“It is surely unfair on women who have to compete against people who, biologically, are still men,” tennis legend Martina Navratilova recently proclaimed. “You can’t just proclaim yourself a female and be able to compete against women. There must be some standards, and having a penis and competing as a woman would not fit that standard.”

Activists blasted Navratilova as “transphobic” and years after she identified as a lesbian the tennis star was booted from the board of a LBGT nonprofit.  Long before any of that happened, women who were biologically still men were competing against other women.  The Union of  Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) deployed such athletes in the quest to show the superiority of “scientific” Communist dictatorship over the democratic nations of the West.

For example, shot putter and discus thrower Tamara Natanovna Press won three gold medals and one silver medal at the 1960 and 1964 Olympics. From 1959 to 1965 Tamara Natanovna set five world records in shot put and six in discus. In 1960, the USSR, then headed by Nikita Khrushchev, famous for his “History is on our side. We will bury you” prophecy, awarded Tamara the Order of Lenin.

At the 1960 Olympics Irina Natanovna Press, holder of many world records, won a gold medal in the 80 meter hurdles and in 1964 bagged gold in the pentathlon. The pair’s heavy masculine features got them dubbed “the Press brothers,” and after the introduction of mandatory gender testing in 1966 the Soviet duo suddenly disappeared. Decades later, their brand unfair advantage would gain a revival.

In 2018, Terry Miller of Bloomfield High in Connecticut “set a girls state indoor record of 6.95 seconds” in the 55-meter dash. Andraya Yearwood, who is also “transitioning to female,” finished second with a time of 7.01. On the other hand, the third-place finisher, with a time of 7.23, was “not transgender.” Like Martina Navratilova, some lesbian activists find this disturbing.

Julia Beck told Tucker Carlson of Fox News that “women and girls all share a biological reality” that men can never share, no matter what surgery they might undergo. “In many states, men can legally identify themselves as female and gain access to women’s single-sex spaces,” Beck explained, “and sports is just one institution where men are taking titles, scholarships, and this is a problem.” Beck was kicked off the Baltimore mayor’s LGBTQ commission, she said, “simply for stating biological facts.”  

Beck and Navratilova had violated the leftist orthodoxy that men and women are “undifferentiated” and that gender is a “construct” of society. Actually, nature determines male and female, and the expensive surgeries the transgendered undergo are literally constructs. Females get a tooling installation and men endure a tuck-and-roll job.  

Indian athlete Santhi Soundarajan failed a gender test and was stripped of her silver medal for the 800 meters at the 2006 Asian games. This was “unethical and biased,” Soundarajan complained. “Sports federations should come up with a solution to this, rather than ostracizing somebody.”  Here automotive competitions can provide some guidance.

Drag racing features categories for “stock” automobiles, untouched from factory specifications, and “funny cars” and other vehicles altered with bigger engines, superchargers and such. Likewise, males who get tuck-and-roll surgery should compete only against others similarly deconstructed, and not against women and girls who are “stock” and from their creator. The altered types, for their part, also create difficulties in fields such as criminal justice.

Convicted murderer Rodney Quine didn’t like the conditions in California’s tough Mule Creek State Prison, so he claimed he was really a woman. In 2015, federal judge Jon Tigar, an Obama appointee, ruled that denial of the operation was “cruel and unusual punishment” and ordered the state of California to pay for the sex-change operation, which cost $100,000. After the rebranded “Shiloh Heavenly Quine” transferred to the women’s prison at Chowchilla, Tigar ordered that taxpayers spring for Quine’s nightgowns, robes, scarves and such.

Sacramento-area history teacher David Warfield got a sex-change operation in 1999 and became Dana Rivers. In 2016, Oakland police charged Rivers with killing Patricia Wright, 57, Charlotte Reed, 56, and 19-year-old Toto Diambu, who all suffered fatal gunshot and stab wounds before Rivers torched the house. For some observers it was a he-said-she-said kind of case, but a woman named Anita Perry disagreed.

“This is a male, and please don’t dishonor the innocent victims,” Perry wrote in a comment on the San Jose Mercury News story. “He is male, so call him transwoman or man. Males who murder women don’t deserve the honor of being called women. If found guilty, I hope people riot if they try sending him to a women’s prison.” Good luck with that.

Meanwhile, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics did not bury the West, and for all their pretensions about science, the USSR never allowed the svelte Tamara and Irina to be tested for gender. Incredibly enough, the pair retain their Olympic gold medals and world records.

Tamara and Irina were often dubbed the “Press brothers” but today that would draw charges of “transphobia” and get the critic tossed from LGBTQ groups. That’s what happened to Martina Navratilova when she claimed women should not compete against “people who, biologically, are still men,” and Julia Beck, “simply for stating biological facts.”