I doubt that he intended it this way, but President* Biden’s recent executive order regarding gender orientation in sports will turn out to be a good thing in the long run. Why do I say that?
Consider a couple of ways that this might play out.
In the first scenario, parents finally realize that there is no such thing as a free lunch — that the hidden cost of letting taxpayers foot the bill for school sports is that school sports must necessarily become politicized; and must, like everything that becomes politicized, become increasingly divorced from real-world considerations in favor of ideological considerations¹.
(That is, what we’re seeing with the various transgender policies being imposed isn’t an aberration, but a natural consequence of trying to use government to get something for nothing. The question isn’t ‘How could this happen?’, but rather ‘What took so long for this to happen?’.)
Having come to that realization, more and more parents move their kids out of taxpayer-funded sports and into privately-funded sports leagues, which are free to make their own rules without meddling from various Departments of Education. As schools become unable to field complete teams, this would lead to the separation of sport and state. Which would be an excellent thing.
In the second scenario, sports remain embedded (like a tick) in our education system, but people finally remember what makes competitive sports interesting is that they are competitive — pitting athletes and teams who are similar in talent and skill against each other.
Note that talent and skill do not depend on gender or sex or age, but do depend on size, strength, speed, coordination, and other physical attributes.
So instead of grouping kids into teams by age and sex, they would be grouped by maturity and ability, using the equivalent of ‘placement exams’. If you’re this big, or can run this fast, or can lift this much, or can throw the ball this fast or this far, you can participate at this level in this sport. If not, you can’t.
A larger, stronger kid — regardless of gender or sex — would be placed on a more advanced team, while a smaller, weaker kid would be placed on a less advanced team. Sports would be sex- and gender-blind, and even more competitive than they are now. Everyone wins.
(And if bathrooms and locker rooms are really going to be a sticking point, kids can show up already dressed to play, and go home the same way, which would save taxpayers money on locker room utilities.)
Now, even though this wouldn’t separate sport from state, it would provide an opening to start doing the same thing with academics. That is, instead of putting a kid in a particular grade, or a particular class, because of when he happens to have been born, or what kind of plumbing he has, we would group kids together who are ready to tackle similar challenges². This would be good for the kids, and even better for the teachers.
Of course, there’s a third way that things might go: Individualized Competition Programs. But even those would be an improvement over what we have now, in that they would actually use targeted handicapping to eliminate any natural superiority that either sex might enjoy over the other. And what we would lose in excellence, we might hope to make up in entertainment.
¹ For example, we send Social Security checks to millionaires; we force insurance companies to offer pregnancy coverage to men; we tax the poor to educate the children of the rich; we give longer sentences to casual drug users than to violent criminals; and so on.
² Note how, by taking age out of the equation entirely, this eliminates the whole ‘least restrictive environment’ issue in classrooms. When a kid is ready to do what all the other kids in a class are ready to do — whether that happens at age 6, or 16, or 60, or never — he can join them. Until then, he can’t.
