Super Bowl ads are a great American art form. Paying eight million dollars or more for a chance to capture the collective national imagination in thirty seconds isn’t merely a commercial transaction; it’s an act of faith, a declaration that something called “the collective national imagination” still exists and that it is still possible, in this age of fragmented audiences and frayed attention spans, to have a conversation all Americans find relatable, inspiring, and urgent.
And yet, the most urgent and inspiring ad we’ve seen this year—generating millions of views and encomia from luminaries who don’t usually wade into the shallow waters of advertising, such as author J. K. Rowling—wasn’t aired during the Super Bowl at all. It was posted online a few days earlier, cost $40,000 to make, and featured largely unknown athletes, such as Sia Liilii, the captain of the women’s volleyball team at the University of Nevada, Reno, and the All-American swimmer Riley Gaines. It was produced by XX-XY Athletics, a new brand dedicated to protecting women in sports from the male athletes who take advantage of the radical left’s aggressive insistence that gender is a fluid construct and that any mediocre man who had failed in his field of choice can merely don a dress and mosey on to athletic glory.
The ad is as simple as it is moving. It depicts Liilii, Gaines, and others waking up before dawn and training vigorously while others sleep, showing the sort of dedication and grit it takes to compete at the highest level. Playing in the background, however, is the constant trill of critics who focus not on these young women’s remarkable achievements but on their insistence that no men ought to be allowed to step into their arenas, to say nothing of their locker rooms. Liilii, for example, led her team in refusing to play an opposing team who had allowed a biological male to compete, a brave and principled decision that was not backed by her university. And Gaines, perhaps the most recognizable figure in the struggle to keep women’s sports safe and fair, began her advocacy after being overshadowed by Lia Thomas, a middling male swimmer who had recently undergone hormone replacement therapy to “transition” and was thereafter celebrated as an inspiring trailblazer by the National Collegiate Athletic Association and much of the mainstream media. The obvious and stirring contrast between the young women’s courage and excellence and the moral obtuseness of their detractors made the ad an overnight sensation.
The online ad was launched on February 1. A week later, anyone watching the Philadelphia Eagles trounce the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LIX might have been forgiven for thinking that every major advertiser had gotten XX-XY’s memo. Nike, for example, which just last year featured a campaign starring transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney wearing its sports bra, aired a flashy ad broadcasting full-throated support for female athletes and bemoaning the hardships they face, primarily from men who belittle their achievements. The National Football League, which spent the 2023–2024 season celebrating Justine Lindsay, its first transgender cheerleader, ran an ad arguing that women are better at football than men. It’s a comical claim considering that Mekhi Becton, the Eagles’ offensive guard, is 6-foot-7-inches tall and weighs 363 pounds, but at least it treated women as women rather than playing the old gender-bender game.
It’s easy enough to explain away corporate America’s sudden change of heart as a response to Donald Trump’s re-election. Just four days before the big game, the president signed an executive order titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” which will “rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities, which results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy.” True, we rarely suspect our captains of industry of having too stiff a moral backbone. But it seems that concerned executives in boardrooms all over the country are rushing to reverse the damage they did over the last four years as they succumbed to ideological pressure and pretended that men can become women by purchasing and putting on a $35 Lycra brassiere. And we may breathe a bit easier, thinking that the inflammation, or at least the worst of it, is subsiding.
Such relief, alas, is premature.
Sure, seeing our biggest brands use formerly controversial words like “women” in straightforward, and dare I say normal, ways is reassuring, and the success of upstarts like XX-XY—which did very brisk business in the days after its video went viral—is a comforting example of capitalism’s ability to course-correct, one of the free market’s most awesome powers. But the zealots who spent the better part of a decade trying to force us to believe that human biology, to say nothing of religion and morality, ought to take a back seat to the dangerous delusions of depraved ideologues are far from giving up the fight.
Because the fight isn’t, and never was, simply about people’s right to choose their own gender, their reproductive organs be damned. Nor, for that matter, is the heated discussion about abortion merely about that catchiest of all contemporary American political slogans, a woman’s right to choose. Take a look at these movements—together with, say, the burgeoning pro-assisted suicide crowd—and you’ll find not only shared funders and organizers but also something more profound and profoundly troubling: belief in the promise of disembodiment.
Those of us who know that we were created in God’s image have no choice but to acknowledge our bodies, those awkward earthly vessels that matter and cannot be manipulated as if they were raw material for our disembodied wills. We prohibit certain behaviors because we know that we must not befoul, debase, or snuff out creation. Judaism does not permit tattoos, for example. And of course, the pinnacle of embodiment—procreation—is carefully guarded against abuse. The sexual appetites must be regulated, because we approach the gift of life with trembling awe and respect.
Take away this belief in the sacred character of the body and it becomes not a temple but a speed bump, which explains why every radical political movement in the past three quarters of a century made it its goal to promote and celebrate some measure of radical disembodiment. From the long-haired groovy cats of the 1960s who preached that the Pill had now forever severed the connection between procreation and sexual pleasure, to the purple-haired fanatics who now argue that we ought to consider chemically castrating any eight-year-old boy who prefers Barbie dolls to trucks, the war these modern pagans are waging is a war against the gift of embodiment. It’s a war on the human body and its divine origins, a battle at the end of which lies the shining, utopian promise that each of us may shed his skin—and become whatever he wishes.
Transgender entrepreneur and founder of the satellite radio industry Martine Rothblatt, one of the movement’s visionaries, is candid about what lies ahead. Transitioning from one gender to another, Rothblatt explains repeatedly in written works and public addresses, is a relatively timid step. Shedding the human body altogether—in order to become an animal, say, or merge one’s consciousness with that of a powerful supercomputer—is the logical next step. Disembodiment must be complete, opening up new frontiers for all who believe, against flesh-affirming Christianity and Judaism, that the self’s ultimate goal is to tear through all of its constricting corporeal limitations and recreate itself. With billionaires like George Soros pouring millions each year into a variety of causes that fall under this big and dark umbrella, and with tech moguls like Bryan Johnson investing heavily in technologies designed to curb death and rattle all the foundations of the human experience, we can only assume that the war against the human body will open up a new front any day now.
Let us, then, take a moment to relish the courage of women who defend women. Let’s toast the achievements of companies like XX-XY that manage to win the battle against the trans-juggernaut, armed with little more than conviction, gumption, and moral clarity. But let us not assume for a moment that the war is over. The disciples of disembodiment have abandoned neither their beliefs nor the desperate certitude, common among cultists, that every setback only makes their aim all the more sacred and justified.
Make no mistake: The sanctity of the human body will be challenged in new and terrifying ways. We must be there to defend it, with joy and confidence.
