Charlie Sheen

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Indeed, Ryan went on to enjoy a heartwarming comeback from 1987 to 1993, leading the league in strikeouts from 40 through 43 and throwing unprecedented no-hitters at 43 and 44 for the Texas Rangers. This was greeted at the time as a thrilling fountain-of-youth tale due to hard work and clean living.

But then Roger Clemens, another Texas Republican and friend of the Bush family, made an eerily similar late-in-life resurgence, leading the league in ERA with a 1.87 at age 42 in 2005. But by then it wasn”€™t too unexpected when the 2007 Mitchell Report named Clemens as a late-career steroids user.

My best guess is that strength, lifting, and steroids tend to correlate with conservatism, with loyalty to the tribe, while jogging correlates with the leapfrogging loyalties of liberalism. This isn”€™t a hard-and-fast rule: An obvious exception would be the notoriously liberal ex-con Sean Penn, who was one of the earlier actors to shape-shift from role to role 30 years ago.

But which way does the arrow of causality point? Do conservatives take up lifting while liberals try running? Or does our type of exercise affect how we think? For example, did Tiger Woods get jacked up in 2006″€“07 because he was thinking about quitting golf to become a Navy SEAL, or did he think about becoming Tiger Woods, American Commando, because he was getting jacked up?

We don”€™t know yet, but this seems fairly straightforward to test: Offer college students free personal trainers and see whether the ones randomly assigned lifting trainers move to the right relative to the ones assigned running trainers.

Another reason for the lack of intellectual attention is that the sheer existence of artificial sex hormones betrays the intellectual zeitgeist that tells us that sex isn”€™t natural. We”€™re supposed to believe that, just as race does not exist, sex does not exist either. Instead, there is only “€œgender,”€ a social construct as arbitrary as whether the word moon is feminine in French or masculine in German.

So we”€™re intellectually disarmed to make much sense out of the vast amount of pointillist data we”€™ve acquired over recent decades.

For example, in 2015 we are supposed to take seriously 1970s decathlete Bruce Jenner’s assertion that he’s taking female hormones now because he always felt like a Caitlyn on the inside. We are assured by august authorities that Jenner’s Kardashian spin-off reality show raises serious questions about outmoded ideas of gender distinctions.

A much less popular theory is that all the artificial male hormones Jenner likely took to improve from tenth in the 1972 Olympic decathlon to gold in 1976 may have permanently damaged his endocrine system and altered how he remembers his own past. But we don”€™t have legal proof that he did what practically all the successful 1970s weight-throwing field stars did. So nobody wants to think about it.

It’s possible that the ascension of transgenderism to the cause célèbre of the 2010s isn”€™t simply due to progressives not having anything else to do after gay marriage. It may be in part an aftereffect of the abuse of artificial hormones over recent decades. We are told to believe that transsexuals were born that way, intermediate in gender. Yet a striking fraction of the most publicized cases in recent years have been men who were quite masculine in their 20s. (It’s been noted that Jenner and several other famous transsexuals are Republicans or Libertarians.)

Perhaps some of them used chemical assistance to be more masculine when they were young, and are now experiencing a kind of hormonal blowback?