Transgendered (Male) Athletes in Women Sports

While the 2026 World Cup was underway in North America, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling, which is to say, a judgment rationally argued, siding with member-states that did not permit “Y chromosome” students in public schools to play in on “XX chromosome” sports teams. Not being a writer who fecklessly evades controversial topics for fear of turning away some readers, I will attempt to tackle the jurisprudence and ethics of male athletes who self-identify as women playing in women sports such as American football in public schools.

Because gender language had become so muddled by enough people in at least some member-states even just for ideological purposes, which is to say, to impose, I resort to reductionism in highlighting chromosomes, which, after all, are empirical facts, and, at least as of 2026 when the Court’s opinion was announced, the “Y” chromosome stays for life. This is not to castigate or dismiss individuals whose respective mental states include a close affiliation and even a group-identification sense of self with the other gender. The cultural stereotypes of the widths of masculinity and femininity had arguably contracted too narrowly since at least the eighteenth century in the West that a young, slender man with long, straight hair and a high-pitch voice in 2026 would likely conclude that he is not masculine and even feminine even though everything about him that is natural/biological would by definition be masculine (i.e., consistent with male hormones and the related Y chromosome). This point should not be taken as reductionistic concerning gender-identification, but I submit that the point is often overlooked.

In ancient Greece, unlike in Rome, bisexual or gay men who felt sexual pleasure in submitting in being penetrated by a penis were regarded as just as masculine as men who penetrate anally or vaginally. Perhaps Carl Jung would say that for the ancient Greeks, both genders were regarded as containing animus and anima, albeit proportioned differently. I contend that a man who is conscious of his anima has a fuller sense of himself than a man whose self-awareness only consists of animus. Again, this is not to explain or account for every transexual person, but, rather, my intent is to widen the discussion even if doing so is beyond the tolerable narrow limits of some ideologues who presume themselves and their partisans alone as entitled to proclaim opinion as fact in contradistinction to the mere opinions across the aisle.[1]

In terms of the U.S. Supreme Court, the anima in a male person and the animus in a woman, is like a dissent to a majority opinion. As a society, we ignore dissents at our peril, especially as several majority opinions, such as “separate but equal,” have been overturned. In her dissent in West Virginia vs. Becky P. Jackson, Justice Sotomayor claims that the majority was “wrong to reject Jackson’s equal-protection” (14^th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution) claim.[2] Sotomayor admitted, however, “We just simply do not know scientifically that transgender students pose dangers,”[3] meaning that such students have physical advantages athletically over biological women in playing in sports like (American) football, where body-size and muscle-mass do matter at the line of scrimmage. According to the Huffington Post, Sotomayor writes in her dissent that the facts show that transgender “women” do not have an “inherent athletic advantage” over (biological) women, but a strident ideology is indeed capable of inventing facts for itself while accusing the other side of ignoring facts.[4] That the X chromosome has over 1,000 genes, whereas the Y chromosome carries only 50-200 genes, including the SRY gene, which furnishes instructions for the development of distinctly male genitalia, suggests that women and men are indeed biologically different in a myriad of ways, so the claim that biological males do not have advantages in the conduct of sport may be dogmatic rather than based on fact. This is not to say that every man is physically stronger, as the 1970s tennis match between Bobby Riggs and Billy Jean King demonstrated.

Perhaps the Court’s decision comes down to the prime facie assertion that people with penises and testicles are by definition exogenous to women sports. Furthermore, the equal protection clause is not violated because nobody who was born with a penis (and still carries the Y chromosome) can be on a women-only (XX chromosomes) team. Just as in labeling a film’s lesbian sex-scene as homosexual, or gay, rather than heterosexual because two vaginas and no penises are involved and the mental states of the persons in the scene go only so far and thus do not alter the label, so too do such states go only so far in terms of whether a person qualifies to play in women sports. Not even if one person in such a scene has had her female breasts (“boobs”) removed and is taking testosterone and sports a mustache—neither boobs nor facial hair counting as sexual genitalia—is such a scene heterosexual, for the sexual genitalia of the two people are the same, which is to say, homo rather than hetero. Similarly, women sports includes only people who were born with the same (XX) genitalia, regardless of how the people have decided to appear externally and what mental state they have. The underlying culprit is ideology, as per its inherently expansive propensity at the expense of even legitimate constraints.

---

1. A week before the Court’s decision, while I was volunteering to work at the 2026 Gay film festival in San Francisco so I could include some examples of “gay cinema” in a forthcoming book I was writing on philosophy and theology through the medium of film, I casually mentioned to two young women that the film shown had a lesbian sex scene. “That’s heterosexual sex!” one of the young (presumably lesbian) women angrily declared to me as if her fact trumped what was merely an opinion on my part. “No,” I retorted, “a sex scene with two vaginas is not heterosexual.” To my shock, the two women dismissed this fact by stating, as if declaring a fact of their own making, “No, it doesn’t work that way.” Translation: two vaginas as a sex act can be heterosexual if one of the women self-identifies as a man. This simply is not true; a person’s mental state is not sufficient to change the label. What surprised me the next week was how many young people pushed back against my rather obvious claim that a sex scene involving two vaginas is not heterosexual, as if the claim were suddenly disputable without regard to the definitions of the words, homosexual and heterosexual. One young man even repeatedly shouted at me at a coffee shop, “You’re an idiot!” To be so dismissive of definitions may involve an underlying troubled mental state, as well as arrogance and narcissism. Ideological angst and anger do not trump definitions. The sheer presumption, even more than the flashes of anger unleased on me, shocked me, for such presumption is like arrogance on stilts during a flood. Ideology itself had become a problem in the far left quarter of San Francisco by 2026 as evinced by the presumed entitlement to not only overreach, but also lash out in spiteful anger in verbally attacking anyone who is an obstacle to the overly expansive sense of self and the presumption to declare facts out of what is actually ideological opinion as a fact. Postscript on the Gay “Frameline” festival in San Francisco: the vengeance of the two young lesbians led Cicily, who managed the festival’s operations that year to write a hostile email to me accusing me of having spoken inappropriately. She had not even contacted me first to ask what I had actually said to the two complaining, vindictive lesbians. “The film contains a lesbian sex scene” is in no sense inappropriate, especially at a gay film festival! Besides accusing me of having spoken inappropriately during my first shift, Cicily was stupid enough to send me the harsh email as I was en route to my last shift. Accordingly, I was able to write a brief rebuttal and turn back (to my own work!) rather than continue on to the theater to freely give my labor to such a sordid, resentful, and too ideologically-driven group. Saying that a sex scene is not heterosexual because it involves two vaginas and no penises is not inappropriate; in fact, it is an accurate statement. San Francisco “pride” had gone too far, moreover, in its ideological intolerance and vindictiveness against anyone objecting to the "Castro norms" so I voted with my feet the next week by not watching its parade downtown. In the Castro, for example, tips at bars, fast food places, and even at coffee shops were, according to several gay men and at least one harsh employee, required by the very employees who receive them. “It’s the Castro standard,” a young man sitting at a table near mine scolded me before he dismissively walked away from the Poesia coffee shop with his friend while making it clear to me that he was laughing at me for having complained about a barista there who had angrily demanded a tip. Self-righteous immaturity would likely continue in that district. Another “Castro standard” callously and selfishly imposed by many gay men there on their boyfriends and even husbands was the presumed right to have separate sex with other men even with romantic attachment because, as one jejune gay man told me, “everyone here does it.” But even common practice is not itself an ethical rationale according to David Hume; the sub-culture reigning in the Castro (gay) district could simply have been dysfunctional, sustained in its narcissistic pathology by unresolved psychological issues prolonging self-absorbed adolescence. Bad air!

2. Mark Sherman and Lindsay Whitehurst, “Supreme Court Upholds State Laws Banning Transgender Girls and Women from School Athletic Teams,” APnews.com, June 30, 2026.
3. Ibid.
4. Sebastian Murdock, “Sotomayor: ‘Facts Do Not Matter’ to Supreme Court after It Upholds Trans Athlete Ban,” The Huffington Post, June 30, 2026.

Free Will and Moral Responsibility

According to Rousseau, we are born free but we live out our life in chains. Although some people subvert background context and foreground personhood such that the chains are believed to be societally imposed as if people are not sufficiently free to transcend or counter the “binding” external strictures of some institution or society, Nietzsche argues that the sovereign individual is lies at the end of an arduous long process by which our species has become bred to be “to a certain degree necessary, uniform, like among like, regular, and consequently calculable” and thus certain people can be trusted to be reliable in promise-keeping.[1] Such people are free individuals. They are autonomous even against the “Though Shalt Nots” of moral mores, which had their place as virtual societal straitjackets in the development of the species but are legitimately cast off by people who can be relied upon to keep promises without violating them in the heat of the moment. Such people are individuals, but not narcissists, for the latter calculate each moment as to what lies in their self-interest—the feelings of others be damned if they are in the way. It is ironic that moral responsibility applies to the latter rather than to the autonomous individuals because only the free ones can call their “dominating instinct” a “conscience.”[2] Modern society, at least in the West, could use an elaboration on Nietzsche’s description of the autonomous individual in so far as such a person is antipodal to the herd animals on whom moral responsibility should be imposed because they cannot be trusted, for they are not promise-keepers. St. Paul’s dictum to keep the fools at a distance is ironically in line with the second essay of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, where the Christian ascetic priest is lampooned for its innate weakness even as it seeks to dominate the strong out of ressentiment.

At the end of human prehistory, and arguably even well beyond that—at the end of a process in which “the morality of mores and the social straitjacket” fashioned the species as being capable of being relied upon and thus of having a memory fortified against the encroachment of legitimate forgetfulness—lies “the ripest fruit,” the “sovereign individual, like only to himself, liberated again from morality of custom, autonomous and supramoral.”[3] Such an individual must be in some sense have achieved regularity, and thus be calculable by others who rely on the promises made. To Nietzsche, autonomous and moral are mutually exclusive.[4] But this does not mean that the autonomous person who is free from one’s own instinctual urges that compete with that of that of conscience necessarily acts immorally. This “emancipated individual,” freed from moral mores, even well-ensconced as custom, that would otherwise be binding and thus hold a person as though in chains, has one’s “own independent, protracted will and the right to make promises.”[5] In this type, we have our species “come to completion.”[6] Free will is not a precondition for external moral customs to be legitimately applied to human beings, and yet it is the autonomous individual who has “the right to make promises.”[7] In such a person, conscience as an instinct is dominate and thus we can say that the morality of keeping one’s own promises is internal and thus consistent with free will.

Whereas Rousseau’s fictional character, Emile, says to his mentor, Lycurgus, “I have decided to be as you made me,” Nietzsche’s autonomous individual says to oneself, “I have decided to me as I have made me,” as being capable of being relied on in the keeping of one’s own promises to others. Such people voluntarily hold themselves to their word. Paradoxically, the autonomous individual “is bound to honor his peers, the strong and reliable (those with the right to make promises)—that is, all those who promise like sovereigns, reluctantly, rarely, slowly, who are chary of trusting, whose trust is a mark of distinction, who give their word something that can be relied on because they know themselves strong enough to maintain it in the face of accidents, even ‘in the face of fate.’”[8] Accidents are things that come along that tempt a person to violate one’s promises. Even though an autonomous individual free of moral custom is free to put one’s instinctual urges that favor satisfying those “accidents” before the urge to keep one’s promises, the person can be relied on to go on putting the promise-keeping urge first. “Here I stand and I cannot do otherwise,” Luther stated as a priest free from Rome; he could have done otherwise, but is inner conscience, a long-standing instinctual urge, was his autonomy. He was free to overcome (i.e., master) his most intractable instinctual urges to the contrary, and strong enough to do precisely that. The output of his mastery were his 95 theses, which he defiantly nailed to a church door. His statement, “I cannot do otherwise,” should not be taken literally as instantiating determinism, but, rather, as a statement of a free decision to go on principle with a resounding force of conscience that follows from a free choice rather than as cutting it off. This is how autonomous and cannot can be viewed as being consistent rather than as contradictory.

The autonomy is inside the “ripened fruit” of our species. The type of moral responsibility that is consistent with this is that which comes voluntarily from within. “The proud awareness of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, this power over oneself and over fate, has in his case penetrated to the profoundest depths and become instinct, the dominating instinct.”[9] The power over oneself is one’s will in choosing to treat one’s conscience as one’s dominant instinct, but can an instinct that is dominate over others really be chosen? Is not the outcome of tussling instincts a result of the contending instincts rather than a separate, internal will? Nietzsche states that the strong cannot be other than strong, and the weak are inherently weak, so presumably free will does not apply to the decision on whether to be weak or strong.

Nevertheless, Nietzsche gives the autonomous individual credit for having a reliable will. “The ‘free’ man, the possessor of a protracted and unbreakable will, also possesses his measure of value.”[10] Perhaps then the autonomous individual applies a measure of high value to the conscience, which can thus act as an instinct that is dominant (though Nietzsche viewed the instincts in physiological terms). Kant claims that reason has absolute value because rational beings use reason to apply value to things. For Nietzsche, it seems that the free will—autonomy within a person—has absolute value because it is the will that can assign values to contending instincts if the will is free of even the most dominant of them, but is the will not itself an instinct according to Nietzsche?

The thorny questions on whether the autonomous individual has free will rather than merely being autonomous of moral customs aside, Nietzsche’s distinction between a promise-keeper and a promise-breaker is clear. A pathos of distance naturally exists between the two basic types of people because one is a free agent who can be trusted whereas the other is a slave to himself and thus should not be trusted.  To be able to keep promises, such that “a world of strange new things, circumstances, even acts of will may be interposed without breaking this long chain of will,” and thus to be able “to stand security for his own future,” such a person should “be aware of his superiority over all those who lack the right to make promises and stand as their own guarantors.”[11] How “much trust, how much fear, how much reverence he arouses—he ‘deserves’ all three—and of how this mastery over himself also necessarily gives him mastery over circumstances, over nature, and over all more short-willed and unreliable creatures?”[12] The deservingness with the superiority, and indeed the respect due all distinguish the promise-keeper from the promise-breaker. The mastery of the autonomous individual extends even over nature, such that perhaps in willing the instinctual urge that we call conscience to be dominant, the free individual makes it so physiologically within himself. In utter contrast are “the feeble windbags who promise without the right to do so, . . . and the liar who breaks his word even at the moment he utters it.”[13] Although Nietzsche claims that the free individuals who will themselves to be reliable in promise-making such that the promises are kept are “bound to reserve a kick” for the promise-breakers, I contend that any association would violate the natural pathos of distance that legitimately exists between the promise-keepers and promise-breakers (and liars).

Ironically, the inferior person, whose narcissism manifests as pathological lies in order to manipulate other people, is more likely to enforce the distance out of envy and resentment, whereas the promise-keeper is likely to engage with other promise-keepers without a thought to the pathetic losers who find it so easy to break their promises and otherwise lie to get what they want. Such people are those who instinctively obviate commitment by “redefining” a romantic relationship as anything goes, including even separate sex with emotional attachment or romantic connection.

For example, being confronted by an autonomous individual for acting like a “trophy whore,” a narcissist who is enslaved to his most intractable urges (and thus refuses to keep promises, and thus cannot and should not be trusted) will refuse to look within and admit to the validity of the accusation and thus be willing to change.  As though a trapped animal, the promise-breaker and liar will strike out at the messenger, viewing that friend as a threat. People with a vested interest in the promiscuity and even in promise-breaking as if it were a virtue would gladly be manipulated by the narcissist into pushing back against the promise-keeper even though the latter would actually like to see the liar as reliable and thus as being capable and deserving of trust.

In short, even though the pathos of distance may be created by the promise-keeper refusing to trust the promise-breaker and pathological liar, the latter makes sure that the distance is enforced, out of sheer anger. “How dare you call me a trophy whore!”, “I will never talk to you again,” and even, “I’m going to manipulate people I know to run you out of town so I never have to see your disgusting face again” constitute a very different response than, “I don’t like myself for lying and reneging so much; I didn’t realize what I have become. Would you please help me so I might become capable of being trusted so someday I could enjoy genuine friendships and even an emotionally-intimate romantic relationship with someone whom I can trust?”

Sadly, the narcissist who views himself as too weak even to ask for help and perceives wake-up calls as attacks will never change, never be trusted; such a person will go through life in a series of superficial relationships lacking commitment and trust. No promise-keeper would agree to be lied to and betrayed by a person who insists on having his cake and eating it too. Even in locales where having separate sex with other romantic interests is the norm, and even deemed worthy to be imposed in a relationship, narcissists will ruin themselves in refusing to maturate into adulthood. Of course, an autonomous individual would object to such an arrangement as being utterly selfish and inconsiderate, and even hurtful; a pathos of distance would naturally be erected like the wall that separated Eastern and Western Europe after World War II for decades.

Whereas an autonomous individual has the strength and free will with which to face oneself internally and thus to change so as to grow as a person and be capable of emotional intimacy in friendship and romance, people who let their immediate urges rule are static entities that will not change. If the two types try to become friends or even a romantic couple, what begins as a stream between them inexorably becomes an abyss that cannot be crossed because they are like oil and water. I am not suggesting that autonomous individuals adopt a savior complex; that would diminish their internal freedom. Rather, I submit that calling out narcissistic liars is a worthy activity because there is a chance that one day some may change as a result, even if they are likely to retaliate because that is easier than facing their own demons and recognizing that selfless love may actually exist and have been freely bestowed on them without them being able to reciprocate. Because Nietzsche claims that the weak cannot become strong, even with external help, it may that simply respecting the natural pathos of distance that separates the honest from the liars is best. It is sad, though, that potentially reliable people who are otherwise good people, even lovable and potentially deserving of unconditional love, must be lost due to their own stubborn intractability and refusal to look within rather than act on the momentary instinctual urge to strike out as if a trapped wild animal. Primitive animals are not free of their momentary, primal urges, and so they are not free to hold themselves as reliable, and thus as trustworthy by other animals. What a species we are in having bred ourselves as a species by means of moral customs to be reliable and yet to still have in our midst people who are utterly untrustworthy, who even treat commitment as if it were a dirty word and use sex as a weapon so as to inflict pain on promise-keepers as if being reliable, and thus honest, were a crime against humanity. The spite with which the weak resent the strong is something on which Nietzsche wrote extensively. Two different orbits; two different types, yet astonishingly of the very same species!

---

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), p. 495.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., p. 496.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., pp. 494-95.
12. Ibid., pp. 495-96.
13. Ibid, p. 496.

On the Ethics of AI

In June, 2024 at the international political meeting of the G7, a group of seven industrial nations, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis, spoke on the ethical dimension of artificial intelligence, or machine-learning. Regarding what the Pope called the “techno-human condition,” machines capable of AI are yet another manifestation of human propensity, which our species has had since its inception, to use tools to mediate with the environment. Although tools can be thought of as an extension of our arms ad legs, it is important to distinguish the human from the machine, even as we posit human characteristics onto some advanced machines, such as computers. In the film, 2001, the computer Hal sounds human, and may even seem to have human motivations, but any such attributions come to an abrupt end when Hal is shut down. To say that Hal dies is to commit a basic category mistake. It would be absurd, for example, to claim that Hal has an after-life. So too, I submit, is there a category mistake in taking the Pope’s talk on the ethics of AI as being religious in nature. Just as it is easy to imprint the human mind on a machine-learning computer, it can be tempting to superimpose the religious domain onto another. The Pope overreached in arbitrarily bringing in religious garb on what is actually an ethical matter in the “techno-human” world.

The full essay is at "The Pope on AI."