NPR Says Something Stupid About Women in Sports

Leave a CommentNPR Says Something Stupid About Women in SportsCommentary, News

National Public Radio has become a parody of itself.

NPR recently ran a news article about how the World Athletics Council, the governing body for international track and field competitions, will henceforth prohibit biological males who “identify” as females from competing in women’s sports.

The article had this line, which, for readers with common sense, might produce a chuckle:

“At the center of the issue is whether transgender women athletes have a physical advantage over other female competitors, even after lowering their testosterone levels,” NPR reported. “But there is limited scientific research involving elite transgender athletes—which the council also acknowledged.”

Do biological men have a physical advantage over women? Is the sky blue? Are we going to need more studies to figure this out?

NPR’s Twitter account leaned even more into this message about how it’s just a mystery as to whether men have significant physical advantages in elite athletic competition over women.

“The international governing body for track and field will ban trans women athletes from elite women’s competitions, citing a priority for fairness over inclusion, despite limited scientific research involving elite trans athletes,” the tweet said.

There actually are studies on this subject that show that even after hormone treatments, men are still physically distinct from women. Two years after starting hormone treatments, biological men still retained natural advantages over women.

Twitter users piled on, and the social media platform added “context to the Tweet” with these studies attached.

That prompted NPR to issue a correction to the tweet.

“An earlier tweet incorrectly stated there is limited scientific evidence of physical advantage. Existing research shows that higher levels of testosterone do impact athletic performance. But there’s limited research involving elite trans athletes in competition,” the tweet stated.

They’re getting warmer, but they’re not there yet.

That tweet was still misleading, and Twitter users again piled on with studies on transgender men versus women in competition.

The truth is, NPR and other left-wing outlets will carefully tiptoe around studies that don’t confirm their ideological bias on this issue. In their view, to be against gender affirmation is to be on the wrong side of history, so they will do whatever they can to wiggle out of facing these inconvenient realities.

Apparently, you’re supposed to give yourself a lobotomy and pretend that this 2022 NCAA “female athlete of the year” had no inherent biological advantagesdue to being a man.

Biased reporting in favor of cherished left-wing causes by the publicly funded NPR shouldn’t come as a surprise at this point. 

The news outlet leans hard into race and gender narratives, and has been more open about allowing its journalists to participate in activism.

If this was just another left-wing outlet, that would be one thing, but NPR continues to get hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funding to underwrite what has somehow become an even more extremely slanted outlet.

Even with this financial support, NPR has run into money troubles. In mid-March, it announced that it was cutting 10% of its staff and four of its major podcasts.

NPR has gone from being a standard liberal publication with some occasionally interesting cultural programming to a dedicated promoter of the cultural revolution. In many ways, it mirrors the radical trend of countless other large public and private institutions.

Maybe it’s finally time for elected officials to stop shoveling NPR our money year after year.

Jarrett Stepman is a columnist for The Daily Signal. Original here. Republished with permission.

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