CARRIE LUKAS: The West Must Stand Up For The Classic Liberal Values That Allowed Women To Thrive 

Democrats dismissing the men-in-women’s-sports issue missed how it served as the most easily recognizable symptom of an underlying disease. Voters knew that candidates insisting “transwomen are women” when faced with displaced and injured female athletes were infected with a radically woke political agenda that had subsumed common sense. Voters could safely assume such candidates were also disconnected from reality on crime, open borders, inflation and about everything else — and vote accordingly.

The women’s sports issue also speaks to how the anti-colonialist, woke political movement sacrifices women’s interests to their cause. Women have thrived in Western democracies committed to rule of law, equality, free speech and economic liberalism. Academia and leftist political leaders have worked to tarnish these classic liberal ideas as colonialist and therefore illegitimate, and women’s rights and opportunities are degraded as a consequence.

It is easy for American and most European women to forget this, but through much of human history, and still today in many parts of the world, women cannot safely live alone. They require men to protect them from other men. Western democracies developed laws to punish violence and cultural expectations about women’s equality and nonviolence that created a strong enough sense of security to allow women to freely participate in all aspects of society.

Recognizing women’s equality does not mean that women and men are interchangeable. Feminists fighting for Title IX in 1973 did not want women to have the right to try out for men’s sports teams; they wanted leagues of their own. Physical differences mean that women’s safety requires separate spaces such as female prisons, women’s shelters, showers and locker rooms. Raising alarms about the risk to women of forcing them to share such intimate spaces with men is not based on the idea that trans-identifying individuals are disproportionately sexual predators. It merely recognizes that men are physically different — generally stronger and capable of rape — leaving women uniquely vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse.