Cheap Seats 2021

Handicapping - 03/23

By Rich Trzupek
  When I was a young lad, many moons ago, fate placed me in a position where I had to figure out ways to play with my largely annoying, six years my junior, little brother, Gerry. As best I recall, Ger and I started to interact in sports when I was about 12 years old and he was about six.
  Quite obviously a healthy, reasonably coordinated 12-year-old male can beat the pants off a healthy, reasonably coordinated 6-year-old male in practically any athletic completion. But where’s the joy in that? Competition should include actual competitiveness. If one enjoys a huge physical advantage that is about the biological realities – not practice, training, effort, etc., – then those advantages should be accounted for in the form of handicaps or in the form of divisional structures defined by potential abilities.
  Lia Thomas and Lia’s supporters do not agree. Lia and Lia’s supporters assert that Lia is entitled to compete against women in swimming events in spite of the undisputed fact that Lia remains a biological male and that biological males are often gifted with physical and athletic advantages well in excess of those benefits afforded biological females.
  We can not ensure that all athletic competition is 100 percent equal, but we can do our best to dispel inherent inequalities. Lightweights do not fight heavyweights, in boxing or in wrestling or in weightlifting. Tee boxes are relatively closer to the hole in the LPGA as compared to the PGA for a reason. None of those choices is about favoring one group over another. They’re about recognizing and accounting for the differences that nature imposes on the human race.
  Young lad Rich was not able to create a separate league in which little bro Ger could compete. Accordingly, I attempted to balance the scale through handicaps. When we played hockey against each other, Gerry’s goal would be 4-feet wide, while I had to defend a goal that was 10-feet wide. In wiffle ball, Ger’s home-run marker was half the distance of mine.
  I didn’t come up with the handicaps to enhance Gerry’s self-esteem. I didn’t give a crap about his self-esteem. I invented those rules to keep myself from getting horribly bored. What joy, or even interest, could one have in winning a competition that nature stacked so heavily in your favor?
  It boggles my mind that Lia and Lia’s supporters can’t – or refuse to – see that. There is absolutely nothing inclusive about allowing a person born with the undeniable physical advantages that undeniably occur in far greater instances and to far greater degrees to “compete” against a group not so blessed.
  Before you go all “you’re being misogynist” on me, please take a moment to understand. Strength and agility are not the only characteristics that define a person, male or female. In the broadest sense, women are smarter, more pain tolerant and more empathetic than their male counterparts. That observation does not belittle biological males, it recognizes some of the gifts bequeathed to biological females.
  Lia Thomas was born with certain gifts. A religious person like me might define them as “God-Given gifts”. When I see pictures of Lia on the starting blocks at an event, I see somebody who is far more broad-shouldered and strongly muscled than Lia’s competitors. There are only two reasons this should be so. One, Lia has greatly outworked Lia’s competition in terms of physical training. Two, Lia enjoys a genetic advantage that allows Lia to obtain relatively broader shoulders and stronger muscles relative to Lia’s competitors given the same amount of effort.
  If the correct answer is answer number one, then Lia’s participation in women’s athletics should not be an issue. To go back to the boxing analogy, nobody should want fly weights to fight heavy weights. If we assert that’s not what’s happening in this case and we believe that is so, then Lia and Lia’s competitors should have at it.
  On the other hand, if the correct answer is number two, then we are left with a couple of ways of treating Lia and women’s sports fairly. The first, and the easiest, is to say that no one who was born a biological male or female can participate in sports activities of the other gender, no matter what reassignment therapy may occur in the future. The other is to create new class(es) of competition that equitably account for physical differences following the boxing/wrestling/weight-lifting models.
  If Lia chooses not to participate in sports with other biological males, God Bless Lia. If Lia wants to participate in a sport that is unarguably biased toward greater accomplishment depending on the physical characteristics associated with biological gender, that’s OK too. But, that doesn’t mean that Lia should be allowed to take over competition among the multitudes of people who choose to carve out such physical differences that are associated with the biological female gender for the purpose of enjoying equitable competition and accomplishment.
  So, give Lia Thomas and all those who identify with Lia Thomas their own category, just as we distinguish welterweights from heavyweights. Let Lia Thomas fairly compete against Lia Thomas’ actual peers, rather than the peers Lia Thomas wants to abduct.
  Lia and Lia’s supporters would prefer that we ignore objective reality so that Lia can achieve “success” within a distorted reality. We should all wish Lia all the success that life has to offer, just not at the price of the hopes and dreams of the millions of women who choose to consider the constraints of biology differently than Lia does.
  Email: richtrzupek@gmail.com