Seeking Truth in Today's Troubled World

One might have imagined, in a more grounded age, that sport was the arena in which young people were taught the virtues of discipline, fair play, and the noble art of striving within the rules. But we live now in a time when the rules are no longer fixed, the boundaries no longer observed, and reality itself is apparently negotiable. At a high school track meet in Southern California, the long jump was not the only thing being stretched – so too were the limits of logic, science, and basic decency.

A young woman named Katie McGuinness, after years of training, discipline, and focus, saw her dream of winning the CIF championship vanish this last week, not by injury, fatigue, or lack of skill, but by the intrusion of ideology into the most unlikely of places: the sandpit. She was outjumped not by a fellow competitor playing by the same biological deck of cards, but by someone operating under an entirely different set of chromosomal instructions.

We are told, in dulcet tones from elite enclaves, that feelings are facts and that identity is the ultimate arbiter of truth. Yet no amount of sentimentality can bend bone structure, muscle density, or testosterone levels. Nature, as it happens, is a stubborn thing. It does not read Twitter. It has no regard for hashtags. And it cannot be shamed into silence. A biological male, no matter how sincere or psychologically distressed, does not become a female by mere declaration any more than one becomes a violin by identifying as Stradivarius.

What we are witnessing is not compassion, it is cowardice masquerading as virtue. The adults in the room have abdicated. The stewards of sport, education, and reason have handed over the keys of the kingdom to the mob, hoping the mob will not notice them hiding behind the curtains. It is not the trans athlete who should bear the brunt of our frustration, but the institutions, those grinning apparatchiks and hollow bureaucrats, who know better and say nothing.

Katie McGuinness did not simply lose a medal; she lost faith in the fairness of the world adults promised her. And that may be the greatest injustice of all. For when the scoreboard ceases to reflect reality, when girls are told to train harder rather than question the framework, we are no longer raising competitors – we are raising silent casualties of a social experiment gone awry.

Some will cry, “Inclusion!” as if the word alone can sanctify any arrangement. But inclusion, if it means excluding reality, is no virtue. Justice, to mean anything, must deal in the currency of what is, not merely what feels right to the loudest or the most litigious.

Let us not mince words: to pretend that there is no difference between a male body and a female body is not enlightenment, it is erasure. And it is women, the very group the modern West once prided itself in championing, who are now being shoved aside in their own arenas. They are told to smile, to clap, and to lose with grace. And if they don’t? Well, they’re labeled bigots.

There was once a time when children were taught that actions have consequences, that reality imposes limits, and that fairness was more than a slogan. We would do well to return to that time. Not because it is nostalgic or neat, but because it was rooted in the hard earned wisdom that civilizations do not long survive when they lose the courage to say that two plus two equals four, that girls’ sports are for girls, and that truth, however inconvenient, is still truth.

Until then, we will continue to hear stories like Katie’s. And with each new medal handed out on the altar of ideology, we bury not only competition, but the common sense that once made it worthwhile.

In Christ’s service,

~JFH