“Transjacking” Sports

The Games of the XXXII Olympiad in Tokyo (July 24 to August 9, 2020) are about a year away, but controversy is already building. There’s always Olympic controversy, of course, most often about performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs).

At the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, host-country athletes and “scientists” were so widely involved in cheating (especially in urinalyses) that the World Anti-Doping Agency recommended Russia be banned from participating in the 2016 Summer Games in Rio. That didn’t happen, although Russia was subsequently banned at the ‘18 Winter Games in PyeongChang, although some Russian athletes did compete, as “Olympic Athletes from Russia,” but without the Russian flag or national anthem. (Several of them failed drug tests at the Games.)

Overall, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has a strong and oft-stated interest – one shared by the governing bodies of all participant sports – of keeping the Olympics free of PEDs. This is not just because of the competitive advantages these substances provide but also because of the danger drugs present to the long-term health of athletes.

The ideal of the amateur athlete may be gone from the Games, but a belief in the importance of healthy, natural athletes persists.

Or does it?

The IOC and many – if not most (and by next July perhaps all) – athletic federations now condone some of the most extreme drug use imaginable: mandated testosterone-suppressant drugs for men who wish to compete as women – i.e. male-to-female (MtF) “transgender” athletes.

Click here to read the rest of Mr. Miner’s column at The Catholic Thing . . .