There is a movie genre in which a boy acquires fantastic strength or speed, which allows him to dominate a sport and bask in the astonished admiration of family, friends, school bullies, and others.

One example is the 1993 movie Rookie of the Year, in which a 12-year-old acquires a lightning-quick fastball after undergoing arm surgery and becomes the Chicago Cubs’ ace pitcher. Another is The Incredibles (2004), in which a superhero boy is at last allowed to compete in school track races and jogs chuckling with irrepressible delight to the finish line comfortably ahead of his lead-footed peers.

Such stuff caters to a fantasy that perhaps most young boys indulge in, in which they are possessed of outstanding athletic prowess that stuns the world and nets glory, gold medals, championship rings, and other glittering hardware.

It is harmless fun when confined to juvenile dreams and fictional entertainment. But even in the movies there is a trace element of something that would be ugly in the real world, especially in anyone out of childhood. The ace pitcher and the superhero track star gloat in their ascendancy and mock defeated opponents. Such people used to be called “bad sports.” Whatever charm strutting superiority has in a child, it manifestly lacks it by the time he turns 14 or 15, and it is deeply repellent in a young man in his late teens or 20s.

Our culture has become cruder since the 1970s and no longer exerts as much civilizing influence on boys as it once did. It’s why the NFL had to start penalizing taunting in 1984 and excessive celebration, a related vice, in 2006. Like the culture in which they grew up, players no longer control the impulse to gloat and symbolically dance on the graves of vanquished foes. Braggadocio, chest-thumping, and smug parading in sport are trappings of uncouth modern culture.

This manifestation of arrested civilization can also be seen in the takeover of women’s sports by men. Men are stronger and faster than women — it’s a simple fact — which is why admirable, inspiring, separate events were established for women, and why boys were once expected to become civilized men who would be chivalrous and protect women, not seek to dominate and humiliate them. Male athletes are like female athletes with unfair advantages that, though not exactly superpowers, cannot be overcome merely with hard work, grit, training, and natural talent.

Fortunately, some sports are reasserting sex segregation, but many still do not. A male college runner who calls himself Sadie Schreiner won two individual sprint races at a meet last weekend — the 400-meter and 200-meter, plus a relay — setting records for women’s events with times that would have placed him last in the men’s events.

There should be no kudos, only shame, in such achievements. There are many reasons for this, and they are worth repeating until our culture comes fully to its senses and keeps men out of women’s sports. A man in a women’s event is cheating, competing under false pretenses; he is stealing valor like a soldier who lies about courageous leadership in battle; he is participating in a grossly regressive trend that is wrecking generations of effort to create respected competition for women; he is encouraging social and cultural corrosion that corrupts sports and its officials, such as those who decided Lia Thomas, a male swimmer masquerading as a woman, should alone receive a trophy despite only tying with Riley Gaines, an actual woman. 

Inherent in this enshrouding madness is an in-your-face misogyny that has its roots in the boyhood fantasy of unbeatable preeminence in sport. It flaunts male physical advantages loutishly in the faces of women who are expected to shut up and accept it. It says that the best women are actually men. The University of Pennsylvania, with the moral blindness we have come to expect from the Ivy League, nominated Lia Thomas as “woman of the year.” 

Women and girls are beginning to refuse to take part in events against men and boys, but they are being punished for it. Other men and boys should support them and refuse to take part in women’s and girls’ events that are open to anyone other than women and girls. It is the chivalrous, honorable thing to do.

Chivalry became frowned upon decades ago as a form of patronizing condescension. But it is really the decent response by a sophisticated civilization to the irreducible fact of sexual differences. Those differences do not go away, indeed they become more glaringly apparent, when we pretend they do not exist.

It is seven years since tennis great John McEnroe suffered an internet beatdown for complimenting Serena Williams as the best female player in the world. Leftists, such as the woke movement’s publicly financed propaganda arm, National Public Radio, quibbled over McEnroe’s qualifier “female.” Why not simply the best player in the world? Well, McEnroe pointed out, because Williams would be about 700th in the world if ranked against men.

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McEnroe’s comment was not a juvenile gloat, just the plain truth. He shouldn’t have had to say it and would not have been forced to had our culture not decided to detach itself from truth. NPR’s disingenuous questioning was a measure of how distorted sexual politics has become. Since then, we’ve been pitched into the bitter and absurd battle over transgender athletes.

The transgender agenda is definitionally psychotic. It demands that we assert what we know to be untrue. Almost everyone, on both sides of the debate, knows that transgender claims are nonsense. But too many people are scared to admit it, browbeaten into passivity. It is time — beyond time — to assert what we know to be true. Men and women alike should stand up and declare that men and women are not exactly alike.