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Recently, I attended a rally for National Women’s Sports Week. The event featured female athletes who competed against male-bodied athletes who had decided to become transgenders.

 The women’s stories were heart-rending, even outrageous:

The women all blamed President Biden for their predicament. Brenda Pacheco’s comment was the most pointed: “I am a minority gay woman, so, no one has the right to call me transphobic or a racist bigot. There is a very sick zeitgeist when obliterating an entire sex from sports is sanctioned by the Democrat party, made law by the President, and cheered by a sycophantic Leftist base.”

Referring to the Biden administration’s neglect of the science of biological sex differences, one Montana mother asked plaintively, “why don’t we have to go with the science on this issue?”

This question can be answered in two words: Karl Marx. Karl Marx viewed the entirety of social relationships through the lens of social conflict. His crowning academic contribution, known as Conflict Theory, holds that society is in a state of perpetual conflict because of competition for limited resources.

Although Marxism is best known for its focus on economic relationships, later iterations of Conflict Theory probed conflict between various racial, ethnic, and religious groups. Marxists were especially drawn to relationships between men and women, viewing women as doubly exploited by capitalism and by the nuclear family.

Marxists are not content to be mere arm-chair academics. They actively seek to sow social discord. In the United States, the best example is the Violence Against Women Act, which glosses over the inconvenient truth that each year, women are more likely to engage in partner violence than men, according to the Centers for Disease Control (Tables 9 and 11). But VAWA advocates dishonestly portray men as perpetrators and women as victims.

So promoting the participation of male-at-birth transgenders in women’s sports has become the latest tactic to intensify the decades-long War of the Sexes.

How did this all come to pass?

On January 21, 2021, newly minted President Biden issued an Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation. The policy stated, “It is the policy of my Administration to prevent and combat discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation.” This new policy would soon wreak havoc on women’s sports.

At that point in time, transgenders in women’s sports were considered a novelty. Except in Connecticut, where a lawsuit had been filed the previous year seeking to ban two transgender sprinters, Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood, who together had won 15 girls state championship races.

Then In March 2022, the political zeitgeist reversed course.

That’s when Lia Thomas of the University of Pennsylvania won the women’s 500-yard freestyle event, becoming the first transgender Division I champion in NCAA history. Americans were appalled to see Thomas celebrating the victory, with elongated and muscular arms raised in triumph over his diminutive female rivals.

Almost overnight, transgenders in women’s sports became a flashpoint of political debate. Numerous organizations began to issue statements and circulate petitions. The Independent Women’s Forum issued a report documenting the numerous physical advantages of transgender athletes over biological females.

But ideologues are flat-footed when it comes to accommodating to new political realities. Like religious zealots, they plod ahead, confident that their deeply held belief will eventually prevail.

So on June 23, the Biden administration decided to stay the course and issued its new Title IX plan. The draft policy seeks to expand the definition of “sex” to include “sex stereotypes, sex characteristics, pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity.”

In response, Rep. Steve Scalise and Rep. Debbie Lesko called out the cluelessness of the Biden proposal: “It is shameful that Democrats’ divisive politics and radical gender ideology ignore basic science and are destroying women’s sports that Title IX was created to protect.”

Which raises the question, How many erstwhile liberals will decide to flee the Democrat fold as a result of Biden’s gender policy?

Edward E. Bartlett is a former university professor, and worked for 17 years for the Department of Health and Human Services.

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