Anonymous Mailbag

It’s Tuesday, which means it’s time for the anonymous mailbag to rescue you from your usual work and life doldrums.

While also solving all the problems in the OutKick universe.

As always, you can send your anonymous mailbag questions to claytravis@gmail.com, anonymity guaranteed.

But, first, can we all pause and exult over the brave judge in Florida who finally ended the absurd, anti-science, two-year mask mandate for airplanes, trains, and Ubers? All it took was one brave judge to actually apply the law and this entire insanity collapsed in a matter of hours.

Hallelujah!

Okay, here we go with your questions:

“If a male Shaq-body-type basketball player transitioned to female and scored 50 each night in the WNBA, dunking on women, what would the reaction of woke media and WNBA liberals be? Would he/she be portrayed as the Jackie Robinson-equivalent of trans athletes and celebrated? Would their reaction be different (basically non-existent) from what happening in NCAA women’s swimming?”

I think the question you’re asking is inevitably going to arise.

At some point, a top male athlete will decide to become a woman. Remember the Penn transgender swimmer was a fairly mediocre male swimmer. And most people don’t care that much about women’s swimming, especially women’s college swimming, to make much of a stink about this.

But what happens if, say, a top men’s tennis, basketball, golf, soccer player or sprinter decides to become a woman? Most of us know the names of the top women’s tennis, basketball, golf, soccer or sprinter athletes. What if a seven foot man, a dominant player in the NBA, decided to transition? I don’t think it’s a joke to say that Giannis, if he became a woman, could average 70 points a night in the WNBA. He/she would be completely unstoppable.

The same thing would be true if Djokovic, Nadal or any other top fifty men’s player decided to become a women’s tennis player. No one would ever beat him/her as long as they played. What if Pulisic decided to become a woman? He/she would dominate women’s soccer at a level never seen before.

At some point, there will be a top male athlete in a popular women’s sport who transitions and becomes the greatest “women’s” athlete of all time in that sport. And immediately breaks every record that has ever existed. Significantly, it will also be impossible to ignore because there are enough people who are fans of those sports that everyone would be forced to discuss it.

So far, the male athletes who decide to become women haven’t done so in sports that command much attention. And they haven’t been top male athletes in their sports. (Right now there are financial incentives for mediocre male professional athletes to become women. Think about how much more, for instance, the best “women’s” tennis player makes than the 450th best male tennis player makes. The financial incentives alone are there in spades. Not so much, honestly, for the top male athletes because they make a ton of money already and would stand to make way less, most of the time, by becoming a woman. But the guys on the fringes of being professional athletes in male sports would be the GOATs of women’s sports.)

Which is why some male athletes are going to become women and compete in all these sports eventually.

It’s inevitable.

And when it does, there will be only one option: people will have to choose to either support women’s athletics being for biological women or they will have to acknowledge that the greatest “women’s” athletes of all time are men.

I’m on the side of women competing with women, as are the vast majority of sports fans.

But what’s happening right now is the woke sports media is mostly pretending this story — and the resulting choice it requires — isn’t actually out there.

In the years ahead, this failure to make a choice will become increasingly untenable. You either believe in men competing against men and women competing against women, or you believe biological men should win everything.

Period.

“So I’ve always helped out coaching my son’s baseball teams, from T-ball until now in kid pitch. The last two seasons I’ve had to step up and take on the responsibility of head coach due to a lack of volunteers.

So twice now, once last season and once this season, I’ve had some random dudes anonymously text me wanting to have secret affairs. Both mentioned they were married men with kids like me. That tells me they know who I am. When the first one happened I was certain it was a friend messing with me and just played along for a few texts, but soon realized it was no joke. So I told the dude leave me alone and blocked the number. Now it’s happened again this season. I didn’t even entertain that it might be a joke and shut it down right away. My wife wanted to spend money and try to reverse look up the numbers, but honestly I’d rather not know who these people are. Especially because I’m convinced they got my number when I put it out to the baseball teams I’m coaching. Would be so awkward if I had to see these people all the time. I’ve got no problem with how people choose their sex lives, that one just isn’t for me. So my question is twofold, would you want to know who it is? And am I giving off a vibe or do secretly gay married men have to shoot as many shots as they can and I’m just getting caught in the crossfire?”

I’d probably want to know who it was if I were you, just because I wouldn’t want to have my phone number circulating in this way. But I’d also expect that if you’re getting random texts like these, they are coming from someone’s burner phone. I just can’t imagine that a married man, who is otherwise pretending to be straight in his life, is texting other dads that he wants to have an affair with them from a traceable phone number.

That doesn’t mean, however, that this isn’t risky behavior.

Now due to my unblemished record of heterosexuality, I’m not an expert on gay men, but what I have pointed out before is gay men are basically straight men except they like to bang dudes. What do I mean by that? They engage in all sorts of risky sex behavior. Not because they are gay, but because it’s two dudes. Think about it, in heterosexual relationships, it is usually the woman who keeps men from doing insanely risky things.

When I was in college, some of the bathrooms at George Washington University became super popular for gay guys to meet up and have anonymous sex there. That is, dudes who didn’t know each other would show up in a random college bathroom and bang each other. You might be thinking, “Man, that’s wild,” but the truth is if heterosexual men could show up at bathrooms and random girls were there who just wanted to bang, this would be the most popular bathroom that had ever existed.

Dudes would camp out there.

There would be lines for days.

Think about some of the stuff that gay dudes think up. Glory holes, for instance. They make a hole in a wall and stick their dicks in it and other gay guys are showing up and these things are wildly popular. If heterosexual women were into this thing, straight dudes would put their dicks in wall holes all day long too. But it doesn’t happen because heterosexual women, in general, have much lower sex drives than heterosexual men and don’t engage in risky behavior like this.

Gay dudes are, generally speaking, in much better shape then straight men. Why? Because gay men care more about the physical attractiveness of men than women do. With gay men, you have double the sex drive and none of the restraint. So, in general, my bet is gay men would throw out sex hail marys way more often than straight men. Because the rate of success is much higher. (The average gay man has around ten times as many life partners as the average straight man.)

Now I’ve coached little league baseball for years, and no gay men have tried to bang me. That could be for several reasons. One, I may not be that good looking. Two, I may not give off much of a “I’d like to suck a dick” vibe. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but maybe you do. Or maybe you’ve just got a super aggressive parent and he’s throwing out hail marys to lots of people and most of them are too embarrassed to even mention it.

This also raises the question of what percentage of “straight” married men are actually gay? That’s an answer I’d be fascinated to know. Is 5% too high of a number? Too low? I really don’t know. In general, however, I think if I got a hail mary like this, I’d just block the number and not engage in any way with the texter.

This could also lead to an incredibly awkward parent conversation after a game one day. You give out the game ball to little Johnny for his performance and then ask for the parents to gather round and go off on how someone on the team’s husband has been texting you that they want to engage in gay sex with you. (This speech was made for Kenny Powers to deliver. BTW, a dark comedy about little league coaching starring a Kenny Powers-esque, win-at-all-cost coach? I’d watch that in a heartbeat.) You talk about def-con one in a ton of marriages if this happened. Lots of women are afraid their husbands will have an affair one day, but a gay affair?! The entire little league might fall apart.

Which is why I’d keep this entirely quiet.

My guess is it’s the same guy with different burner phones and he’s sending these texts to multiple numbers of married guys he finds attractive hoping he can reel in a buyer.

Block and ignore is the play.

But if it keeps happening and continues to bother you, it really might be worth employing someone to try to track down the texter. Because if he’s engaging in this kind of risky behavior on a regular basis, his wife, honestly, deserves to know what’s going on in her household.

“I’m a 21-year-old male from California, and I recently graduated with a Bachelor’s in Math. I then applied to, and got accepted at, a few graduate school programs. As I am currently contemplating which schools to accept or decline, I realized that this silly issue of vaccine mandates is still present.

I took COVID seriously from the start. When the vaccines first came out, I really wanted to take them ASAP, but my parents, having done their research, suggested otherwise and told me to wait. Nevertheless, I wore a mask basically whenever I left the house, and was just super careful in general, knowing that I wasn’t vaxxed. Yet, eventually, one of my [double-vaxxed] family members did get COVID, and I got it as well. However, my symptoms were milder than literally any IRL friend I knew who got COVID–I had an evening of mild fever and a day or two of fatigue, and that was it. I attended online meetings during that period too, with no serious issues (people probably didn’t even know that I got the virus). Even then, I quarantined for a full 15 days, just to be super safe–again, taking COVID seriously.

I find it ridiculous, however, that if I want to attend grad school, I still am forced to get jabbed and masked. The vaccines currently have no studies for long-term side effects, and my demographics (and experience with COVID itself) prove that it is FULLY unnecessary for me to get vaxxed at THIS POINT in time. As I pointed out above, I continue to take the virus seriously, yet I know for a fact that I don’t need to get vaxxed. However, refusing to get vaxxed basically forces me to forego grad school–not ideal, since a grad degree in Math would boost my learning and employability (and is arguably essential for Math majors, in order to be able to get a high-ranking job in the future). Do you think U.S. schools will EVER let go of this stupid issue? If not, do you have any words of advice for me (as well as for the countless number of other young adults who undoubtedly are in a similar position)?”

I believe that COVID vax requirements are going to continue to collapse across the country, just like we saw the airplane mask mandates collapse everywhere yesterday afternoon.

Just over the weekend, Broadway shows in New York City announced that they will no longer be requiring anyone to provide proof of vaccination to attend shows. (You still have to wear masks, which is an entirely different absurd story, but at least we’re finally nearing the end, it appears, of the federal mask mandate on airplanes.)

To my knowledge, there are no bars or restaurants anywhere in the country still requiring proof of the COVID shot to enter. That’s because these mandates never made any sense, and they cost substantial amounts of dollars to businesses. So as soon as they could abandon them, most places abandoned them.

I bring this up because I think some schools will begin to lessen their COVID shot requirements going forward. But only some. Because most schools have long required proof of vaccination to attend schools. (It has been a long time since I was in college, but I had to have all my vaccines for college, law school, and grad school.) The question is, will colleges require the COVID shot in the years ahead? I have my doubts. Most schools, for instance, don’t require the flu shot, and that’s basically what the COVID shot is too.

And, increasingly, COVID looks to be far less dangerous to most young people than the seasonal flu is.

I wouldn’t turn down grad school over the COVID shot if I were you, but I would wait until the last possible moment to get the COVID shot.

“I’ve stopped talking to family or friends that voted for Biden, and/or still vote Democrat. I wasn’t always like this, but after the way they have run our country into the ground I feel I have to, as my anger towards the Democratic Party is all encompassing. You said you have family and friends that voted for Biden. How do you handle it? I try to separate the two, but just can’t get past all of it after what they’ve done.”

I think you’re making the wrong choice here by cutting out people with different political opinions than you. I get how frustrating it is to have to live with the Biden administration, which has been an abject failure on virtually every front, but eliminating people from your life based on their political choices is the wrong decision.

I have tons of family and friends who voted for Biden.

I’m public about the fact that I voted for Trump. So far as I know, this hasn’t cost me any friends. (Truth be told, like many of you, I’m so busy with my family and work that I don’t have that much free time anyway. So if someone decided they wanted to cut me off, it would just make my life easier because it frees me up to focus on the people who are still my friends.)

I believe that many Biden voters regret their decision to vote for him. And I suspect you will see many of those middle of the road Biden voters swing back to Republicans in 2022 and 2024.

But even if they don’t, allowing your entire life to be dictated by politics is, in my opinion, the wrong choice.

I’m far more troubled, personally, when everyone agrees than I am when everyone disagrees. Conflict can be good.

After all, take it outside of politics. Do you only have friends who root for the same sports teams as you? I doubt it. Do you only have friends who are the exact same religious denomination as you? I doubt it as well. Variety is the spice of life. Focus on the things you do agree on, spend less time on the things you disagree on.

And good luck with that.

…

As always, send your anonymous mailbag questions to claytravis@gmail.com, anonymity guaranteed.

And I hope all of you have fantastic Tuesdays.