For decades, the automotive safety world quietly committed a slow-motion act of misogyny: it pretended women were just short men with a rubber jacket glued to their chests. The standard "female" crash-test dummy was nothing more than a 4'11," 108-pound version of the 5'9," 172-pound male Hybrid III, scaled down like a child's toy. It was rarely placed in the driver's seat (because "real" drivers were assumed male), and its pelvis, spine, neck, and abdominal sensors were never designed for the actual biomechanics of the female body.
The result? Women are 73 % more likely to suffer serious injury and 17 % more likely to die in identical frontal crashes. Seat belts ride up over the softer female abdomen instead of the hips, submarining under impact and rupturing organs. Airbags calibrated for male sternums punch female faces because women sit closer to the wheel (shorter arms, shorter legs). Whiplash tears cervical ligaments built for lighter, more flexible female necks.
On November 21, 2025, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy finally ended the charade by unveiling THOR-05F, the first true female anthropomorphic test device. It has a pelvis tilted forward like a real woman's, breasts that affect belt path, shorter limbs, a more flexible neck, and sensors in the exact places women actually break. In other words, it is engineered for biological reality instead of ideological fantasy.
This should have been celebrated by every feminist on earth. Instead, the same activists who spent years screaming "believe the science" on every other issue went strangely silent, because the science just reaffirmed the most politically incorrect fact of all: men and women are physically different in ways that matter, and pretending otherwise gets women maimed or killed.
The Fatal Cost of Gender-Neutral DelusionThe old Hybrid III "female" dummy was introduced in 1988 and was obsolete the day it rolled off the line. NHTSA itself admitted decades ago that it didn't represent real women, yet regulators kept using it because redesigning safety standards is expensive and, let's be honest, acknowledging sex differences became culturally radioactive.
So, women kept dying.
A 2011 University of Virginia study found women wearing seat belts had a 47 % higher chance of serious injury than men in the same crash.
A 2019 IIHS report showed female drivers were 20–28 % more likely to die when vehicle size and weight were controlled for.
Swedish data revealed that in identical car-to-car crashes, women were three times more likely to suffer whiplash injuries lasting longer than a year.
Every one of those deaths and disabilities was preventable, if only the industry had been allowed to admit the obvious: female bones are less dense, female muscle mass is lower, female fat distribution is different, female ligaments are more elastic, and female pelvises are wider and tilted forward for childbirth. Those aren't stereotypes; they're measurements.
Yet for years, the same people who insisted a man can become a woman by declaration, also insisted a crash-test dummy could become female by shrinking it 15 % and slapping on a rubber bra. The cognitive dissonance would be hilarious if the body count weren't real.
The Broader Pattern: Ideology Over AnatomyAutomotive safety is only the most literal example of a much larger phenomenon. When you deny sex differences, women lose, every single time.
In medicine, heart-attack protocols were built on male symptoms for decades; women's atypical presentation (nausea, jaw pain, fatigue) was dismissed until thousands died misdiagnosed.
In sports, female athletes suffer ACL tears at 4–8 times the male rate because training programs copied male loading patterns instead of accounting for wider Q-angles and hormonal ligament laxity.
In the military, "gender-neutral" physical standards have produced epidemics of stress fractures and pelvic injuries in female recruits because no one was allowed to say the obvious: the average woman has 50–60 % of a man's upper-body strength.
Everywhere you look, the refusal to treat women as a distinct biomechanical category ends the same way: with injured, disabled, or dead women.
The Irony That Should Embarrass Every Gender TheoristHere's the punchline: the Trump administration, routinely accused of waging a "war on women," just did more for female safety in eight months than the previous two administrations did in twenty years. While progressive regulators dithered, afraid that a realistically female dummy might "reinforce harmful stereotypes," Sean Duffy's DOT said the quiet part out loud: "There are only two sexes, male and female, and that biological fact isn't just a talking point; it's an important safety consideration."
The new THOR-05F dummy doesn't care about your pronouns. It cares that your uterus sits lower, your ribs are shorter, and your neck is more vulnerable. It is the ultimate repudiation of the blank-slate delusion that has dominated Western institutions for a generation.
If even crash-test dummies now admit women are different, maybe it's time the rest of society caught up.
Because the next time someone tells you "sex is a spectrum" or "men and women are the same except for socialisation," remember this: that lie has a body count. And thanks to a crash dummy with properly modelled breasts and a forward-tilted pelvis, that body count is finally going to start going down.
Reality always wins. The sooner we admit basic sex differences, in the lab, on the field, and yes, even in the driver's seat, the safer actual women will be. THOR-05F isn't just a new dummy. It's a monument to the moment common sense finally crashed through the windshield of ideology. Women are not inferior men; they are their own sui generis entity, something that needs to be shouted from the roof tops!