As for its failure of wisdom, Abigail Shrier predicts in the Wall Street Journal that Joe Biden's first day in office will be seen as the beginning of the end of girls' sports. She writes that the president's Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation means that,
Any school that receives federal funding — including nearly every public high school — must either allow biological boys who self-identify as girls onto girls’ sports teams or face administrative action from the Education Department. If this policy were to be broadly adopted in anticipation of the regulations that are no doubt on the way, what would this mean for girls’ and women’s sports?Shrier's whole op-ed is interesting. She explains how the harmful effects on girls that can be expected to result from President Biden's foolish executive order go well beyond sports.
“Finished. Done,” Olympic track-and-field coach Linda Blade told me. “The leadership skills, all the benefits society gets from letting girls have their protected category so that competition can be fair, all the advances of women’s rights —that’s going to be diminished.” Ms. Blade noted that parents of teen girls are generally uninterested in watching their daughters demoralized by the blatant unfairness of a rigged competition.
I say rigged because in contests of strength and speed, the athletic chasm between the sexes, which opens at puberty, is both permanent and unbridgeable. Once male puberty is complete, testosterone suppression doesn’t undo the biological advantages men possess: larger hearts, lungs and bones, greater bone density, more-oxygenated blood, more fast-twitch muscle fiber and vastly greater muscle mass.
It should be no surprise, then, that the two trans-identified biological males permitted to compete in Connecticut state track finals against girls—neither of whom was a top sprinter as a boy—consistently claimed top spots competing as girls. They eliminated girls from advancement to regional championships, scouting and scholarship opportunities and trophies, and they set records no girl may ever equal.
How big is this performance gap? To take one example cited by the Connecticut female runners in their complaint against the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference, the fastest female sprinter in the world is American runner Allyson Felix, a woman with more gold medals than Usain Bolt. Her lifetime best for the 400-meter run is 49.26 seconds. Based on 2018 data, nearly 300 high-school boys in the U.S. alone could beat it.
As for transparency, Mr. Biden promised that there'd be “at least 100 million Covid vaccine shots into the arms of the American people in the first 100 days.” His spokesperson, Jen Psaki, declared that this would double what was accomplished during the last forty days under the previous administration since during that span the average number of shots per day was 500,000.
I can't say whether Ms. Psaki intended to be disingenuous or whether she's just not good with numbers, but her statement is very misleading. The reason why the average number of daily vaccinations during the last forty days of the Trump administration was at 500,000 was, presumably, because in the early days after the vaccines were approved there were very few doses administered. It took time to get the shots out to the general public (they're still not available in my part of Pennsylvania). By the end of the forty days, however, the average number of daily inoculations stood at 939,973 doses, so what Mr. Biden is actually promising is a relatively small improvement of 60,000 doses a day.
Biden called the current rate of vaccine distribution a "dismal failure," but boasts about a rather paltry 6% increase. Even this is probably not an actual increase over what would've been available under Trump as the vaccine rollout continued to ramp up through January and February and reached more facilities where it could be dispensed.
When a reporter asked Mr. Biden to explain why we should get excited by a vaccine availability that's essentially what it was under his predecessor, Mr. Biden grew testy and replied, "When I announced it, you all said, ‘It’s not possible.’ Come on, give me a break, man." It's odd, though, that anyone would've said that Mr. Biden's goal of a million shots per day was impossible since that's almost the number that was being administered even as he spoke.
Anyway, Mr. Biden delivered himself of a knockdown solution to the Covid problem in his inaugural address by promising to mandate that everyone on federal property wear a mask at all times. The president assured us in his speech that wearing masks was "patriotic" and is the "single best thing we can do" at this time to save lives. But then, inexplicably, he and his family subsequently appeared maskless at a public event at the Lincoln Memorial, which is, of course, federal property.
When Ms. Psaki was asked by a reporter about this seeming inconsistency the press secretary bobbed and weaved and finally concluded by proclaiming that, "I think we have bigger issues to worry about at this moment in time." So, the centerpiece of Mr. Biden's response to the pandemic - wearing a mask for 100 days - really isn't all that important, after all? Or is it a mandate just for the little people that the elites need not bother themselves about?
To compound the confusion Mr. Biden has also stated that "There's nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the virus in the next several months." What?
Isn't this the same Joe Biden who promised during the campaign that he wasn't going to shut down the country, he wasn't going to shut down the economy, he was going to shut down the virus? Wasn't he almost daily berating Trump for not doing more to contain the plague? And now he's telling us there's nothing he can do?
If the next few months are anything like the first few days how long will it be before the beleaguered Ms. Psaki breathes a deep sigh of relief and hands the press secretary baton off to someone else?