Riley Gaines is back in the news.

After her patently unfair college competition against “transgender” swimmer Lia Thomas, she has been crossing the country speaking out against men competing in women’s college sports. And unsurprisingly, many progressives are outraged at a woman who dares to speak the truth about womanhood.

Most recently, Eventbrite (yes, the website you’ve probably used to RSVP for something recently) decided to refuse ticket sales for Gaines’ talk “Protecting Women’s Sports.”

According to Eventbrite, Gaines’ event violated their community guidelines, which

“do not allow content or events that . . . discriminate against, harass, disparage, threaten, incite violence against, or otherwise target individuals or groups based on their actual or perceived . . . gender identity, [or] sexual orientation.”

But in response, many outraged Eventbrite patrons have thankfully started cancelling their accounts. Gaines, who was scheduled to speak at the University of California, Davis in a few weeks, recently applauded the Eventbrite boycott on X (formerly Twitter).

There’s a significant note of irony here.

Eventbrite invoked a community guideline—one that explicitly cracks down on targeting individuals—in order to justify silencing a speaker whose goal is to expose the targeting of biological women in college sports. So here’s a question for us:

how did we get to the point where simply advocating for protecting women suddenly became “discrimination?”

Imagine for a moment that you are watching your 16-year-old son’s track meet. Your son has been training for this day for months, getting up at obnoxious hours to run through freezing cold or gloomy rain, skipping social events so he can get his required hours of sleep, and constantly fighting the temptations to quit. But his discipline has fought through it all, and his body has gotten tougher and faster while his determination to win has only increased.

As he walks up to the starting line, all those months of difficult training are pent up, cocked back, and ready to burst forward—just like the hammer on the starter’s pistol. It’s the race he’s been dreaming of for a long time.

But it’s the race someone else has been dreaming of as well.

As your son crouches down at the starting line, a bicyclist saunters up in the next lane. He steadies his feet on the pedals, checks that he’s in the correct gear, and fastens his helmet. In the same moment that you realize what is happening, the starting gun goes off. Your son leaps forward and pounds the ground as fast as he can while the bicyclist cranks his pedals and bolts ahead. Needless to say, the bicyclist screams across the finish line far ahead of everyone else. And appallingly, he takes the trophy.

After all, the referee says, the bicyclist was also 16 and had also worked very hard. We can’t discriminate, you know.

Even more appallingly, this twisted view of competition describes college sports in schools across America. By ostensibly promoting equality—allowing all who self-describe as “women” to compete in women’s sports—college sports now display a twisted form of inequality, about as twisted as allowing a bicyclist to compete in a foot race. If your track-loving son were beaten that way, you wouldn’t hesitate to protest:

“The bicyclist was driving a completely different kind of machine! He was competing using equipment that is naturally faster—he may have trained hard too, but he was simply in the wrong category!”

Yet somehow, we aren’t allowed to say such things about biological men competing in sports set apart for biological women.

This betrays the fundamental truth that modern progressives refuse to accept—women are created to be different from men, physically, socially, and spiritually. We see this both in Scripture and in God’s revelation through nature. God illustrated this by creating Adam from the ground, but Eve from his side (Gen. 2:7, 22).

God designated women to have different roles within the church (1 Tim. 2:12) and the family (Eph. 5:22). Scripture even indicates that the very nature of things teaches us that men and women have different norms to follow (1 Cor. 11:14–15). And natural revelation reveals this as well. Men’s testosterone levels are higher by orders of magnitude, and women naturally have about one-half the upper body strength and two-thirds the lower body strength of men.

Per the way God made the two sexes, men naturally tend to be better at athletic activities. You might put it this way, recalling our track meet travesty scenario: men are driving a completely different kind of machine. So here’s our critical question:

Would it discriminate against the bicyclist if the referee refused to let him compete in the track meet?

Not at all! As a mentor of mine says, the proper understanding of equality is not to treat all things exactly the same, but to “treat like things like and unlike things unlike.” If the bicyclist decides to compete in a bike race—where everyone is alike to him—he will be treated exactly the same as everyone else.

But it mangles the concept of equality almost beyond recognition if we say that bicyclists must have access to foot races. To do so would make the race extremely unequal to all of the foot racers.

You see, the progressive noisemakers tend to focus all their noisemaking capacities on the bicyclists whom we are claiming should be kicked out.

“Inequality! Discrimination! Intolerance!”

But they don’t address the fact that kicking out bicyclists is the only way to make the race equal for those who were intended to compete in it.

We ought to start making a lot more noise about the majority whose equality we are protecting.

Americans—especially American men—ought to stand up against this absolute nonsense that is taking advantage of women in twisted, deceptive ways. And it’s not because we hate those who call themselves “transgender.”

It’s because it’s our duty to protect women against those who would take advantage of them.

Think about it this way: if a man threateningly approached your wife, you’d likely act lightning-fast to shield her. You wouldn’t do it because you just happened to hate the guy; you’d do it because you love your wife and need to protect her.

When we call for a return to purity in women’s sports, the progressives constantly want to focus the attention on the guys we just blocked. Instead of the women we just saved.