Readers will, I think, recall Mr Sasha Yates, the cross-dressing high-school sports coach with an interest in teenage girls’ panties.

The chap so loudly championed by ladies of a progressive bent, despite numerous complaints regarding Mr Yates’ inappropriate behaviour.

Progressive ladies who denounced the “hate” and “transphobia” of those expressing concerns, while ensuring that Mr Yates retained his position, and his access to the girls’ changing rooms, where he paraded around in his own bra and panties, much to the girls’ discomfort, and while asking those teenage girls about their underwear and menstrual cycles.

Progressive ladies who merrily elevated themselves with the airing of modish views, their ostentatious displays of compassion and inclusivity, while in effect screwing over the schoolgirls being harassed by a cross-dressing creep.

Girls whose discomfort and polite complaints – their failure to be progressive – rendered them low-status. Beings of no consequence.

In case you’re unsure, Mr Yates is the strapping madam in the denim.

Well, readers, I have news.

Following the renewal of his employment contract, reported previously, Mr Yates has since resigned, citing “ongoing health reasons.” Which, as the ladies at Reduxx reveal, is something of a euphemism, another coy dishonesty:

I’ll spare you the more graphic details, but in one of the feats of erotica seemingly shared with the world, Mr Yates asks the question every parent hopes to hear from someone educating their children:

At risk of sounding stuffy and uptight, it occurs to me that if you’re employed as a sports coach at a school, despite perving on adolescent girls, and your home-made porno videos, in which you smoke meth, can easily be found by parents, and presumably by students, this is not an ideal situation.

And because, clearly, we need more irony, there’s this detail regarding the school district’s original investigation:

Wait for it.

You may now resume your humdrum, non-cross-dressing lives.

So, I’ve returned from my travels and I have questions. Among them, why is a planet-wide celebration of athleticism and uncommon sporting prowess being introduced with yet another tedious display of cross-dressing, oddly selective sacrilege, and self-satisfied obesity?

Perhaps I’m missing something. By all means, illuminate me in the comments.

Update, via the comments, where dicentra adds,

I was struck more by the tackiness, the tawdriness of the thing. It just looked so inapt, so adolescent and low-rent. Hackneyed to the point of anachronism. It occurred to me that as a snapshot of a collective cultural psyche, a statement of where we are, or where Our Betters are. it doesn’t instil any great confidence. Or – what’s the word? – oh yes, pride.

Sort of,

I suppose the gender-bending and drag bacchanalia could be construed as some kind of comment on the current Olympic rules regarding who may compete in women’s events – i.e., women, not men. At least, not men who have gone through puberty. So, some men. But not as many as some activists and “allies” might wish. Say, ostentatiously “queer” artistic directors of Olympic opening ceremonies. Maybe even this small concession to physical reality – that men and women are different – was deemed a provocation, an outrage, and a basis for retaliation. As if not being allowed to cheat were a form of oppression.

It’s just a thought. Though not, I think, a wildly implausible one.

Also, open thread.

Scrolling through X, formerly Twitter, two items caught my eye. The first, from the publication laughingly referred to as Scientific American, where we are told, in no uncertain terms:

I’ll give you a minute to process that. Let it roll around your mind. And do note the loaded, rather question-begging word inequity.

The second item, some terribly modern sporting news:

A trans-identified male student seized the title of "Fastest Sophomore Girl" at a cross country championship in Maine this past weekend.

Soren Stark-Chessa, who beat the female racers by 90 seconds, previously ranked 172nd in the Freshman Boys category.https://t.co/xiwRuPJI2J

— REDUXX (@ReduxxMag) October 23, 2023

In videos of the race, several spectators can be heard shouting, not without cause, “Way to cheat, bro.”

In sports that are dependent on skills other than speed, endurance, and raw power – say, archery or shooting – the difference in peak male and female performance may be negligible. But where such things are decisive – as in most sports – to not concede the obvious requires a feat of ideological contortion – a kind of learned stupidity.

And as seen by the inclusion and near-inevitable triumph of Mr Stark-Chessa, our “Fastest Sophomore Girl,” pretending at an Olympic level is very much in fashion.

See also:

As performance coach Steve Magness notes here,

And cheating, as seen above, would presumably become an applauded norm. Or a heckled farce. I suppose it could go either way:

But hey, pride.

It turns out that those inherent biological differences are quite important. In terms of elite sprinting and endurance running, they result in a male advantage of around ten or twelve percent. Ditto cycling, swimming, high-jumping, skating, and many other sports, where performance differences by sex range from around five percent to, in long-jumping, around twenty.

For elite male and female weightlifters – in the same weight class – the difference in performance is around thirty percent. It’s also worth noting that men have greater grip strength than similarly trained women, about sixty percent more, and have vastly greater punching ability – more than double.

As Mr Magness adds here,

But as we’ve seen – and seen quite vividly – we mustn’t expect too much from the current, scrupulously woke, editor-in-chief of Scientific American.

Updated via the comments.

A tale of a girls’ tennis team, a locker room, and a high-school hiring dispute.

First, the view from afar, all rather fragrant and elevated:

And,

The words “transphobia” and “hate” were of course deployed.

And now the view from close quarters:

See? All totally innocent and above-board. Not weird or creepy at all. Oh, and then there was the time Mr Yates followed a sixteen-year-old girl – a girl he wasn’t coaching – into the girls’ bathroom, otherwise unoccupied, and attempted to strike up a random conversation, resulting in the girl’s alarm and some hurried texting.

The reprimand mentioned above – or rather, reprimands, because, well, what’s behaviour without a pattern? – did not seem to deter Mr Yates. Nor did the provision of private bathroom and changing facilities, typically used by sports officials, including coaches. Direct appeals from the girls also failed to discourage him from parading around their locker room in a bra-and-panties ensemble and various states of undress. Such that the girls were left in little doubt that their cross-dressing coach was, as one board member put it, “still fully a man.” And all while seeking out details of the girls’ menstruation cycles and their preferences in underwear.

Indeed, when subsequently challenged, Mr Yates, seen here, invoked “discrimination” and insisted that he is entitled to use “any bathroom.” The school is currently weighing the views of parents against the prospect of legal action and accusations of “transphobia,” with another meeting on the matter scheduled for September. Mr Yates is, he says, “completely overwhelmed with how the community is coming out and supporting me.”

At which point, readers may wonder whether such overwhelming support, largely from progressive women, is actually part of the problem.

Above, Mr Yates, being supported.

Update, via the comments, where Nikw211 adds,

Well, one might think so. And yet here we are.

Still, it’s interesting to see how Mr Yates’ supporters – again, largely progressive women – will merrily elevate themselves with the airing of modish views, their displays of compassion and inclusivity, while in effect screwing over the girls. Girls, who, by disapproving, even politely, become low-status.

Update 2:

A decision has been reached regarding the future of Mr Yates’ teaching career. And by extension, his workplace interest in the panties of young girls. See if you can guess which way it went.

Update 3:

The further adventures of our strapping madam.

Where, for instance, pst314 and Mr Muldoon point us to an “analysis” piece in Scientific American, in which we’re urged to fret about “the violence Black men experience in [American] football,” and in which we’re told that the physicality of the sport “disproportionately affects black men.” This is framed in the article so as to imply some systemic racial wrongdoing – “anti-Black practices” that are “inescapable” – rather than, say, being an unremarkable reflection of the sport’s demographics, in which, at professional levels, black players are a majority.

Or to put it another, no less scientific, way – the risk of injury while playing a contact sport disproportionately affects those who actually play it.

No evidence is offered, at all, to establish that injuries are more frequent among black players compared to their white peers – which is pretty much the article’s premise – or to support the conceit that any such disparity, should it exist, must be driven by racism. And yet we’re told, with an air of satisfaction,

Albeit a plantation with fan mail, lucrative endorsements, and an average salary of around $2.7 million.

Jonathan Kay on woke mysticism and the latest must-have identity niche:  

[O]ne of the main themes of the 32-page document is that the task of defining the Two-Spirit concept is (quite literally) beyond the powers of Western language and epistemology. And in any case, the category is almost completely open-ended: The act of proclaiming oneself Two-Spirited could be a statement about one’s gender, or sexual orientation, or both, or neither. Or 2S can be a statement about one’s politics, spirituality, or simply one’s desire to present as “anti-colonial.” […]

While the authors of the report were careful to source their work to Indigenous writers and interviewees, it’s interesting to note that all of the listed societal roles attributed to ancient Two-Spirited people align uncannily with the avant-garde outlook of a white 2022-era environmentalist who’s embraced intersectional conceptions of gender… We are told no fewer than nine times, for instance, that the authors are following an “anti-oppressive” approach. Colonialism is denounced more than a dozen times, including in its “heteronormative” (three times) variant.

Needless to say, the whole thing is a bit of a two-legged stool and, shall we say, not entirely consonant with anthropological evidence.

Libby Emmons on cheated female athletes and transgender overreach:

And in sports news:

An adult biological male who identifies as a woman edged out a 13-year-old girl to take first place in a women’s skateboarding contest held in New York Saturday.

Sometimes reality is a little too on-the-nose.

Update, via the comments, where Melofon adds,

Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire takes a brave stand in favour of … the tradition and competitive integrity of the sport of women’s skateboarding. Opening itself up to the (correct) rebuttal that it has no interest in skateboarding or women in skateboarding, and is only covering it to pick on the tranny.

Well, I doubt that ladies’ skateboarding is a regular topic of conversation at the Daily Wire, or among its readers, but the particulars of the sport are not the thing that’s most interesting. There is a wider context, of which the above is very much part. I would guess that readers are more likely to be interested in the pretence that unwell men can become women, seemingly by dint of wishing, and are therefore to be admitted, unopposed, into women’s sports and women’s intimate spaces. The Daily Wire’s readers may even regard this trend, correctly, as pretentious, unrealistic, and unhappy in its implications.

To register this phenomenon – and its wide and rapid spread – as noteworthy is rather more than, as Melofon puts it, picking on the tranny.

More details of the skateboarding saga can be found here.

Readers will note that several wins by dysmorphic men have occurred in women’s skateboarding, and that female players who aren’t entirely happy with this arrangement find themselves assailed by trans activists for daring to complain. Again, the issue isn’t ladies’ skateboarding as such, but rather the ongoing and widespread efforts to normalise something that’s quite odd, one might say surreal, and often unjust.

If another example is required, one that shows, quite vividly, just how awry things can get…

Ben Sixsmith on the blurring of identity and mental illness: 

Of course, it is good to understand the choices people make. But is it always necessary to respect those choices? Some people who have sought out castration claim to be much happier and calmer for it. Yet auto-castration is well-known to be a sign of chronic paranoid schizophrenia. One study in the Journal of Sexual Medicine suggested that in others, the desire to castrate themselves was correlated with “abuse sustained during childhood, including parental threats of castration” and “religious condemnation of sexuality,” among other things. Would anyone insist that there are not healthier means of dealing with such traumas?

Leor Sapir on transgender swimmer Lia Thomas – and when politeness becomes unhinged: 

The Human Rights Campaign warns that “contrasting transgender people with ‘real’ or ‘biological’ men and women is a false comparison” that “can contribute to the inaccurate perception that transgender people are being deceptive or less than equal, when, in fact, they are being authentic and courageous.” This is a strawman wrapped in a non sequitur. Critics of gender self-identification do not argue that people like Thomas are “being deceptive,” but rather that they are themselves deceived. HRC’s use of “authentic” here really means “sincere”: transgender women are being sincere, not deceptive, when they say they have a strong inner sense of being a woman. But that sincerity is irrelevant unless one first assumes that what makes a belief true is the fact that it is sincerely held, rather than its correspondence to objective reality.

Emil Kirkegaard on mental health and political leanings: 

Back in May 2020, I published a paper provocatively titled Mental Illness and the Left. It was based on the common observation (stereotype!) that conservatives seem less prone to mental illness… Since my study was published, replications have come out. The fact that this replicates is not at all surprising because the samples were very large, representative, and results not p-hacked and with tiny p values. Here’s an overview of recent replications…

Statistical chomping ensues. And I’ll leave these items here for no reason whatsoever.

Cyclists and the cycling industry must come to terms with the reality that cycling is a powerful narrator in the power of whiteness that feeds anti-Blackness.

Via Instapundit, news from the frontier of woke sports, where “the power of whiteness within cycling” is, we’re assured, a thing that exists:

It’s time for cycling to think beyond white fragility, white privilege, implicit bias, and microaggressions, and begin to think about its root cause. Cycling must reject interventions that continue to individualise anti-Black racism, and work to break down the structures that allow whiteness to retain power in the sport.

As is the custom, assertions soon pile high, albeit unsteadily, and questions are begged at a rate of knots. The “system of privileges and advantages afforded to white people” is denounced more than once, along with “the whiteness of cycling,” though, as so often, the particulars remain unobvious and unconvincing. Apparently, “white privilege” is a phenomenon to be taken as a given, always and everywhere, and in which we must believe. For instance,

In late September, many in the sport turned a blind eye when it came to light that world-champion Chloe Dygert ‘liked’ several racist and transphobic tweets.

I’m unfamiliar with Ms Dygert or her views, but the sole, supposedly damning, example of her “transphobia” is her liking of the statement “Men who identify as women are not actually women.” This does not strike me as phobic, or scandalous, or indeed inaccurate. And for a female athlete to prefer competing against other women, i.e., fairly, should not be controversial – in a sane world. As for alleged racism, the only evidence provided is the liking of a tweet that says, “White privilege doesn’t exist; good choice privilege does.” But even to dispute woke conspiracy theories is, it turns outs, itself proof of racism and a basis for “disgust,” which seems enormously convenient, for the accuser, and must save a lot of time. And so, this liking of a tweet is framed as,

an expression of the violent normality of anti-Black racism in the world.

Which is in no way hyperbolical or ludicrous, obviously.

Via Darleen, Mary Hudson on the dirty secrets of ‘progressive’ public education:

There was an ethos of hostile resistance. Those who wanted to learn were prevented from doing so. Anyone who “cooperated with the system” was bullied. No homework was done. Students said they couldn’t do it because if textbooks were found in their backpacks, the offending students would be beaten up… I tried everything imaginable to overcome student resistance. Nothing worked. At one point I rearranged the seating to enable the students who wanted to engage to come to the front of the classroom. The principal was informed, and I was reprimanded. This was “discriminatory.” 

Somewhat related, this, this, and the third item here. 

Jonah Goldberg on the immorality of “social justice”: 

Among the myriad problems with this worldview is that individual circumstances are boiled away… Vast abstract categories of human beings are swept up into notions of collective guilt — or victimhood… Traditionally, a person is only supposed to be responsible for the wrongs he or she committed against a specific person. If Person A does something terrible entirely unbeknownst to Person B, it is unjust to hold Person B accountable solely because of the colour of his skin. It’s even more grotesque to hold Person B accountable for the things done by Person A if Person A lived 300 years ago.

Andy Meek on a modern vice: 

Robocallers and spam callers are getting quite good at masking their identity. They do this partly by “spoofing” local numbers, making it seem like a legitimate local number is calling to increase the likelihood that you’ll answer. That’s the reason, according to [caller-ID app] Hiya, that around 9 percent of spam calls a month actually get answered by phone owners even though they don’t recognise the number calling. Nine percent might not sound like much, until you consider the fact that 26.3 billion robocalls were made to American phones in 2018. That’s up 46 percent from 2017’s total of 18 billion.

And via Ace, some news from the world of powerlifting, an activity we don’t often cover here: