Name five elite female transgender athletes, the operative word being "elite."

Go ahead. I'll wait...still waiting.

Chances are you can't do it (unless you're a regular visitor to Outsports), because they're as rare as an honest politician.

Yet, if we are to listen to the braying classes, you'd swear the Female Transgender Athlete (FTA) is the greatest threat to humanity since JFK and Nikita Khrushchev played a game of chicken with nuclear bombs in the early 1960s. Or at least since Rupert Murdoch unleashed Fox News on an unsuspecting public.

This past June, for example, we heard U.S. presidential wannabe Nikki Haley declare the FTA to be "the women's issue of our time...the idea that we have biological boys playing in girls sports."

You read that right. Do not adjust your computer screens. It isn't abortion. Nor domestic violence. Nor sexual assault. Nor pay equity. Nor human rights. Nor misogyny. Nikki figures there's nothing so dire, so potentially ruinous to Uncle Sam's wives and daughters, sisters and mothers as the grave menace that is the Female Transgender Athlete.

"I'm going to fight for girls all day long because strong girls become strong women," Nikki vowed during the first Republican presidential candidate natter on Fox earlier this week. "Strong women become strong leaders and biological boys don’t belong in the locker rooms of any of our girls."

One suspects that Nikki doesn't actually give a damn about five school kids taking part in a foot race in Bugtussle, Ark., but anything to gain political clout at the expense of a minority group.

Besides, she wasn't flying solo in the Fox squawk with seven other would-be commanders-in-chief. They all made like so many Paul Revere's, yelping, "The trans are coming! The trans are coming!" to warn the masses about the invasion of FTAs on America's playing fields. Senator Tim Scott declared, "If God made you a man, you play sports against men," and Florida's "don't say gay" governor Ron DeSantis mumbled something about "gender ideology" and "We need education in this country, not indoctrination." (I find it odd that DeSantis refuses to allow Floridian children to learn about gender and sexual orientation, yet he can't shut up about gays and transgender people.)

At any rate, the great attack of Political Right Forces vs. the FTA wasn't restricted to politicos, with wrinkled rockers Carlos Santana and Alice Cooper joining the fray.

"When God made you and me—before we came out of the womb, you know who you are and what you are," said Santana, the great guitar guru. "Later on, when you grow out of it, you see things, and you start believing that you could be something that sounds good, but you know it ain’t right. Because a woman is a woman and a man is a man. That’s it. Whatever you wanna do in the closet, that’s your business. I’m OK with that."

What say you, Alice Cooper? (And yes, I appreciate the irony of a guy who uses a girl's name waging war against "biological boys" with girls' names.)

"I’m understanding that there are cases of transgender, but I’m afraid that it’s also a fad, and I’m afraid there’s a lot of people claiming to be this just because they want to be that," Alice said. "It's gone now to the point of absurdity."

(Quick side note: School's out for Alice, because Vampyre Cosmetics announced that "Alice doesn't work here anymore" scant days after the shock rocker said nasty things about transgender individuals. Yup, they dumped him like he was Pete Best (look it up, kids).

I can't say how much, if any, sway these rock-and-roll relics hold, but they're part of the anti-trans mob fronted by politicos who insist they're on the side of the angels and only they can prevent the total annihilation of female sports by the trans swarm.

Well, let's do some math:

According to a 2022 report from the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, more than 1.3 million American adults (aged 18+) identify as transgender, 515,200 of them female. If one-third of those women participates in competitive sports, that's 171,733, or 0.05 per cent of the U.S. population.

What about kids sports? Data approximates there are 300,000 transgender youth in the U.S. If one third is female, one-third of whom participate in competitive school sports, we have 33,333 Female Transgender Athletes in middle or high school. Or 0.009 per cent.

That's what all the alarmist squawking is about? Apparently, 0.05/0.009 per cent is going to drop an apocalyptic bomb on female sports? Hmmm. With that kind of power, Commander-in-Chief Joe Biden ought to send the FTAs to Russia and bring Vlad Putin to heel.

The notion that FTAs will lead to the extermination of female sports simply doesn't jibe with the numbers, or reality. It's an exercise in myth-building.

Renee Richards was supposed to bring the Women's Tennis Association tour to its knees when she arrived at the U.S. Open in 1977, but she never won a singles tournament in five years and the WTA didn't get sucked into a black hole. Ditto golf, where just last year Hailey Davidson sought an LPGA Tour card. She didn't get out of Q school, because more than 100 cis women were too good.

Mianne Bagger and Bobbi Lancaster were two other transgender women who played pro golf. Women are still teeing it up. Emily Bridges cycled. Women are still hopping on bikes. Fallon Fox fought in MMA. Women continue to step into the octagon. Tifanny Abreu plays pro women's volleyball in Brazil. Etcetera, etcetera.

Yet the myth-builders persist, spreading their fear across the globe and knowing many among the masses will ignore evidence, the way a teenager ignores curfew.

But I'll leave you with this sound bite from former British tennis pro Sue Barker, who found herself across the net from Renee Richards back in the day:

"It didn't become the story which a lot of people thought it might become," she told BBC Sport. "She just melted into the tour and didn't dominate. She won matches and she lost matches. It didn't alter the game as some predicted. But she achieved what she wanted to do, to play professionally as a woman and was welcomed by the vast majority."

Nothing to fear.