BY STEWART JUSTMAN
Someone makes a public comment out of line with progressive opinion. Enforcers of such opinion promptly descend on the offender online, pelting him or her with abusive slogans in the name of justice. The offender buckles, offers submission—even while protesting that he or she didn’t really mean any harm—and promises, perhaps, to become a better person. Over recent months we have become all too familiar with this sequence, which by now constitutes a genre. For example, answering a question about the possibility of a transgender player competing against women in professional tennis, former champion Martina Navratilova tweeted on December 20, 2018:
Clearly that can’t be right. You can’t just proclaim yourself a female and be able to compete against women. There must be some standards, and having a penis and competing as a woman would not fit that standard.