Suddenly, mansplaining is a good thing.
Or so I can only conclude after watching Sophia Lorey, a 23-year-old former college soccer player leading a talk on defending “the original intent of Title IX.”
Before she’s even through her preamble, Lorey is shouted down by two men and booted from a California library for having the gall to acknowledge in front of the “we believe in science” fan club the fact that biological males are now playing women’s sports.
How else to approach a frank talk, specifically about keeping women’s sports fair — and female?
In the clip, which is now circulating online, Lorey stands at a lectern in the Mary L. Stephens Davis branch library located in Davis, California and introduces the session, which was meant to “empower and protect girls sports and female athletes.”
She lays out the library’s “code of behavior” adding that comments and questions will be taken at the end.
The talk, Lorey said, was going to explore the “physiological advantage of male athletes,” and the “emotional and psychological impact on girls when men play on their sports teams” noting girls’ dreams of playing college athletics is in peril, “as long as men are allowed to compete in womens sports.”
Lorey, who played college ball at Vanguard University in Costa Mesa, Calif., was drowned out by a dude’s voice, shouting, “Are you going to misgender people throughout the entire [talk]?”
A second one says, “We don’t want any transgender females called males.” And the male librarian shuts her down, saying misgendering is against their policy.
Not only were these two men espousing their rejection of biological reality. They were, as the left is fond of saying, simply, “mansplaining”: Commandeering a conversation from a female intimately acquainted with her subject matter.
The word “mansplaining” has been a central part of our cultural conversation since it was named one of the New York Times‘ “words of the year” in 2010, though the concept crystalized two years earlier in an essay by author Rebecca Solnit.
A 2012 piece in the Atlantic described it as “explaining without regard to the fact that the explainee knows more than the explainer, often done by a man to a woman.”
During the 2020 presidential race, then Vice President Mike Pence was roundly accused of the high crime of mansplaining while in the throes of a debate with Kamala Harris.
“Mr Vice President, I’m speaking,” she told him with withering condescension. Despite their exchange taking place in the context of a verbal joust where rhetorical chops should matter more than sex, Harris’ phrase became a feminist battlecry, a slogan repeated ad nauseam and printed on shirts, pillows and stickers — a bottomless gift shop for the pink pussy hat set.
It was also proof of how the word itself, lobbed at nearly every GOP figure in the last decade, was merely a projection of partisan political beliefs. A cheap but cheered on method to disarm and discredit men, especially with whom progressives disagreed.
In 2020, the NY Times asked, “Why are men still explaining things to women?”
Suddenly, no one on the left is asking this once pressing question.
And surprise, surprise, it has faded as our binary world is blurred and biological men encroach on female spaces.
The hypocrisy is chilling, as men who claim to be women preach to us about periods, win “women of the year” awards and Lia Thomas, who was able to swim on the UPenn women’s team about five minutes after declaring himself female, lectured us the concept of feminism.
Male egos, once prime targets for feminists, are now to be coddled, cradled and never questioned — if they check off a certain identity box.
Forget the girls who get beaten by males on the tennis courts, in the swim lanes and bike trails. Forget the college swim team that changed in a janitor’s closet because they felt uncomfortable disrobing in a locker with Thomas, who still had a penis.
Screw the women inmates who don’t want to be behind bars with men or the 17-year-old girl who ran into a man and his genitilia in the ladies locker at a California YMCA.
Nope, it’s now about prioritizing the feelings of men over the experiences and expertise of women.
All these dudes have to do is self-identify as ladies – or play along with all of these new gender identities. Just like that, magically, they’re not mansplainers, they’re unimpeachable rulers of the universe encouraged to tell us chicks, how it is.
And we’re just supposed to sit back and enjoy being transplained to.
