Dear John Oliver, Kindly Pound Sand

Sincerely, the entirety of based womankind

In April of 2017, something remarkable happened. Megan Rapinoe and her US Women’s National Soccer team, composed of the very best female soccer players in the nation, lost a scrimmage to a team of high school boys. The boys were all 15 and younger. Some of them hadn’t even fully entered the throes of puberty yet.

The game was not particularly close. The boys won the match with a score of 5-2, creating a pretty powerful visual of an obvious truth most reasonable people fully understood until circa 2015 when transmania broke the world’s brain: Males have an obvious power advantage over females when it comes to athletic pursuits. Male bodies are different than female bodies. Virtually every creature in the animal kingdom innately understands this, but here we are in the year of our Lord 2025, and for some inexplicable sorcerous reason, women are still being required to fight tooth and nail to defend the protections we’ve fought long and hard to secure in the athletic arena.

The issue was newly resurrected this past week as the world watched a number of men continue to transjack women’s opportunities on a global stage. Not only did female fencer Stephanie Turner have to forfeit (and ultimately be disqualified from) her match at the USA Fencing’s Cherry Blossom Women’s Open in Maryland in order to avoid competing against a man, but we also watched two men steal women’s spots to compete against each other in the UK’s Ultimate Pool Women’s Pro Series final.

It’s infuriating to watch as it’s so obviously and outlandishly wrong that even progressive posterboy Gavin Newsom has begun to acknowledge the injustice. But some political pundits and influential internet personalities continue to perpetuate global denial and bolster the new male supremacy movement by taking pot shots at anyone with the audacity to name the problem.

Enter HBO Host John Oliver and his spectacularly misogynistic 45 minute tirade against women’s sports this past week. The rank chauvinism and tired silencing conventions were really something to behold. Throughout his segment, Oliver repeatedly accused conservatives of being “obsessed” and “fixated” on the topic of trans inclusion in sports, his not-so-subtle underlying message ringing clear: “Womenfolk, this is not a big deal. Get over it. You’re overreacting, and all of this is manufactured outrage designed to score political points for the Republican party.”

(That’s a strawman, by the way. Oliver knows darn well this is not exclusively a Republican issue. He’s gone toe to toe with a number of lifelong liberal groups and feminists including queen J.K. Rowling herself on the issue. It’s just easier to pretend liberal opposition doesn’t exist when it absolutely does.)

Oliver proceeded to aggressively mock the female athletes raising their voices in protest. He essentially accused Riley Gaines of leveraging her mediocre swimming performance in order to build her brand. I’m paraphrasing here, but “Who even cares about women’s fencing?” he joked dismissively in regard to Turner’s disqualification. He then shifted his focus to Payton McNabb, the female volleyball player who, at age 17, was hit in the face by a ball traveling at 70 mph as spiked by a male on the opposing team, resulting in traumatic brain injury, concussion, partial paralysis on her right side, whiplash, and vision problems. Oliver suggested that McNabb’s injuries were overstated and exaggerated to spin a narrative. What’s worse is he called her “nasty” for confronting a man in the women’s room. To John Oliver, women’s boundaries are little more than nuisance manifestations of bigotry. Apparently “no” only means “no” until a man insists otherwise.

It’s the same kind of gaslighting women endure on a regular basis from abusive men. “You’re overreacting.” “Care about something that matters.” “You think this is a big deal?” “Don’t be dramatic.”

Any ounce of sympathy Oliver possessed was reserved exclusively for the men invading women’s spaces and claiming girls’ opportunities and titles. The good ol’ boys club hasn’t disappeared with our newfound progress; it’s just changed sides and masked itself in dresses and pronoun buttons.

And while Oliver did acknowledge the reality of the obvious physical advantage of “cis” (I hate that made up word) men, the crux of his argument in defense of male transjackers amounted to this: “There aren’t enough studies to prove that trans women retain any advantage after taking hormones” and “There’s significant overlap in the performance results of men and women anyway, so stop making a mountain out of a mole hill.” (Again paraphrasing.)

You guys.

Pretending we need studies to understand male bodied advantage is like pretending we need studies to understand that ice melts in sunlight. Synthetic hormones do not magically negate the litany of sex-based advantages males possess over women in sports. Men have increased O2 capacity, greater musculature, increased bone size and length, etc. Male bodies and processes aren’t altered by monthly menstruation. The difference in testosterone levels between men and women are so vast that there is literally no overlap in the ranges. Males produce 300 to 1000 nanograms per decileter (ng/dL). In females this range is 15 to 70 ng/dL.

In 2021, biologists Emma Hilton and Tommy Lundberg published a study called “Transgender Women in the Female Category of Sport: Perspectives on Testosterone Suppression and Performance Advantage.” The results, perhaps unsurprisingly, were pretty clear: Even after a year of suppressing male testosterone, trans identified males retained a crystal clear advantage over female athletes.

“Longitudinal studies examining the effects of testosterone suppression on muscle mass and strength in transgender women consistently show very modest changes, where the loss of lean body mass, muscle area and strength typically amounts to approximately 5% after 12 months of treatment. Thus, the muscular advantage enjoyed by transgender women is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed. Sports organizations should consider this evidence when reassessing current policies regarding participation of transgender women in the female category of sport,” they report.

Well duh. That’s probably why a recent UN Report noted that female athletes have lost nearly 900 medals to transgender rivals competing against them in women’s sporting categories in recent history. If trans identified males magically lost their physiological advantage over women the minute they started pumping their bodies full of stupid drugs to wage war on their sex-based functions, surely this would not be happening.

But remember— This isn’t a big deal. There are more important things to care about. John Oliver has declared it so. And isn’t that always the way? When an issue disproportionately affects women, it’s always easy to shove it to the sidelines and pretend it’s secondary and inconsequential. As I write this essay, I’m fully aware of the many gloating men on the extreme right who think this fiasco is a hilarious death knell to the feminism they insist is to blame for the madness in the first place. Somehow there’s always a very convenient way to blame women for our own mistreatment and men behaving badly. And it certainly doesn’t help when sex traitors like Megan Rapinoe, who have personally experienced the female inability to compete against males, pull the ladder up after themselves and pretend like there’s no problem with men taking over women’s sports.

We don’t need more studies, guys. We have the whole of human history from which to draw our data.

When, in the history of women’s sports, have the world’s best females ever outperformed, outrun, outthrown, outlifted, or outpaced the world’s best men? It’s never happened. As a former small college athlete myself, I take no pleasure in acknowledging this. It’s just the way things are. There’s a reason you will never see a female (no matter how she identifies) on the starting lineup of any NFL, NBA, NHL, or MLB team. Flo-Jo, phenom that she was, would still lose the 100m dash to super fast high school boys. John McEnroe, controversial and bombastic as he may be, was not wrong when he asserted that Serena Williams would not be able to hang against elite male tennis pros.

If those of us who continue to sound the alarm on this issue are “fixated” or “obsessed,” perhaps it’s because we actually believe that the dignity of women matters in this world. Perhaps it’s because we know that if we allow this dramatic departure from material reality to go unchecked, then whatever comes catapulting out of Satan’s playbook next is going to be infinitely worse. As Voltaire said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

If you don’t think men bulldozing women’s sports is close enough to an atrocity, what will you say about the fact that this same movement is literally taking the same drugs used to castrate gay men in the 50s and sterilizing children with them? Is that bad enough yet? Will you say anything when they harvest women’s wombs and try to implant them in fetishistic men? Where’s your line on this nonsense? Surely it must exist somewhere.

I hope, for everyone’s sake, that men like John Oliver find the intellectual honesty and the moral courage to stop pretending the emperor is anything but naked. And I hope his ratings take a hit in the meantime. No one should be rewarded for male supremacist activism. There’s nothing progressive about stripping women of our rights, protections, or identity. Some of us have had enough.