Stephanie Turner, 31 [above, kneeling] is the latest athlete to garner praise for her “courage” in refusing to fight a male (transgender female) athlete, after taking a knee against male fencer Redmond Sullivan at a Maryland fencing tournament. Turner was suspended by officials at the USA Cherry Blossom Open on March 30^th of this year.

The Mail, extolling the “Brave fencer who refused to fight transgender rival,” quoted Turner’s views and concerns at length, highlighting her determination to “prioritize [her] own physical safety and the safety of other women and girls” and reporting her anger that “we’re going along with somebody else’s fantasy.” Turning Point USA called Turner a “hero,” citing Riley Gaines’ endorsement of her refusal as “Amazing.” The Telegraph hailed her action as “a protest of quiet dignity.”

Many who supported Turner took it further, making comparisons between “strong women” and “weak men.” “This is what true strength looks like as a woman!” enthused one commentator on Instagram. “Stephanie Turner is a strong woman” said one X user. “Stephanie Turner Became More Powerful Than Any Male When She Took a Knee,” gushed a Substack writer. Paul Batura wrote for the Daily Citizen that “It’s Weak Men Who Try to Compete Against Strong Women.” And so on.

Even in a physical contest where the whole point is that men are, on average, much stronger than women, the issue is framed as a demonstration of women’s superior strength. Men are weak for wanting to compete against women, while women are strong for recognizing men’s greater strength.

This type of strained rhetoric is almost inevitable, and it highlights the heads-you-win, tails-I-lose aporia that gender ideology has created for men and women alike, with consequences extending far beyond the sporting arena.

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Feminist and gender ideologies have always appealed to women (and continue to appeal) with the promise that women are strong and should be applauded for competing with and winning against men. Any woman who does so is almost automatically granted elevated status in our culture, praised for her guts, stamina, and even “balls.” Women who “break [gender] barriers” enter a special pantheon of heroines. Cartoons and action-movies are filled with super-athletic females who successfully battle all manner of male antagonists.

Feminists were, for a long time, extremely enthusiastic about this view of things. It was radical feminist Kate Millett, author of feminism’s bible Sexual Politics (1970), who praised sexologist John Money for experiments allegedly showing that gender had little or nothing to do with biological sex. She declared approvingly that “In the absence of complete evidence, I agree in general with Money and the Hampsons who show in their large series of intersexed patients that gender role is determined by postnatal forces, regardless of the anatomy and physiology of the external genitalia” (p. 30).

Many other feminists similarly emphasized gender’s social character and declared transgenderism a form of sexual liberation for women, with feminist writer Jacqueline Rose pronouncing in an essay for The New Statesman that “The gender binary is false” and that “Challenging the binary by transitioning becomes one of the most imaginative leaps in modern society.”

Feminist sociologists Judith Lorber and Patricia Martin argued extensively in “The Socially Constructed Body” (see especially the gob-smacking pp. 258-261) that women would at last pass men in many traditional sports when they truly believed they could, for “If members of society are told repeatedly that women’s bodily limitations prevent them from doing sports as well as men, they come to believe it […].” Lorber and Martin lamented that opportunities were so rare for men and women to compete directly with one another (strongly implying that the patriarchy kept men and women apart so that women couldn’t judge for themselves), and they looked forward to a feminist future in which women could at last demonstrate their true physical capabilities.

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From the first, the machinery of this kind of celebration backed men into an impossible corner. Most men have always known that women are not as strong as they; few men want to compete against a woman in sport or elsewhere. Yet no man dared gainsay the right of any woman to show herself equal to or better than a man if she could, whatever the context. If a man refused to compete with a woman, to welcome her into his club, to hire her into his firm, to respect her in any athletic endeavor—then he was a Neanderthal and a misogynist who should be shamed, shouted down, and immediately dismissed from his job.

But a man who competes with a woman, or treats her as he would treat a man, is often in trouble too, as we are seeing now. Yes, a woman was just as good as a man, our culture has insisted, but always and only on the woman’s terms. Sometimes the woman did not wish to be treated as an equal or a competitor, and that too was her right. Men had no say in the matter.

Over the years, there have been cases in which women didn’t like the culture men had created in their places of business; didn’t like male jokes, male camaraderie, male means of competition, or male methods of evaluation. Some women felt harassed, disrespected, held to an unreasonable standard, judged too harshly, given inadequate mentoring, singled out, left too much alone, treated cruelly, looked down upon, forced to behave in ways they didn’t prefer.

In general, women like competing against men and getting praise for it, but they don’t like losing to men.

Some women have turned in fury on the men who took the feminists at their word, preposterously claiming, as did “gender critical” (i.e. anti-trans) feminist journalist and former academic Helen Joyce in her Quillette essay “The New Patriarchy: How Trans Radicalism Hurts Women, Children, and Trans People Themselves” (2018), that trans women exemplify the latest form of the patriarchy that seeks to subjugate women, usurping their bodies and silencing their voices.

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Many men, keen to avoid the gender wars they’d never wanted to fight in the first place, have felt understandably flummoxed and on the defensive. Which is it? Are women equal to men in all areas of endeavor, or not? Should women be kept out of direct competitions, or encouraged to show their mettle? Should men champion male-female sameness, or respect male-female difference?

In some once-exclusively-male areas, elaborate protocols have had to be worked out to protect women from feeling as if they have been beaten by men, while also protecting them from the knowledge that they were being protected.

When Sarah Fuller [above], a 21-year-old soccer player at Vanderbilt University, was brought on in 2020 to kick off the second half of a (male) college football game for the Vanderbilt Commodores, who were losing to the Missouri Tigers, officials pretended that the kick, which travelled perhaps 20 yards in the air and dribbled another 10 towards the sideline, was an awe-inspiring demonstration of female strength. (Fuller hustled off the field immediately so as not to face any tackles.) At this point, the gender fantasy was that women were fully capable of competing with men even in contests where male speed, agility, and strength were glaringly superior. Sports pundits and other athletes had to hide the reality of female weakness and vulnerability.

It is a story all too familiar for men in fields that have recently been forced to admit women. Some of the problems were detailed by an anonymous contributor, a military sergeant, to my book Sons of Feminism: Men Have Their Say (2018). Not only have military units in various Anglophone countries bent over backward to admit women and help them pass their training programs, including by dramatically lowering physical standards, but they hide the reality from the public and even from the women themselves, quickly promoting the women to high-profile positions where mass media attention can showcase alleged female achievement. Despite the acclaim, women’s lesser physical strength impacts everything from routine tasks to advanced training exercises.

Men in positions of leadership are well aware that failure to offer kid-glove treatment can result in career-imperiling complaints by the women. There is also a significant cost in money, time, and energy to provide special facilities, more flexible hours, gender equity oversight by designated staff, compulsory feminist training programs, and female-focused networking and career opportunities not available to the military men.

How many women have come forward to call out these inequities?

The firefighting service offers other examples. Under pressure from politicians, bureaucrats, and advocacy groups, men have had little choice but to participate in recruiting women, training women, and in redesigning firefighting manuals, equipment and facilities at an extraordinary cost to taxpayers.

“Women Firefighters: The Gender Boondoggle” (2008), an investigative essay by law and crime reporter Christine Pelisek, detailed the effort, long before the Los Angeles fires, to get women into frontline and command firefighting positions in that city, including the fast-tracking of women through the ranks and the lowering of standards (at one point, the LA Fire Department had a no-fail policy for female recruits in training).

For their still-not-sufficient efforts, many of the fire chiefs and captains were excoriated as sexists. Of the small number of women successfully brought into the departments, many bailed out on extended stress and injury leave.

The cost to male morale, Pelisek demonstrated, was incalculable. As Captain Frank Lima commented in interview for that essay, “It is hard to go into a fire with someone when you know from drilling she can’t lift the ladder.” Work-arounds to accommodate weaker women often involved men doing double-duty, making the fire teams less efficient. Captains who documented female trainees’ lack of strength or pushed them to be better found themselves facing lawsuits for sexual harassment, sex discrimination, or hostile working environments. Pelisek detailed a plethora of injury suits and harassment claims, noting that while less than 3 percent of Los Angeles city fire personnel were women at the time of her investigation, “that tiny group accounted for 56 percent of the often multimillion-dollar lawsuits against the LAFD between 1996 and 2005.”

Clearly, it’s not just in the boxing ring, the sports field or on the fencing mat that women’s inferior physical capacity results in damage to female bodies. A 2015 study by the United States Marine Corps was explicit: in addition to under-performing their male colleagues in most tasks, including the handling of weaponry and evacuation of casualties, female trainees were injured at more than six times the rate of their male counterparts. As the report stated bluntly, “The well documented comparative disadvantage in upper and lower body strength resulted in higher fatigue levels of most women, which contributed to greater incidents of overuse injuries such as stress fractures.”

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Who should be blamed for allowing and encouraging women into professions where they are hurt and incapacitated at such a high rate? Whose “fantasy,” to echo Stephanie Turner, are we accommodating here? And where are the strong women standing up for the safety of women and girls, telling them not to go into policing, the Secret Service, the military, the air force, and all the other professions in which women’s lesser capacities mean they are physically and mentally vulnerable? If such protesting women exist, they are not being promoted in mainstream or any other media.

One is tempted to conclude that on the paramount issue of sex differences, women’s much-touted concern for women’s safety, while perhaps genuine, is decidedly secondary to other, often more seductive, considerations. These include a natural dislike of losing, self-righteous indignation at men, an ingrained consciousness of inferiority that manifests in (tearful) accusation, and enjoyment of applause-garnering attention.

None of those necessarily applies to fencer Stephanie Turner, who seems to have acted on the basis of a sincerely-held and faith-based principle. In general, however, there is something highly annoying about the women who now evoke male-female biological differences as if asserting a reality that men have tried to suppress. I nearly spat out my tea when I read afore-mentioned feminist activist Helen Joyce’s claim that feminism springs from the recognition that “women are oppressed because they are physically weaker than men.” On the contrary, feminist women from Virginia Woolf and Simone De Beauvoir to Judith Butler and Jacqueline Rose did not make that argument: they claimed, instead, that the category woman is socially created through the oppression of some beings perceived as weaker, with women’s weakness the result, not the cause, of patriarchal domination.

Anti-trans feminist arguments are straight-up hypocritical, painting women once again as heroic victims resisting male tyranny. But one can’t help noticing that all they seem to want is to get men out of arenas and competitions where women do not want them. I’ve yet to encounter a feminist group, or any group at all, raising awareness about the harms to both women and men of women’s entry into formerly male domains where male strengths are required.

Alas, it’s easy for women to get fired up about a situation in which they can claim an unfair disadvantage. That will always bring them out to protest, with a lot of men in support. It’s not so straightforward when the situation involves women’s refusal to admit their own limitations or to take responsibility for causing harm to others. If an influential women’s group ever comes clean about the widespread reality and ramifications of female biology, more power to them. Until then, my enthusiasm for women like fencer Stephanie Turner will remain decidedly lukewarm.