Ratjen

As is common in women’s spectator sports, however, a fury of popular jingoistic feminism ensued. The report was permanently hushed up after South African sports officials played the race card, with Leonard Chuene of the RSA track association demanding, “Who are white people to question the makeup of an African girl?”€ 

(Ironically, Chuene employed Ekkart Arbeit, the East German throwing coach notorious for assigning steroids to shot-putter Heidi Krieger, who is now known as Andreas Krieger.)

The basis of women’s sports is segregation by sex, a Plessy v. Ferguson-style separate-but-equal system. Therefore, women 800-meter runners argue that Semenya cheats them out of their rightful rewards. For example, Semenya’s participation in the Olympics cost third-place finisher Ekaterina Poistogova of Russia a silver medal and denied fourth-place finisher Pamela Jelimo of Kenya any medal. 

But who cares about majority rights? Even women’s rights are a fairly old-shoe cause compared to the ascendant LGBTQIA crusade. Elite global opinion has thus rallied to Semenya’s right to the privileges of womanhood on the newfound principle that the world must accept the claim of anybody to be any sex. 

What if the heavyweight boxing champion Klitschko brothers, Vitali and Wladimir, tire of fighting men and decide to enter women’s boxing in the 2016 Olympics? Should they be allowed to pummel women merely by declaring themselves the Klitschko sisters?

The Klitschko brothers would no doubt consider that unmanly and dishonorable. If you suggested it to them, they might hit you, and that could hurt.

Progressive moral preening is made plausible only by the survival of the majority’s old-fashioned morals.

Indeed, the Semenya cause is hardly about establishing principles. Instead, it’s the latest way to assert one’s sophistication over the unenlightened. It’s all part of the war on homophobia…or stereotypes…or maybe apartheid. 

The elite rationalizations aren”€™t logical, but the mood music is irresistible: Minoritarianism has been a winning hand for so long that everybody knows you won”€™t get in trouble pushing even this reductio ad absurdum.

In this century, who has ever gotten ahead by demanding fair play for the majority?