In the Washington Post today:
* An opinion piece by a famous female swimmer making the case that it's simply unfair for women to compete with women who used to be men (at least if they went through puberty). The advantages are not reversed by the subsequent lack of testosterone. An extract:
To be clear, trans women are women. Full stop. We must also be clear that trans women who have gone through male puberty acquire physical advantages female puberty does not provide: More red blood cells store and use oxygen more efficiently. Wider shoulders mean a leverage advantage, and narrower hips make for more efficient movement dynamics. Longer legs and arms, bigger hands and feet, can more easily handle a ball or cover a field.
A transgender woman who has transitioned from a testosterone-driven to an estrogen-driven system loses speed and muscle mass, yes, but puberty’s “legacy advantages” do not change with a new hormonal profile. Simply reaching an authority’s acceptable testosterone level should not qualify a trans woman to compete in the female category as currently designed. The physical disparity remains too great for true equal performance potential.
The comments following contains some of this ilk:
But by far the majority are actually on the author's side (she suggests there probably is no solution other than to have trans compete against trans - or men if they want.). Many also have a problem with the line "trans women are women. Full stop."
So my point is - there is some identity politics nuttniness (no recognition of reality) on display in comments, by people who insist there is no problem. But there's not that many, and do those who do think this way affect the country much? No.
* An article by Philip Bump noting the still extraordinarily high numbers of Republicans who are in the Trump fantasy land that he actually won the last election. And this is by Pew Research polling, which I think has some credibility:
Pew found that only about 1 in 3 Republicans think Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and only about 14 percent of them say he definitely won, which he did. In other words, six out of every seven Republicans are unwilling to say that Biden definitely won. Instead, a third say Trump probably won — somehow — and almost another third say Trump definitely won. By now, this position is simply an act of faith, a rejection of all available evidence in deference to a feeling. It’s still remarkable in scale.
The polling also found that people whose views were furthest from reality on the results of the 2020 election were also those most eager to downplay what occurred at the Capitol. For example, 7 in 10 Republicans who say Trump probably won in 2020 think that too much attention has been paid to Jan. 6. That position was held by 9 in 10 of those who say Trump definitely won....
To believe that Trump won in 2020 is to reject concrete evidence that he didn’t. It’s to dismiss as unimportant or tainted any objective analysis to the contrary. Even allowing for the fact that members of the Jan. 6 committee would broadly be pleased to be able to implicate Trump more directly in the day’s events, it’s likely that any examination of the day would be treated with skepticism by a group that is defined by its skepticism about observable reality.
But then we factor in that original point: Most of those who think Trump probably won in 2020 also think he bears no responsibility for the violence and destruction on Jan. 6.
Some of this is probably a function of partisan flag-waving, a rejection of the mainstream media’s (accurate) description of events in a way that casts Trump in a negative light. But some of it is also clearly true belief, a sincere insistence that Trump did win and that the violence wasn’t his fault. Millions of Americans want to believe that’s true, and so some do.
This is a rejection of reality by a very high proportion of the American electorate - and it's obviously serious in a functioning democracy when partisanship leads to fantasy beliefs that justify political violence.
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