Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is out here touting how “After years of delays, our team has finalized the details for this new, state of the art female crash test dummy.“
Okay, so far, so good, kinda normal. Having crash test dummies modeled on the female body is a good, necessary, long-overdue thing. While men get in more car crashes, women are more likely to be seriously injured. Rather than design dummies that reflect the differences in women’s bodies, like pelvis shape and less dense bones, testing usually just involves a smaller version of the male dummy. So, hooray for Duffy!
But Duffy just couldn’t help himself. Why pass up an opportunity to do a culture war?
“The Left doesn’t want to hear it, but the science is clear: there are only two sexes – male and female.”
A THOR-5F female crash test dummy is shown in a driver's seat at Humanetics in Farmington Hills, Michigan.
Buddy, we guarantee that “The Left” has not been thinking about how to trans crash test dummies.
It’s not just that Duffy is a bigoted nitwit, riding along with Trump’s unwarranted and unhinged obsession with trans women. It’s also that he’s pretending to have overseen major efforts to bring this to fruition when it looks much more like he showed up for the first time on the last day of class and signed his name at the top of the group project.
“After years of delays …”
Shut up.
Duffy is trying to make it sound like somehow everyone else was sitting around not developing female crash test dummies, too subsumed with our need to make everything trans. But politicians have been pushing this for years, somehow avoiding the temptation to link it to crying about gender.
Here’s a bipartisan bill introduced in May 2024, which would have required female crash test dummies. Here’s Sen. Ron Wyden talking about it later that year. Here’s the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration under Biden, discussing research into reducing gender disparities in crash outcomes.
Surely, since Duffy is bragging about it, the Trump administration has really leaned into road safety, including for women.
Not so much. Here’s the NHTSA under Trump, cutting 25% of the workforce and proposing $10 million in research cuts. Here’s the Trump admin slow-walking transportation safety grants to the tune of 90% slower than the Biden administration. Here’s Duffy’s DOT gutting safety regulations.
A cartoon by Mike Luckovich.
Okay, but surely Duffy isn’t lying about how these extremely not trans lady dummies are “new, state of the art?”
The Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute created the first dummy modeled on female bodies back in 2023. The crash lab at the Medical College of Wisconsin has been working on developing female crash test dummies for years.
What this looks a lot like is that the Trump administration finalized an existing initiative not because it cares about women or safety, but to score cheap points.
And there’s really no reason to give the administration the benefit of the doubt here. When it comes to women’s well-being, Trump has shut down decades of research into women’s health, gutted reproductive health care, and yanked funding for research into women-specific health problems like uterine fibroids because that’s woke.
It’s nice that Duffy got a chance to brag about something he likely didn’t really have anything to do with, and what a treat for him to get to spew some transphobia along with it. Wouldn’t want to pass that up.
