Making Sense by Michael Reagan

The problem with young people today is no one teaches them history.

If they knew what the East German government did to their Olympic women athletes in the 1970s and 1980s, for instance, they might understand why it’s not fair for transgender men to compete against women in sports like swimming, tennis and surfing.

It’s ancient news now, but before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, East Germany was arguably the most evil communist country in Western Europe.

It wasn’t just the lack of political, economic and social freedom or the fact that half of your neighbors and relatives worked for the Stasi.

It was also what East Germany’s government did to its athletes – women especially.

In the 1970s and 1980s the country’s women’s swim team dominated the world, breaking most of the women’s records and taking most of the medals at the Olympics.

Everyone knew why its masculine women swimmers were so good – and why many were sprouting facial hair. They were being doped.

From an early age, and mostly without their parents’ consent or knowledge, East German girls were being forced by their trainers to take growth hormones and testosterone, the male sex hormone.

The world sports community united in outrage when it learned what East Germany was doing and eventually the country was stripped of its medals.

Making parallels with East Germany and what’s going on in women’s sports today with transgender athletes is tricky, but I’ll try.

East Germany’s government gave drugs to biological women to make their bodies more like men’s so they could unfairly dominate women’s sporting events and win lots of medals.

In America today, we are giving drugs to biological men that make their bodies more like women’s bodies – and then we let the biological men who identify as women unfairly dominate women’s sporting events and win lots of medals.

The biggest difference between the 1970s and now is that today there is so little outrage in the sports world about how transgender policies are hurting women athletes and making a national joke of women’s sporting events.

Where are the angry male sportscasters or “pundits” in the media?

Few of them have screamed about how absurd and unfair it is to let transgender athletes like Lia Thomas, a 6-4 biological male, “compete” with smaller, weaker and differently built women athletes in the NCAA’s women’s swimming championships.

Where are the noisy feminists? What happened to the idea of sticking up for the equal rights, opportunities and dignity of women?

And, most all, where are the fathers? They should be fiercely defending their daughters, filing lawsuits and demanding that their girls be allowed to compete on equal playing fields – with girls.

Young women who’ve trained all their lives to be great swimmers like NCAA champion Riley Gaines are being disrespected and cheated in the name of wokeness.

Gaines – who says she was forced to share a locker room with Thomas last year and didn’t appreciate what she saw when he casually dropped his pants – has called for the NCAA to at least adopt a policy of separate locker rooms.

That’s way too sensible. And it will never happen because it’d be seen as a cruel insult to transgender athletes.

When it comes to transgenders competing in women’s sports, it’s not a woke country we are living in, it’s an insane one.

Things are so nuts it makes East Germany’s use of drugs and hormones seem almost ahead of its time.

In women’s sports it’s now OK to cheat to beat anyone, as long as you are the right gender and have the right drugs in you.

A comic I saw recently said you can be the 482nd tennis player in the world, and all you have to do is cut off your penis, put on a sports bra, and you can become the No. 1 woman player in the world.

Sadly, that joke would be much funnier if it weren’t true.

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Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.