several grand landmark bridges and structures designed more to look impressive than to satisfy a need. This, combined with CHSR’s promotional materials, show that the project is designed to “create” jobs and give California an impressive megaproject. In a recent press release, CHSR proudly celebrated having created 6,000 jobs for local workers—but it’s not even close to finishing the much-reduced central section of the high speed railway it’s building.
Not only does Brightline have a system moving passengers and producing revenue, but it’s also provided Miami with a shining new retail and residential development above its station in the heart of downtown. This is because private railroads rely on more than just passenger revenues to pay the bills—they also get revenue from developing the property they own. This is commonplace in Japan, where private railways build and operate shopping malls around their city center stations, with the mall and the railway both driving up each other’s revenues.
We should let businesses identify demand and satisfy it accordingly. The resulting projects will do a better job of serving actual needs, will be more numerable, and will encourage more economic growth to fund further projects in the future. Private projects may not create as many jobs in the short term as public ones, but they create a far more prosperous economy in the long run. Brightline is now planning another railway to span the 270 miles between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Let’s see how quickly it will deliver a completed project compared to CHSR, with the latter’s fourteen-year head start.
CHSR exemplifies what happens when the government manages a major project—delays, budget overruns, and needless expenditure. Brightline shows what is possible when a private business is in control. Sadly, America’s original railroads were driven out of business by government-funded roads and airports (many of which are now in dire need of repair). Let’s hope Brightline is the first of a new generation of private rail projects that will reintroduce some entrepreneurial spirit into the transportation industry in the United States.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2022/03/15/florida-company-california-brightline/?omhide=true
******************************************The latest item on America’s culture wars menu is ... chocolate milk
Washington: Chocolate milk has become the latest American culture war battleground, as debate rages over the dairy drink’s place on school cafeteria menus.
After divisions over cancel culture in universities, book censorship in schools, and critical race theory in the classroom, students’ diets have become a political pressure point, pitting Democrats against Republicans, the dairy industry against vegans, and mums and dads against education authorities.
The epicentre of the food culture wars is New York City, where health-conscious mayor Eric Adams wants chocolate milk scrapped in schools because of its sugar content, and has previously posted instructional videos urging parents to give their children more water instead.
“Should we have chocolate, high-sugar milk in our schools?” Adams, a Democrat, mused in January after being elected to City Hall.
“Now, I’m not going to become nanny mayor. But we do need to have our children have options.”
Chocolate milk has been a bugbear for Adams, a self-declared “imperfect vegan” who sometimes eats fish but never dairy.
In an instructional video posted in 2019 when he was New York’s Brooklyn borough president, Adams backed a Department of Education proposal to ban the drink from schools, telling his community, “instead of serving our children beverages that set them up for a lifetime of health problems, we should be encouraging them to drink more water”.
Three years later – and now with the power to make the city’s policies – his office has not ruled out revisiting the idea of a chocolate milk ban, sparking concern among New York farmers.
Parental choice is a dominant theme in this year’s midterm elections, so some members of Congress have thrown their weight behind proposed new laws to stop school authorities from banning flavoured milk.
Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik, an ally of former president Donald Trump, has introduced a bill that would require all schools participating in the National School Lunch Program to offer students at least one flavoured milk option or risk losing federal funding.
“Instead of taking away milk choices from students, my bill will give them better access to essential dairy nutrients critical for their development,” Stefanik said in a statement. “Let our New York students drink chocolate milk!”
The lunch program provides low-cost or free lunches to about 30 million American children. Stefanik said her legislation, known as the Protecting School Milk Choices Act, would preserve the right of students to have chocolate milk while also protecting dairy farmers from future bans in New York, which is one of the largest dairy states in the nation.
Republicans don’t have the majority in the House of Representatives, and therefore any bill put forward by the party’s members would require Democrat support.
However, a bipartisan congressional group of New York politicians also wrote to Adams, urging the mayor to keep chocolate milk in New York school cafeterias and warning that “for many NYC families, the meals children receive in schools are their only source of many recommended nutrients”.
While the congressional group argues, alongside America’s dairy industry, that low-fat flavoured milk increases school meal participation and gives children important nutrients, vegans and health professionals strongly disagree about the claimed benefits.
“Cow’s milk is already high in natural sugar. In fact, it has 8½ times more sugar than soy milk. So adding further sugar to give to children is completely irresponsible, given the epidemics of obesity and type 2 diabetes,” said Josh Cullimore, the director of preventative medicine at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which promotes a plant-based diet.
“Dairy products are also the No.1 source of saturated fat in the US diet, which is known to cause heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease.”
Racial inequality further animates the debate because far more African Americans are lactose intolerant than white children.
Former Olympic cyclist Dotsie Bausch, co-founder of the anti-dairy lobby group Switch4Good, presented this argument to members of Congress during a trip to Washington last week when she lobbied for subsidised soy milk in schools. At present, students who do not want a dairy milk product as part of their lunch must have a note from their doctor or a parent.
The chocolate milk debate is only one of the politically heated disputes about parental rights in the lead up to the midterms.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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