It looks as if Megan Rapinoe has had her flash of fame. Her captaincy of a metric football team gave her a platform to engage in narcissistic anti-Americanism, but she lacked the necessary poise to be a sports heroine. While she’ll probably be given a spot among the D-list celebrities for her service to The Narrative, she’ll never really be famous.
UPDATE—Typo fixed. I hate autocorrupt.
The US team won its match with the English team 2-1 in the Women’s World Cup series.
The Brits have been having trouble with us during the month of July for the past 243 years.
I’m 5′-8″. That puts me within one standard deviation of average height for an adult American male but definitely on the low side of average. That fact causes certain limitations on me. For instance, no NBA team would consider me for a position on their roster. Indeed, even if I claimed to be transgendered, I’m still too short to make the cut on a good women’s team. OTOH, there are women’s sports where a man my size could dominate, and we’re beginning to see such men (who probably couldn’t be top-level competitors on a fair playing field) push women out of the winner’s circle. A man just won the NCAA women’s track championship.
Meanwhile, the LGBT activists are up in arms because the Trump Administration has released an updated version of an HHS regulation that recognizes the term “sex” as having a biologically defined meaning. The previous version of the regulation had been changed during the Obama administration to include “gender identity” within the mean of “sex.” This required health insurance companies to pay for transgender-specific services that had previously been considered elective or cosmetic. According to an HHS spokesman, the regulation was revised back to the old wording because “the regulation’s coverage of gender identity and termination of pregnancy was contrary to law and exceeded statutory authority, and that the rule’s harm was felt by health care providers in states across the country.”
The LGBT media is trying to spin that change as allowing hospitals to deny emergency room care and other normal medical services to transgender people. That’s nonsense. In fact, unidentified gender dysphoria can put patients at risk. According to the AP, a hospital’s treatment of a person who presented in the emergency room as an obese male as if “he” were a man resulted in a death. The “man” was pregnant, and the stomach pains were labor pains. Because proper intervention was delayed, the baby died.
People are entitled to live their lives as they wish so long as they don’t adversely impact others. If I wanted to self-identify as a 6′-3″ female basketball center, the world should let me so long as my rejection of Reality doesn’t cause a problem for someone else. But world should not be compelled to humor my fantasy. And the taxpayers certainly shouldn’t subsidize it.
LBGT people should be treated fairly and with the personal dignity all humans deserve. However, the mutual tolerance we should have for one another doesn’t change the stubborn facts of biology. I have a Y-chromosome. I’m male, and barring genetic abnormalities, so is everyone else with a Y-chromosome.
A NBC News report on transgender athletes contains this statement—
“There’s no simple or even complex biological test you can apply that tells you who’s a man and who’s a woman,” Roger Pielke Jr., director of the Sports Governance Center at the University of Colorado, said.
The Washington Times reports that Terry Miller of Bloomfield High has set a Connecticut girls’ state indoor record of 6.95 seconds in the 55 m sprint. Second place in the event was taken by Andraya Yearwood. Both Miller and Yearwood have Y-chromosomes. Third place in the event was taken by a girl.
I wonder if athletes such as Miller and Yearwood are afraid to compete on a level playing field or if they want to take advantage of weaker competitors or if I should embrace the Power Of And in such cases.
… I remember watching a Boston Braves game on TV, but that shouldn’t be surprising because today is my 71st birthday.
While many companies benefit from the political agendas of one side or the other, most try to appear to be more-or-less neutral. That’s a reasonable strategy aimed at avoiding upsetting what could turn out to be a large group of customers. Nike has taken sides, most visibly with their selection of Colin Kaepernick as the face of the next “Just Do It” campaign.
Nike is politically involved in other ways. The Oregonian reports that Nike has given $25,000 to the reelection campaign of Oregon Governor Kate Brown (D).
Nike is poised for an unusual level of involvement in the November election. In July, the company poured $100,000 into the Common Good Fund, a new political action committee headed by Julia Brim-Edwards, Nike’s senior director of government and public affairs.
That contribution came days after Brown met with Brim-Edwards and other representatives of major Oregon-based companies. It also was a couple days before the deadline to turn in signatures to qualify initiatives for the November ballot. Brown’s campaign told Oregon Public Broadcasting the governor helped negotiate a deal to keep a public employee union-backed corporate transparency measure off the ballot. If passed, it would have required Nike and other large companies to disclose sensitive tax details.
Get Woke, Go Broke meets Quid Pro Quo? Or a belief that wokeness confers the right to special treatment? Or stupid marketing and plain-old greed?
Whatever.
I’m wearing a pair of Reeboks.
