#Biden’s transgender policy could threaten women’s soccer

Why can’t the political and the practical co-exist? Why must otherwise sound, noble ideologies be so detached from common-sense realities?

We saw what’s beginning to play out now after the last women’s soccer World Cup, likely the last, I suggested, to be contested by born-and-raised women without lawsuits and demonstrations of anger and entitlement.

On Day 1 of his term, President Biden declared he unconditionally, across-the-board supports LGBTQ inclusiveness, from the military to athletics. As an ideology? Great. As a practicality? Ridiculous.

Let’s boil it down to a visceral reality:

Let’s say Biden’s granddaughter shows up to run the 880 in the high school track championships. She has trained for years to qualify, which she easily did.

But when she arrives, she looks down the starting lineups to sees a muscular, 6-foot-4 competitor who now “identifies” as a female.

That big, strong ex-male easily wins the regional championship. This passes Biden’s smell test? His sense of fair play? This conforms with any enlightened, reasonable person’s sense of right from wrong? This is good for what ails us?

Ah, but to protest such lunacy one risks being called and branded all sorts of names for the intolerant. Heck, your home may be picketed or worse by those who demand tolerance, of course. Already, women’s athletic groups that have protested this have been condemned as intolerant, backward bigots.

In 2018, two males, also-rans on their boys’ Connecticut high school track team, declared that they’re transgender females before easily winning girls’ local high track and field championships, eliminating girls from advancing. Biden would applaud that? Really?

“I promise you,” Biden said while campaigning for president, “there is no reason to suggest that there should be any right denied your [transgender] daughter. … None. Zero.”

And he immediately kept that promise.

Four and five years ago, legislative battles raged in North Carolina and Texas over public bathroom rights. Economic threats were issued by organized sports, including the NFL, if LGBTQ folks aren’t allowed to use the bathrooms corresponding to their current sexual identification. The loss of big events — Super Bowls, NCAA basketball tournaments — was held over these states as acts of political extortion.

Yet the practicality of the matter was ignored. After all, all restrooms have stalls for privacy, and no biological woman would try to use anything other than one of those stalls.

Yet the gender bathroom issue became the driving force behind sporting-event boycotts.

So the needless argument became strictly political because the practicality of bathroom use was ignored. And still is. Makes perfect nonsense to me.

So future women’s World Cup teams, among other female competitions — tennis, basketball, golf, swimming — may even include a few participants born as women. To paraphrase a Temptations song, “Get ready, ’cause here it comes.”

Bloggers’ site offers library of old baseball cards

Looking for a cool website? Check out Gary Cieradkowski’s “Infinite Baseball Card Set”, which posts pictures of baseball cards from the late 1800s into the 1950s. Then click on the card to read a well-researched, often fascinating story about the players, many of them otherwise unknown.

Never knew that 130 professional baseball players, of all levels and achievement, were killed in World War ll. This week, Cieradkowski, from his home in Kentucky, has a show-and-tell on Milton “Rosey” Rosenberg, a promising lefty pitcher from Hunter, N.Y., killed in action in the Leyte invasion of the Philippines.

There’s also the minor league card and story of Tommy Lasorda igniting “The Fight of ’57,” a 35-minute brawl while he pitched in the Pacific Coast League for the 1957 Los Angeles Angels.

By the way, with the statute of limitations expired, I admit it: I cheated. I played with a fixed deck.

Before we gathered to flip baseball cards, I’d remove and hide my non-expendables — all Yankees, even Hal Reniff, Harmon Killebrew, Warren Spahn, Hank Aaron and a player they unsuccessfully tried to rename “Bob” on his baseball cards, Roberto Clemente.

Of course, I’m with the rest of us whose mother “threw them out.”

Were there comm issues on mound?

With Masahiro Tanaka gone, we may never know how he communicated on the mound with Gary Sanchez — both used interpreters during interviews — or why they placed their gloves over their mouths. Or was that to foil in-house Japanese and Spanish-speaking lip readers?

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Seems every time I watch a Rangers game on MSG the past few years, I hear — end-to-end, studio to booth — “Good job” and “Nice play” by the Rangers. But rarely are they winning and often they are losing.

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As readers, including 96-year-old Elaine Blumstein, have informed me, Friday I applied the immigrant movie mogul’s quote — “Include me out!” — to the wrong mogul. The speaker wasn’t Adolph Zukor but Samuel Goldwyn.

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Nets YES analyst Sarah Kustok seems to address the Nets as if we’ve never before seen a basketball game. She emotes excitedly over the smallest Nets successes — any field goal — that she seems to be selling to an audience that already bought in. Give us a break — and some credit.

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Lookalikes: Rangers’ forward Mika Zibanejad and Katherine the Great’s mentor, Rasputin.

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Showtime’s “Inside the NFL” last week included panelists Ray Lewis, Brandon Marshall and Michael Irvin. All have the NFL and arrest records in common. But those are the ex-players TV rewards!

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Reader Peter Dowd: With all the TV commercial stoppages, “Don’t tell me anyone has become tired or worn down in today’s NFL.” Worse, “momentum,” once a significant ingredient in NFL games, has been eliminated.

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Last week the Cavaliers traded Kevin Porter Jr. to the Rockets for, based on reports out of Cleveland, failure to behave. Really.

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Nothing recedes like excess. Reader Dan Stevens: “Channel surfing last night, I passed a few NBA games. I literally couldn’t tell which teams were playing by just looking at their uniforms. There was a time when that wasn’t the case.”