The fastest time a woman has ever run a marathon is 2:11:53; the fastest time a man has ever run one is 2:00:35. Male Olympic champion Michael Phelps can swim the 100m in 47.77 seconds; female Olympic champion Cate Campbell’s best time in the same race is 52.03 seconds. So why would any elite female athlete want to compete against a similarly situated male athlete for a gold medal?

Enough said.

But there’s a lot more to say now that transgendered athletes have entered the sports arena, and law professor and former college elite runner Doriane Lambelet Coleman says it in her new book, On Sex and Gender. She argues that despite her progressive ideas about women’s rights and roles and her support for equal legal treatment of the LGBTQ+ community, sex is binary, and we ignore that fact at the risk of undercutting gains for women.

Shots fired — yet another hot-button issue to further polarize our seething populace. Coleman writes that because of her views, she’s been vilified as a hater and a “TERF” (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist). There have been calls for her dismissal from the Duke Law School faculty. She offers herself up as the latest victim of the latest culture war.

Coleman steadfastly maintains that, particularly in the competitive-sports arena, biology is destiny. On April 2, 2019, she testified against pending legislation before the House Judiciary Committee, the “Equality Act,” that would have prohibited all sex classifications under the law and created a “sex-blind society.” Coleman objected to the bill because “it wasn’t clear that we could continue to have ‘women’s’ and ‘men’s’ sports — at all.”

Her book includes an early chapter straight out of a Biology 101 textbook to explain — with as much tedium as it did in college — what it means, as far as science is concerned, to be born male or female. The unquestionable result is that, as a group, those who began life as males are taller and stronger, with greater cardiopulmonary capacity than females, all because of the hormones that bathed their bodies since birth and drowned them at puberty. Something of a problem when it comes to running alongside them if you were born female and hope to win.

We now live in a world where what you see is not necessarily what you originally got. Persons who believe they were trapped in a body with the wrong sexual composition at birth can, with the help of modern thought and medicine, adopt the modes of fashion of the opposite gender, block or add hormones, or even take the drastic steps of lopping off an Adam’s apple, adding or subtracting breast tissue, slicing off (or constructing) a penis and testicles, or creating a vaginal space.

The whole concept drives conservatives crazy, but Coleman argues that this issue is not black-and-white (or right and left, for that matter) and goes far beyond who gets to use which bathroom at the local high school. Outside the world of sports, she argues that eliminating male-female distinctions could negatively impact scientific research. For example, the National Institutes of Health currently requires scientists seeking federal grants for medical research to include both male and female subjects in that research to determine the impact of discoveries on each sex.

But it is in competitive sports that Coleman feels the most strongly about her subject. “Fulfilling the commitment to sex equality in the elite sports space requires both separate-sex competition and protecting the female category from competitors who have experienced male puberty,” she writes. The goal is to ensure that women have “one-for-one parity, including the same training, competition, and travel conditions; equal pay; and an equal number of spots in finals, on podiums, and in championship positions.” Among elite athletes, tennis champ Martina Navratilova agrees.

Coleman is adamant that her goal is not to deny the transgendered their legal rights. By way of example, she points to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2019 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County that correctly held that a transgender woman couldn’t be fired from her job at a funeral home simply for being transgender (it wasn’t relevant to her job description). But she also agrees with a lower federal court that later ruled a transgender man who worked as a prison guard was not male for the purposes of strip-searching male prisoners (the suit was brought by a Muslim inmate whose religion didn’t allow him to be touched by a female, whatever their current gender).

The author criticizes certain progressives (singling out the National Women’s Law Center) for turning the word “misogyny on its head, redefining it to mean differentiating between females and males who identify as women.” In other words, transgendered women are women. Period. Coleman argues “society should accept as equals and the law treat as equals people who have historically been marginalized, often to the point of invisibility, on the basis of sex- and gender-based differences.”

But as in most controversial matters these days: You are with us or against us. Rather than share an open dialogue about these divergent points of view, debate has shut down. When Coleman gave a speech about Title IX and transgendered girls in sports at UCLA (at the invitation of the conservative Federalist Society), leftist students carried posters calling her a “transphobe” and then threatened to report attendees at her speech to prospective employers. It cleared the room.

There may be a middle ground to this debate, or there may not. But what do I know? In my one and only marathon, my finish time was 5:11, and I’ve always been content in the female skin I was born in.

Diane Kiesel is a former judge of the Supreme Court of New York. She is an author whose next book, When Charlie Met Joan: The Tragedy of the Chaplin Trials and the Failings of American Law, will be published in February by the University of Michigan Press.

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