I'll be the first to admit I don't know anything about golf. I had a brother-in-law, now sadly passed, who was a semi-pro and played in tournaments all over the country, but I never picked up the bug. My sole exposure to that game was when I was a junior in high school on the day our physical education class went to a driving range for an introduction to hitting that little white ball.
I really wasn't any good at it, and the coach frowned at me when I pointed out that I may not be able to hit that ball with the club very well, but put that little white ball a hundred yards downrange and I could pop it with my old .22 Mag woodchuck rifle. I do remember, though, that there were two lines from which we hit that ball: the boys hit from one line, while the girls hit from a line a few yards farther forward. Even at 16, this made sense to me; as the coach explained, "Boys can hit farther than girls."
Bear that in mind; I'll be coming back to it.
That memory, many decades in the past now, was the first thing that came to mind when I read that a women's pro golf tour took to the media to defend its decision to only allow, you know, women to compete. Good for them.
NXXT Golf Tour CEO Stuart McKinnon responded to backlash surrounding his decision to ban transgender athletes from the Women's pro tour, arguing the move ultimately came down to ensuring female athletes a right to "competitive fairness" on the course.
The decision to ban biological males from competing in the women's league sparked outrage from transgender golfer Hailey Davidson, who won the NXXT Women's Classic back in January. McKinnon addressed the controversial decision and how it was made during "Fox & Friends Weekend."
"We didn't make this decision lightly. We knew it was a polarizing topic and would evoke a lot of emotions from people out there," McKinnon told co-host Will Cain on Sunday. "We took a lot of time in educating ourselves, spoke to many stakeholders in the golfing community and the sporting community at large from coaches and players and doctors and scientists, and educated ourselves."
This shouldn't take much education, frankly; I've known that there were some very fundamental differences between boys and girls since well before my buddy's second cousin (who was most emphatically a girl) took me out behind the barn one summer when I was fourteen. And there certainly are differences - men are and always have been, on average, larger, stronger, and faster than women. These are facts.
But in these days of media whirlwinds over things that are controversial and really shouldn't be, I guess it's obvious that they had to do their due diligence.
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Here's the kicker:
"It really came down to one principle, and that was about competitive fairness," he continued. "We felt that the biological male had a physiological advantage against the woman on the tour, and we made the decision to change."
Yes, males - there's no need to say "biological male" because that's a redundancy; sex is a fundamental matter of biology - have significant physiological advantages in strength, speed, and endurance. These are facts.
The "transgender" player affected weighed in with a whine that registered on the Richter scale:
Davidson sounded off on the ban on Instagram, writing, "You know what really bugs me is that people think I win just by showing up. This is such a slap in the face to ALL female athletes being told that any male can transition and beat them regardless of the life of hard work those women put in… You think your (sic) attacking me but your actually attacking and putting doen [sic] ALL other female athletes."
No. This is wrong. The simple fact, as anyone who has taken a Gen-Ed Biology 101 class knows, is that men have significant advantages in speed, strength, and endurance over women. That's why, as I learned that long-ago day on an Iowa driving range, girls hit the ball from a line closer to the hole than boys do. By and large, any man - whether or not he calls himself a man - is going to have significant advantages over a woman. It's deeply and fundamentally unfair, and the NXXT Golf Tour is correct in disallowing this man - yes, man - from competing against the women on their tour.
This decision is an unalloyed good, and may it spread through the rest of women's sports. It is a matter of fairness; men should compete against other men and women against other women. That's fair. That's just. And it's nice to see at least one women's sports organization having this sudden rush of common sense.
