The latest girls’ 100- and 200-meter dash winner from Cromwell High School in Connecticut has some broad shoulders, manly biceps, and a mustache — because he’s not a girl. The power of social stigma is strong enough, however, in this politically and culturally Left community to coerce an entire girls’ track team and their families to affirm an idea their eyes and experiences can easily disprove and which is directly harmful to their own aspirations and children.

Just listen to the 15-year-old transgender youth’s mother explain why she is willing to say that her obviously male son, who also has not taken drugs nor undergone surgery to mimic femininity, is a female. She thinks helping him affirm the truth will cause him to take illicit drugs or kill himself in revenge upon his community for refusing to affirm a lie: “The decision to be supportive was easy, right? Because she can be whoever she wants to be, but what she won’t be is suicidal, she won’t be an addict, she won’t be, you know, dependent on other ways to feel good. She needs to be herself. And if that means I support her in her transition as a transsex–transgender female, then that’s what I do as a parent.”

This is a real number to do on a mother, to tell her that her choice is between refashioning the entire world to fit a delusion or a dead child. It’s a real number on a child, to tell him that he can be the center of an entire world fashioned around his fantasy if only he picks the currently politically correct fantasy, and that he should feel justified in threatening those who love him with suicide or other self-harm if they don’t comply. “Nice little son ya got there. It’d be a shame if anything…happened to him.”

Mass manipulation is the practice of an enslaved, totalitarian society, not a self-governing one. Transgender politics run on emotional manipulation rather than appeals to reason, tradition, and natural law that lead to informed consent from citizens. This is because reason, physical reality, and natural law oppose the trans lobby’s political aims. They manipulate mothers with the threat of their children’s suicide because it’s effective, just like the mafia threatening business owners with harm to themselves or loved ones is effective.

But is it just? No. In the long run, allowing this scam facilitates popular delusions and expands injustice. Good therapists help their clients accept and live within reality; enablers try to protect their codependent partners from reality, and thereby make the problem worse. Even if this social delusion is tough to counter, it is the right and necessary thing to do.

The Victims the Trans Lobby Doesn’t Want You To See

Every time a boy places in a girl’s sports competition he is necessarily displacing a girl. This is how competition works: it’s a zero-sum game. There can only be one winner of the 100-yard dash, only one second-place, and so forth.

Not only is it not a fair competition to run someone with naturally higher testosterone levels, tougher bones, and higher muscle saturation against women who naturally have less of all these athletic-enhancing features (which is why we separate men and women’s sports in the first place), every single time a boy does so he is taking away opportunities that rightly belong to a girl: opportunities to win a trophy, gain self-confidence, push one’s personal best, and develop momentum going into high-level competitions that can lead to scholarships and careers.

While the meet that sparked news coverage of this young man was only an early-season local meet, his times there would have netted him second place in the girls’ state track championships last year in the 100-yard dash, and approximately tenth in the 200-yard dash. If he competed in the right division against boys, however, his times wouldn’t likely even get him to state, as every single boy who performed at state last year bested his times in both events by a solid margin.

Now, he has room to develop, since he’s just a freshman, but that’s how things stand right now. Playing a boy as a girl is unfair, and it always was going to be, since — newsflash — men and women’s bodies are different.

When The Sexes Are Considered Interchangeable

Even transgender adult males who are taking cross-sex hormones are hard for women to beat. Just ask Canadian female cyclists, or the female MMA fighters against Fallon Fox. Obviously as it grows this trend will erode sex distinctions in sports events. The International Association of Athletics Federations already struggles to define male or female-ness for competition purposes due to a handful of intersex and transgender competitors, notably runner Caster Semenya.

This will take a long time to work out socially, but major upheavals will be unavoidable. One that has already begun to hit is the implications of judicially and regulatorily expanding a variety of laws forbidding sex discrimination to also encompass sexual orientation and gender identity. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals recently wrote sexual identity as a protected class into the portion of a 1964 law forbidding sex discrimination, Title VII. The 8-3 majority took the opportunity granted by the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision legalizing gay marriage to expand the word “sex” to mean not just male or female biology, as was understood at the time the employment discrimination law was enacted, but also one’s sexual self-understanding and behavior.

How are the gay marriage and trans issues connected? With the legal supposition of interchangeability of the sexes. The Seventh Circuit majority in Kimberly Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College made it clear that since Obergefell concluded it’s discriminatory to regard sex differences in marital coupling (i.e., to say that a male-male pair is in any way different than a male-female pair, even though men and women are physically distinct beings and one of each required to create children) it’s also discriminatory to regard sex differences in potential employees’ choice of sexual partners.

Both gay marriage and transgender policies hinge on people agreeing that a man can be essentially the same thing as a woman, and vice versa. Marriage, as a keystone in law, once legally genderless allows for de-sexing other institutions. This assumption in Obergefell, now embedded in Supreme Court precedent, is therefore also affecting rules about sex differences in many other forms. Such as school sports and bathrooms.

That’s the connection to a pile of federal regulations that have a huge effect on a variety of social policies. For example, under President Obama the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, Education Department, and Department of Justice all announced they would read various statutes prohibiting sex discrimination to also encompass gender identity, even though this contradicts the majority of the related jurisprudence and regulatory interpretations since the laws were enacted.

Turning Protections for Women Against Both Sexes

This is also how laws that were intended to protect women (like Title IX) are being transmogrified to provide special advantages for men who choose to masquerade as women. Once laws and regulations have accepted the LGBT advocacy groups’ premise that sex distinctions are not important, laws and social activities based on those distinctions, which usually advantage women, are in jeopardy.

In a case also before the Seventh Circuit where a Wisconsin public school district wants a transgender girl to use a private shower instead of showering with the boys, since her demands violate the boys’ privacy, “The key legal issue…is whether federal sex nondiscrimination law—Title IX—which was intended to provide equal access for girls to educational opportunities—will instead be used for a purpose other than Congress intended.”

The judge hearing that case was very aggressive with the school district lawyer despite his ask simply being that the girl get a sex change before she join naked activities with boys, calling that policy “separate but equal” and “Jim Crow.” Well, ma’am, men and women are different but equal, and that’s simply a fact of life. Sex differences are not the same as racial differences. It’s not bigotry to point out that only a woman has a uterus and only a man has testicles (the rare intersex conditions that do exist are properly understood as disabilities, thereby being exceptions that prove the rule).

Obergefell is a head domino, and we’re about to see it knock down a lot more sex-distinct policies. It’s a pretty sure bet Americans did not expect tolerance for two consenting adults doing whatever behind closed doors to become a spearhead for forcing naked boys to shower next to naked girls and make girls second-class players on their own fields. That’s what happens when you base social policy on feelings rectroactively justified by pretend reasoning, and use courts as a major vehicle for turning those feelings into policy rather than through elected officials more responsive to legislating by consent.