(Daily Signal)—Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Recently we have had two contrasting phenomena.
One is that President Donald Trump had issued an executive order suggesting or maybe threatening K-12 sports programs—and indeed, college and higher education as well—that if they allowed biological men to compete in women’s sports, then he was going to consider cutting off federal funds for that.
But at the same time he did it, the number of transgendered women—that is biological men who have transitioned to supposedly women—has increased and soared in women’s sports.
So, here on the West Coast, a trans athlete dominated the state high school track and field competitions, winning three or four main events. The same thing happened in Oregon. The same thing had happened in Washington. The same thing is happening in Minneapolis with girls baseball in the finals.
The point is it’s usually a phenomenon in blue states and in particular, blue cities. And Donald Trump’s executive orders are going the way of sanctuary cities. People are just ignoring them because they feel that he wouldn’t dare cut off federal funds because it would shut down the whole school.
But let’s get some background on this whole transgendered sports phenomenon. And maybe there’s five or six things we should keep in mind.
No. 1: We know a lot about gender dysphoria. There’s a long history of sex research about people whose psychological or hormonal makeup does not match their physical characteristics. But here’s the key: They’re very rare.
Until the transgendered—I don’t know what we would call it—phenomenon in the last 10 years, we accepted classical epidemiological studies that showed there were about five people who suffered from genuine transgendered phenomenon per 100,000 people: 0.005%. If you do the math, in a country of about 340 million people, we’re talking maybe 20,000, maybe 0.005%, or five per 100,000, maybe 10.
But you see the Pew poll and other polling ask students on campus, they ask the general public and they say there may be 20 million people. But there has been no history of that once the science of epidemiology started, which suggests it might be more of a trendy phenomenon than actual biological or scientific matter.
The second thing to remember is this is not new.
As a classicist, I can tell you that there are documented fables, myths, poems, histories about people who feel they were in the wrong bodies. The most famous is Catullus Poem 63, about a young man who performs transsexual surgery on himself in a fit of mania in honor of the god—the sexually ambivalent god—Cybele and castrates himself and is very unhappy when he wakes up out of the frenzy.
We have this novelist Petronius’ “Satyricon,” where a lot of men are cross-dressers—which is a different phenomenon—but transvestism. And we have—I think there’s a fable in “Phaedrus” about men who change into women. And we got to remember the god Hermaphroditus that comes from Hermes and Aphrodite—the combination of a male and female god. And there’s many fables about that.
So, it’s an ancient phenomenon.
Here’s another thing to remember. Does anybody know—and I’m asking a genuine question—does anybody know of a female athlete who decided that she was in the wrong body and she transitioned to maleness, manliness, and she won a major event? I know of none.
So, when we talk about transgendered sports, we’re talking about one phenomenon. We’re talking about men.
And if anybody—let me ask a corollary question as I pause here. Does anybody know a famous, well-known, but especially spectacular male athlete that transitioned? I don’t. It’s usually men that were not very successful, at least in the elite of their division or their field, who transition to feminism. And then they become very, very successful.
And this is very important because we are told that once you transition, you are a genuine new sex. That your prior muscular skeleton frame doesn’t really matter, given your hormonal treatment. But it does. Because when we’re talking about transgenderism in sports, we’re not talking about women who become men. And because they don’t succeed in that sport, that reminds us that they’re not fully men. Or if they were, they could just declare their new gender and compete competitively.
And by the same token, 100% of what the controversy is about are men who have bigger frames, more muscles who transition and dominate women’s sports in a way they did not dominate male sports. In other words, they’re taking.
Final thoughts: It has so many political ramifications. One is the party of the left, the Democratic Party, has embraced this 20-80 political issue—20% to 30% tops support this, of the American people. And yet, they’re going down the road of a very unpopular development and supporting transgendered women who are decimating and destroying female sports.
The second thing is it’s counterintuitive. The Left was supposed to be for gender parity. And that meant—that was defined by giving money and attention and resources to women so that their sports would be equivalent to male sports. And now we’re kind of reactionary. We flipped it upside down, where males go around the back, take over women’s sports, and essentially, destroy it. And yet that is popular among many on the left.
And then there’s a final political corollary. We were also told by some radical feminists—especially as it applies to women in combat units—that women could do anything that men could do. A small percentage can, physically. But the vast majority—in terms of muscularity, size, frame, endurance, lung capacity—cannot.
So it kind of, in a weird way, also affects that issue that women cannot really compete with men on the battlefield—at least in tasks that require physicality and muscularity.
Let’s just end the discussion with a brief summation.
Transgenderism is an old phenomenon. It was very, very rare, a very small percentage of the population. Sometime around 2005 to 2015, it exploded as a civil rights issue. And the numbers have been vastly inflated. It’s been trendy among young people on campus. But it has almost destroyed female sports in a way that’s ironic, tragically ironic, because the Left once was a protector and the champion of female sports and now it’s de facto, it’s destroyer.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.