Michael Ramirez: The Fairer Sex 3-10-25

From America's Premier Editorial Cartoonist

An issue of fairness and women's rights. -Michael

Editor’s Note: Usually, my notes only go to paid subscribers, but I feel so strongly about this issue that I’ve chosen to send this section to all subscribers on Michael’s Substack today.

Whenever THIS subject comes up, my eyes flash with the promise of a battle that is as simple as it is absurd. Women have only been playing sports competitively for about 100 years. It’s only recently that, in the name of “progress”, we have been asked to share not just our sports, but vulnerable spaces like shelters, prisons, and restrooms with anyone who simply states that they are a woman, whatever the evidence of our eyes and ears show us.

What if the battle was never necessary, though? Rhetoric, semantics, and philosophical games around what a woman (or a man) is never seem to get us very far. Arguments about hormone levels, the letter on one’s altered legal documents, or how sincere someone is when they mimic the stereotypes of the opposite sex already kind of mean you’ve conceded by engaging at all. You can really get in the weeds to the point of irrelevance with some of these points. Human beings, after all, are not clownfish. No one has ever successfully changed their sex, which is determined at conception even though some very smug people on the left have been insisting that undifferentiated fetuses are female by default (how sexist!).

If I could speak to every father who feels outraged, every mother who feels hopeless, and every female athlete of any age who feels cheated, I would tell them how to win this argument every time: the burden of proof for why women and girls do not deserve our sex-based rights does not fall to us. It falls to the people who are trying, with everything they have, to take them away and redistribute them. It is always enough for women and girls to say that we do not consent to male bodies in our locker rooms and sports, and that our safety, fairness and dignity are not up for grabs or debate.

If you find yourself wondering how many women and girls have been displaced in their sport in recent years, or you’ve been told that “it’s just a tiny number”, you should know that the effect of even one male in a female competition space is multiplicative, and not additive. Please take a moment to look at the excellent and meticulously maintained website, shewon.org, to see a list of athletes who would have placed, medaled, or competed in their female sport if male competitors had not displaced them. This is only a partial list, since many competitions are smaller and unpublicized.

-Bree