Growing up in our post-third-wave feminism world, I always assumed egalitarians wanted to empower women. But as I witness male athletes celebrated for their participation in competitive women’s sports, I see nothing more destructive to egalitarianism than how women are being affected by this overt psychological warfare. Perhaps there is no literal cabal guiding these tactical non-combat techniques, but the mass-scale demoralization that’s taking place in America is leaving women feeling consistently and systematically undermined.
What’s going on in America isn’t de jure psychological warfare, such as Vlad the Impaler parading through streets with victims pierced by vertical poles or the Third Reich’s use of Nazi rallies or aggressive propaganda — both intended to intimidate potential enemies. No, in America, common sense is now lost in the shuffle as we allow de facto psychological warfare to demoralize half of the population and, consequently, completely downgrade women’s interests as a priority.
By fostering an environment where women must lower their defenses, allow men to infiltrate their once-sacred single-sex facilities, and be gaslit into affirming the false claim that there are no legitimate differences between the two sexes, there is now a war of nerves being fought by unwilling soldiers.
We know that hormone therapy through testosterone suppression cannot eliminate the inherent athletic advantage that males have over females, so what good does it serve to spread that lie otherwise? As it stands, the sheer fact that men typically have better aerobic capacity, greater bone mass, and stronger, faster muscles could lead a woman to feel like she’s just cursed as the subordinate sex. But by embracing our differences and understanding the uniquely feminine roles we are often perfectly matched to fill, we’re likely to instead cultivate a self-confident generation of women.
One consequence of coddling and the overarching “self-esteem” movement that has permeated parenting methods and educational institutions alike is that, through lavish praise and peppering children with unearned or over-inflated compliments, studies show we risk them actually feeling more insecure and emptier inside.
Female athletes are heroines in their own rights, like track champion and Southern Utah University alum Linnea Saltz, who would wake up before dawn to get critical practice time in ahead of work and then night classes — but was sidelined in competition by a transgender-identified athlete who snagged first place for the indoor mile.
“As all of these women are putting everything that they have on the line to go ahead and race their best time of the season as fast as they can,” Saltz told Independent Women’s Forum, “the person that’s beating them is being told to slow down.”
How is an athlete supposed to feel out on the track when a male is gaining ground on her, pulls ahead, and then she overhears that male’s coach from the sidelines telling him he needs to slow down? Is that not textbook demoralization?
When fellow track champion and Southern Utah State University alum Madisan DeBos was forced to compete against the same individual, she recounted that “at that point, you kind of know that you’re racing for second.” What good does it do to set women up for what are essentially Sisyphean tasks that sow division between the sexes through experienced injustice?
In his soul-stirring book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Holocaust survivor and founder of logotherapy Viktor Frankl noted that social injustices can cause more pain than physical suffering because of the frustration that builds up when our principles and values are under siege.
Our trust in humanity understandably erodes when we watch the very systems we once thought were in place to safeguard equality, mutual respect, and coexistence fail. What’s more, as part of the female sex, we’re actually biologically inclined to experience more intense neurological reactions toward injustice than our male counterparts.
But even if we allow ourselves to ruminate on injustice, battles against discriminatory policies that seek to erase women aren’t easily fought when our troops are demoralized en masse. For every brilliant, empowered woman like Riley Gaines, April Hutchinson, Taylor Silverman, and Madison Kenyon, there are countless brilliant but frightened women who have no outlet to express their disappointment as they watch opportunities fade away.
Their hearts are ill at ease over the very real possibility they, too, will be tormented as “bigoted” or “transphobic,” isolated by their peers, or driven out of the programs they worked so hard to become a part of. I would know firsthand — I’ve received hundreds of stories from them through IWF’s public storytelling drives.
Back in 1984, a former KGB agent named Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov outlined how the Soviet Union used its mind games to subvert the American tradition and undermine psyches across the United States. He explained that ideological subversion begins with demoralization and takes place out in the open, saying that “you can see it with your own eyes.”
By means of a slow, slow drip, which could take upward of 20 years, people become re-programmed and unable to assess basic truths. Following this, new ideologies and realities can rise from the ashes of the old narratives, fake news becomes normalized, and as Bezmenov put it, then “you may kiss goodbye to your freedom.”
While he was providing a warning to Americans about Soviet tactics to weaken our great nation, it’s quite evident that this exact model is now being championed by gender revolutionaries to destabilize existing institutions and the masses into re-education.
The anniversary of Title IX is now upon us. If reversed, the systematic inclusion of male-bodied athletes within women’s sports will without a doubt demoralize female athletes, many of whom have trained their entire lives. Not only will women suffer from a loss of opportunities, but their mental psyche will plummet — and the low self-esteem epidemic is already a debilitating point of vulnerability for young women.
This op-ed was published by The Federalist.
