A new study suggests transgender women maintain an athletic advantage over their cisgender peers even after a year on hormone therapy.
The results, published last month in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, could mean the current one-year waiting period for Olympic athletes who are transitioning is inadequate.
“For the Olympic level, the elite level, I’d say probably two years is more realistic than one year,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Timothy Roberts, a pediatrician and the director of the adolescent medicine training program at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. “At one year, the tran5 women on average still have an advantage over the cis women,” he said, referring to cisgender, or nontransgender, women.
[…]For the first two years after starting hormones, the tran5 women in their review were able to do 10 percent more pushups and 6 percent more situps than their cisgender female counterparts. After two years, Roberts told NBC News, “they were fairly equivalent to the cisgender women.”
Their running times declined as well, but two years on, tran5 women were still 12 percent faster on the 1.5 mile-run than their cisgender peers.
Very interesting to think about when you consider Biden’s executive action allowing transgender women into biological women’s sports.
Attacks against free speech by big tech companies have quickly escalated into a full-blown censorship campaign as social media giants are now regularly targeting and silencing Christians and conservatives. Their latest target? Focus on the Family.
The Christian organization has just been censored by Twitter. The platform locked the global ministry’s “Daily Citizen” publication for allegedly violating their rules against posting “hateful” content.
Focus on the Family CEO Jim Daly said this accusation is absolutely untrue.
The Daily Citizen tweeted a quote on Jan. 19 from one of its articles acknowledging that the Biden administration appointed a transgender woman to serve as Assistant Secretary for Health at the Department of HHS.
The tweet read: “Dr. Lev1ne is a transgender woman, that is, a man who believes he is a woman.”
It’s “inclusivity”. You can’t even explain what the terms mean any more, because feelings are more important than facts to the people in charge of permitting speech.
This is the latest data from the American Community Survey data from the Census Bureau.
Over the last few decades, feminists thought that they could redefine many of the core aspects of marriage, and that men would still continue to marry. But the truth is that marriage used to be a pretty fair deal for men, now it just isn’t under the new rules.
Being the legally and socially recognized head of the household.
An expectation of regular sex.
Legal rights to children.
Lifetime commitment.
That you are guaranteed a chaste bride on your wedding night.
Feminism has destroyed all of these facets of marriage. Feminists want marriage to be all about them, and their needs. And they don’t want marriage to put any responsibilities, expectations or obligations on them.
I am pro-marriage, but for me pro-marriage means rolling back the feminist redefinitions of marriage. That’s the only way to get men to be interested in marriage. Today, men are responding to the anti-marriage incentives created by feminists. Feminists offered men free sex without commitment, and they made marriage into a dangerous legal deathtrap. Men aren’t going to take risks like that. Especially when they have lost the authority to lead the home, and the other benefits of marriage for men. It’s a lot of risk, without any of the benefits. It’s a bad deal.
But it’s not just the legal risks, it’s the fact that men can’t afford marriage in a socialist country. Socialism requires higher taxes, and that leaves men with too little to take on the husband and father roles.
When you look at marriage rates in Canada and Europe, you understand that men are even LESS likely to choose marriage when they have to pay over 50% of what they earn in taxes. And so the marriage rate is declining. I think young, unmarried women are excited by the idea of raising taxes in order to get free stuff from government. That makes it unnecessary to marry at all, so they are free to play the field and obey no man. But there comes a point where taxes are so high that men simply can’t affort to take on a wife and multiple children. We are at that point now, and I expect it to spread up to the higher income brackets so that the marriage rate declines even further.
One final reason for men not marrying is because men don’t like secular leftist women. Young people are sliding to the left, and those values and beliefs are UNATTRACTIVE to marriage-minded men. Just because a secular leftist woman is able to get attention and sex from men, it doesn’t mean that she is able to get a lifelong commitment to love her, protect her, provide for her, and so on. No one likes secular leftist women, and no one wants to marry them.
Evidence on parenting by same-sex couples is inadequate.
Evidence suggests children raised by homosexuals are more likely to experience gender and sexual disorders.
Same-sex “marriage” would undercut the norm of sexual fidelity within marriage.
Same-sex “marriage” would further isolate marriage from its procreative purpose.
Same-sex “marriage” would further diminish the expectation of paternal commitment.
Marriages thrive when spouses specialize in gender-typical roles.
Women and marriage domesticate men.
The eleventh one they missed is that a husband’s leadership is beneficial to a woman because it gives her direction and balances her emotional highs and lows. It’s not politically correct to say what women need from men in marriage, but it’s true. Just like men, women have weaknesses that can be corrected and compensated for by the opposite sex. The twelfth one they missed is that same-sex marriage is incompatible with religious liberty, as recent court cases have shown.
Anyway, here are the details on #7:
7. Same-sex “marriage” would further isolate marriage from its procreative purpose.
Traditionally, marriage and procreation have been tightly connected to one another. Indeed, from a sociological perspective, the primary purpose that marriage serves is to secure a mother and father for each child who is born into a society. Now, however, many Westerners see marriage in primarily emotional terms.
Among other things, the danger with this mentality is that it fosters an anti-natalist mindset that fuels population decline, which in turn puts tremendous social, political, and economic strains on the larger society. Same-sex marriage would only further undercut the procreative norm long associated with marriage insofar as it establishes that there is no necessary link between procreation and marriage.
This was spelled out in the Goodridge decision in Massachusetts, where the majority opinion dismissed the procreative meaning of marriage. It is no accident that the countries that have legalized or are considering legalizing same-sex marriage have some of the lowest fertility rates in the world. For instance, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Canada have birthrates that hover around 1.6 children per woman–well below the replacement fertility rate of 2.1.
I chose this one because I wanted to comment.
I think it’s common today for men and women to not put the production and development of children at the center of their marriage plans. They are not working a financial plan to prepare for children. They are not developing the skills they need to mentor and nurture others. They are resentful of any demands placed on them that restrict their freedom. And they want marriage to be about fun and self-fulfillment. This is not compatible with children, however. And that’s the point. The more we redefine marriage to be about adult selfishness – first with no-fault divorce, then with same-sex marriage – the less emphasis there is on the pre-marital preparations for making and raising children.
If you want to know what you should be doing with your life before marriage, then think of the process of having children and raising children. Think of how much it costs, what skills you will need, and how your character has to be trained. Many of the things that you see young people doing these days – binge drinking, hooking up, running up debt, cohabitating, avoiding things that are hard to do – are not preparing their character for the responsibilities, expectations and obligations that people face when they have children.
Suppose you have a friend who is not good at driving a manual transmission car or not good at weight lifting or not good at doing apologetics – are you able to help them do it, or are you incapable of taking responsibility? If you can’t take responsibility for helping an adult, you certainly can’t take responsibility for a child – children are much less capable. Now are you able to say no to doing things for your own happiness? If you are not able to give up your own happiness – and this is a thing that gets easier as you practice more – then you’re liable to look on your duties to your children with resentment – that you are being “manipulated” into it. You don’t suddenly learn how to put up with children just by walking down the aisle at a wedding. It takes training to get good at being generous with your time, money and effort. It takes practice.
In fact, a smart man who is courting a woman would be trying to get her to practice the behaviors of a wife and mother before he marries her. And the same for a smart women who is being courted by a man. For example, a man has to comfortable giving things to the people around him – he can’t be resentful about it. Even when he doesn’t particularly like those people, he has to focus on their needs, think about where he is trying to lead them, and then work a plan to provide for their needs so they get where he wants them to go. If a man doesn’t like the feel of caring for others who may not be grateful – or who may even hate him – then he should take steps to prepare his character to learn to like it. When a little kid says “I hate you!” to his father, who is paying thousands of dollars for him to grow up, it’s not an easy thing. Always being selfish before you marry is not good preparation for what children will demand of you. This is something I struggle with personally – being content to invest in others who turn out to be ungrateful, and even destructive.
So I think this focus on parenting is a wonderful way for people to work backwards from the goal (healthy, happy, successful children) to the interim tasks and required skills. It helps us to get away from thinking that marriage is about us – our happiness, our needs. Unfortunately, not everyone who runs around telling people that they want to get married “some day” is really taking steps to prepare for marriage and parenting right now. Marriage is a commitment to self-sacrificially love another person – however much they change – for the rest of their lives, and to love any children who appear, too. People don’t like to read about marriage and think it through. But just saying “I want to marry someday” is not a proof of preparation for marriage, as the divorce rate attests. To get married, you have to train yourself to think of others, and to do hard things that don’t make you feel “free” or “happy”. There is no path to a successful marriage that does not involve responsibilities, expectations and obligations for husband and wife. It’s not “happily ever after”. It’s hard work!
