I swear, I don’t know why anybody with more than a few neurons listens to The Young Turks any more (young folk do, but their complement of neurons hasn’t yet connected properly). The show is disgustingly progressive, with founder Cenk Uygur regularly embarrassing himself by having tantrums on the show and in other places, including on Piers Morgan’s show and at airports. Further both he and co-host Ana Kasparian regularly criticize Israel for “genocide” and “apartheid”, lying regularly. (I swear to Ceiling Cat, Cenk is going to blow an artery some day.) Such are the views of “progressives.”
Now Cenk is pushing to have trans-identified males (“trans women”) compete on women’s high-school athletic teams. That’s ridiculous because already in high school males and males who have reached puberty (almost all of them) have an athletic advantage over women, and so women athletes are disadvantaged. Further, high school sports aren’t like kickball and dodgeball in elementary school: they are the launching pad for college athletics (with scholarships), which in turn are the launching pad for professional athletics.
Cenk’s logic is bizarre, as you can read in this Substack article by Jennifer Sey (click on screenshot below):
An excerpt:
There is a clip going around on X of Cenk Uygur appearing on the Triggernometry podcast and discussing the issue of men in women’s sports. Uygur is the founder and host of The Young Turks, a long-running progressive online news and commentary network, and a frequent voice on the American left.
His views are often considered “heterodox” but not because they don’t strictly line up with leftie party line views or mainstream group dogma. Rather because his views are further to the left of the Democrats. He basically just hates the Democratic Party. Which is fine, I don’t like them either. But for different reasons.
Uygur’s comments on the show were revealing.
Here is the clip:
And Sey put the clip on Twitter (“X”). Do listen to about two minutes of Cenk being a blockhead. Note his emphasis on “inspecting genitals.”
Why does anyone listen to anything Cenk says?? pic.twitter.com/l3Km1yMgvr
— Jennifer Sey (@JenniferSey) August 15, 2026
More:
[Cenk] claimed that at the professional and Olympic level, leagues should decide the rules. He says it’s up to them, the leagues, and we should all accept that. He’s not fully conceding male advantage in total but conceding that perhaps there is male advantage at the high level and elite league’s have the right to decide what their own rules are.
This makes no sense. Why would male advantage exist at the highest levels of sports but not at the high school level? It’s an illogical and incoherent position.
He cited a case of a “trans woman” in her forties who immediately lifted two hundred pounds more than the biological women in the competition. Without much training at all.
He’s close on the facts. But it’s even worse.
He is referring to Canadian male powerlifter Anne Andres. Here is Andres disparaging women because apparently he doesn’t understand inherent upper body strength differences between men and women. Nice fella. He’s basically like: why are women so weak and pathetic?
Here’s the clip of Andres posted by Sey on Twitter:
🏋️Trans identifying male, Anne Andres is Alberta Canada’s women’s powerlifting record holder in bench
🚨competes next month in women’s category at the 2023 CPU National Championships🚩Recognizes no understanding of upper body strength differences btw males & females
🧵 pic.twitter.com/DYEyEWZTLr— ICONS (@icons_women) January 4, 2023
At the Canadian Powerlifting Union’s 2023 Western Canadian Championship, Andres won the female masters category with a total combined score that was over 200 kilograms (more than 400 pounds!) higher than the closest competitor, drawing significant public debate and media coverage regarding athletic fairness
Then Uygur pivoted.
At the high school level, he said, it becomes a “balancing act.” He called the entire issue “the tiniest” in America and a “wedge issue” designed to distract from corporate power. That’s what he thinks everything is about. Well that, and Israel.
His solution: let deluded males who “identify as female” compete against girls in high school and, I guess, middle school, though he doesn’t mention that age group.
Because it doesn’t matter that much or something, for high school girls.
“I would rather have my daughter come in second, third, or eighth . . . than traumatize those kids [“trans”],” he declared. “I’m not checking your genitalia and I’m not traumatizing you when you’re a kid.” He completely ignores any trauma to the girls in having to share a locker room with boys or give up their own hard won triumphs to boys.
This is not a serious or coherent position. Truth cannot be negotiated. There is no balancing act when it comes to biological reality. Men are not women. Male puberty produces irreversible advantages in muscle mass, bone density, lung capacity and strength that no amount of hormone suppression erases. And there are advantages even before puberty!
That’s true. As a rough cutoff, I’d say that when men and women begin puberty (roughly at eleven years old, though of course there’s a lot of variation), they should no longer be put together on any sports team, whether trans-identified or not. That would be at the fifth grade: in elementary school. After fifth grade, we can think about a cutoff mandating sports segregation by biological sex, with either an “other” team for trans-identified people, or allowing all trans-identified people to compete on men’s teams. A bit more:
High school sports are not recreational playdates. It is so demeaning to women and girls and their hard work to suggest that they are. High school sports determine scholarships, national rankings, roster spots and the formative experience of fair competition. Some of the top girls will go on to compete in college and then vie for Olympic berths.
Telling girls that they must simply accept displacement so that males with “gender dysphoria” are not “otherized” (his words, not mine) subordinates female achievement and safety to male feelings. It makes girls and women second class citizens.
The genital-check talking point is a deliberate distraction. No one is proposing invasive inspections of children. Schools already require physicals and medical documentation. A doctor’s note confirming biological sex is straightforward and already standard practice for other eligibility questions.
Yes, Cenk’s focus on “genital inspection” is ridiculous. If there’s any question that arises about someone’s sex, a cheek swab can reveal the presence of the SRY gene (on the Y) with substantial accuracy. There are other tests as well, and people like Anne Andres admit that they’re biological males. But if a person shows up in a women’s locker room with big muscles and a penis, there’s not much of a question. More:
The most damning part of Uygur’s remarks is the personal one. He is willing to have his own daughter lose opportunities, titles and privacy so that a male competitor is not made to feel uncomfortable or sad. He says that this is the compassionate thing to do. And if she doesn’t get into her first choice college because of it, so be it.
But where is the compassion in lying to a confused boy and telling him his delusion is reality and that he can, in fact, become a girl? It’s cruel.
This is also a profound abdication of a father’s duty to protect his daughter’s rights. It is difficult to imagine him telling a son, “Just take the L; that other athlete is vulnerable, so your hard work and fair play come second. Just be nice.” Head pat.
We do not tolerate even one athlete using performance-enhancing drugs because it destroys the integrity of the contest. Why would we accept even one male taking medals, scholarships or team spots from female athletes? We would only do that if we thought girls’ experiences just didn’t matter all that much in the grand scheme of things.
The numbers already exceed a handful of isolated cases; and each one is one too many. Thousands of girls and women have already been impacted.
The last link goes to a website where you can see that, contrary to what Cenk says, it’s not just a tiny handful of women who have lost out to trans-identified men playing on women’s sports teams. And if this is a matter of “rights,” which I think it is, then there is no number of unfair cases that must be exceeded before women’s rights are violated. One case will do. But look at the link. And, as trans identities increase, so will the number of cases of unfairness.
h/t: Ginger K.
Even prior to high school boys tend to have an advantage at sports (those less of one than after puberty). Thus 8-yr-old boys will generally outcompete 8-yr-old girls.
At 11 and 12 it is more complicated, since girls generally enter puberty and start their growth spurt about 18 months earlier than boys, and that can counter boys’ natural advantage. Thus, at such ages, girls can often hold their own against boys if matched by age (though not if matched by height).
Once the boys are well in to puberty, of course, they’ll then have a big advantage in most sports.
I don’t agree with Cenk. What he proposes is unfair to girls, unsafe in contact sports (do you remember the girl from North Carolina playing competitive volleyball, who was injured by a male on the opposing team by having him spike the ball on her head?).
Cenk’s lie about genital inspections (for the purpose of sex verification) is very annoying.
And then there is what I would call the dynamic inconsistency of Cenk’s position: So we are supoosed to lie to gender-dysphoric children about their sex until they turn 18, and then we tell them the truth? How is that supposed to work? When you tell a boy that he’s a girl he may want to go on puberty blockers and then on cross-sex hormones. And then you tell him, at 18, after he has had these treatments: Oh, this was all a charade. You can’t really change your sex!
And keep in mind that most gender-confused kids will reconcile with their body (as they emerge from puberty) and just turn out to be gay. The idea that puberty blockers give gender-dysphoric kids time to think is just a theory that is contradicted by the data.
PCC(E) : “And if this is a matter of “rights,” which I think it is […]”
100% – endowed, natural, or intrinsic rights.
Any male is already, and always has been, in possession of the natural right to compete as they see fit athletically against any other males. Likewise for females.
Intersectional Identity is the Spirit (Geist) of a New Age sociognostic religion – a creation of the mind independent of material nature – that subsumes and lifts up the low-level knowledge of the material category of sex (Aufheben).
In the case that Intersectional Identity could be somehow conceived of as natural or endowed highlights the Gnostic Consciousness required to reify the belief. It’s all in their head.
There can be no natural right to use the participants of athletics in the practice of one’s own religion. If one wishes to do so, they can keep it to themselves.
But putting males into female athletics keeps nothing to oneself. It is intended to transform society. Females competing in male athletics apparently does not work the same way but it is the same thought process. Corner cases serve only as exceptions which prove the rule.
“Here is Andres disparaging women because apparently he doesn’t understand inherent upper body strength differences between men and women…”
I see this repeated constantly…the qualification that men only have an “upper body” advantage over women, as if leg strength is entirely equal. It isn’t, even on a pound for pound basis. Men still have a material advantage on lower body as well. To point out the obvious, men dominate in sprinting, distance running, jumping….uh these all seem to involve the legs to some degree.
But to point out the less obvious, the “weightlifting” referred to above is Olympic weightlifting, which is primarily a lower body sport these days. The snatch and clean and jerk involve tremendous lower body power to get the weight moving…in fact the primary training exercise for this sport (other than practicing the lifts themselves) is the barbell back squat. And men dominate this sport….65 kilo men can outlift the heaviest (i.e. 150 kilo women).
Again, I don’t know where this meme started that women are equal to men in lower body strength.
As I read it, it all refers to power lifting: bench press, squat, dead lift, but it makes no difference as all lifting except the old standing press which was eliminated some years ago from olympic lifting competition as being too hard to enforce properly, and bench press require lower body and core strength.
Many years ago, a viet-nam combat vet who had lost his legs in action and a big part of his physical therapy was doing bench presses entered a power lifting meet I was in. The aau officials were apoplectic: what weight class should he be in with the upper body of a heavyweight but without legs, a much lower bodyweight. And because he cannot do a squat or deadlift, he cannot “total”. Oh and he of course could not keep his feet flat on the floor as required during a bench press. The vet had a sense of humor about it all, explaining that he really did not have his legs blown off so he could win a bench press competition. Eventually he was allowed to compete to the applause of the other competitors.
Apparently some of the Canadian officials had a sense of humor about this lady in 2023 as there was a bit of tit for tat from the coach according to this quote:
“ Avi Silverberg, the head coach of Team Canada Powerlifting, responded by entering a women’s powerlifting competition, where Andres was in attendance. While self-identifying as female in protest, Silverberg then broke Andres’s bench press record by nearly 100 pounds, benching 370 pounds.”
You are correct…it is referring to powerlifting not Olympic lifting.
In retrospect, TYT was always like this. But Trump and Gaza, plus having multiple former TYT hosts like Jimmy Dore start their own shows and constantly crap on TYT (mostly from the left), seems to have driven Cenk literally nuts. Being eclipsed by his idiot nephew, Hasan Piker, probably hasn’t been great for his mental health either.
Luckily, Ana has reached sanity on some issues, like crime.
I had no idea that Hasan Piker was Cenk’s nephew!
Indeed!
Among critics, he is still commonly called “Cenk’s Nephew” because he got started as a nepo baby on TYT.
And now that Hasan is bigger than Cenk, Cenk himself is perhaps best called “Cenk’s Nephew’s Uncle”.
As we once would have asked as students of Behavioral Genetics:
Is the stupidity because of genetics or early environment?
And yes, dismissing biology or other empirical evidence counts as stupidity.
The meme that biology has no influence on physiological traits like muscle mass, or that it is far less important than one’s identity, is just more evidence of the fantasy world lived in by the ideological extreme left, which, by influence online and through the media, has diffused into mainstream society. I hope that societal backlash happens soon, and that empirical data regains its rightful place in mainstream society—I’d like to live to see it, and as an alte kocker, I don’t have many years to wait.
But did Cenk really deny empirical evidence on biology or does he simply think that girls and women are second-class citizens? Or is it that he simpy hasn’t thought through his position? I put the question in comment # 2 above here:
I no doubt got this link many years ago on WEIT. It very comprehensively compares the performance of the top high school boys to the top female olympic athletes. Some women do beat the boys in some events, but more often than not … not.
https://boysvswomen.com/#/
“But where is the compassion in lying to a confused boy and telling him his delusion is reality and that he can, in fact, become a girl? It’s cruel.”
Perhaps a philosopher somewhere will soon write about the parallel here with Jason Arday?
Here are two:
https://lgbcouragecoalition.substack.com/p/the-same-world-that-affirmed-jason?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1729963&post_id=211613392&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=wz3tc&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
https://www.broadview.news/p/the-tragic-affirmation-of-jason-arday?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=73620&post_id=211555181&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=wz3tc&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
A problem with single sex teams is they disadvantage small schools. Take for example hockey – needs a squad of 13-14 players. At a school with <300 people, will there be that number of both boys and girls in age group interested in playing in school competitions? Or do children miss out?
Here (New Zealand) in local competition, the hockey teams are mixed up to about 13 but teams must have at least two girls on the field at any time. Most have more. And provincial NZ has none of the trans rubbish. The girls are all young biological women. I note having refereed some of the games that some of thee smaller high schools have girls playing in their boys team (they only have one age grade team in the competition) at older age grades.
That is exactly why the best solution is to have two teams/divisions:
An open team that anyone can join
A female only team/division (no biological males)
That way, women are given maximal opportunities. The most talented can compete in the open team, and the rest are protected from having to compete with biological males. Yes, this will slightly disadvantage boys (the lower tier boys may lose a spot to some exceptional girls), but usually there are more boys sports and more opportunities for boys to compete anyway.
We can give the transwomen another special name…”non-biological women”. You’re still a woman, honey, just not a “biological woman”. We’ll cheer you on in the Open division using whatever pronoun you want.
Sorry, Jeff Vader. ALL women are biological, IOW, female. Men who think they’re women are honestly mistaken, lying, or delusional. In any case, they’re still men, IOW, biological males.
Language like this implies that there are two categories of women, one biological and one not. This is not the case.
Note that no one ever says “nonbiological men.”
I’m glad that seems to be working out, but wouldn’t there be occasions where a team does not have enough girls? I suppose then there can be an agreement to equalize the boy/girl ratio on the opposing team.
The argument that trans-identified high school males should be allowed to play on the girls’ team “because there aren’t that many of them” immediately prompts a question regarding the dividing line.
Let’s say we allow this because there’s only a dozen “trans girl athletes” in the country. Would a hundred be too many? A thousand? A dozen in every high school? And how many awards would be too alarming for your argument to work? What is your cutoff, where you say “okay, all these trans ‘girls’ need to quit their teams? Yes, you’ve been playing and it’s become the accepted standard — but whoa! There are now too many of you, you’re too good at it, and my concern has been triggered!”
I have never seen anyone who claims that there just aren’t enough trans athletes for the issue to matter go ahead and answer the question on a hypothetical cutoff point where suddenly it does matter. That’s because the numbers were never the point and the argument is ingenuous and bogus. Ask the question and they all immediately switch tactics, point out the window, and yell “squirrel!” Always fun to watch.
I wonder how Cenk feels about NBA players in the WNBA. https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/enes-kanter-alleges-nba-players-165242279.html
Hey, if they say they are women then they ARE women. So to be logically consistent Cenk should be on board with it.
“A woman is whoever she says she is” – standard woke response to the question “what is a woman?”
Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner opposes men playing in the WNBA:
https://nypost.com/2026/08/16/sports/caitlyn-jenner-says-enes-kanter-freedom-royce-white-exposing-wnbas-trans-hypocrisy/