All totalitarian systems make liars of those trying to coexist with their orthodoxies, and contemporary feminism is no exception. Witness the tragic case of Harvard President Larry Summers. Mr. Summers was presumably telling what he thought was the truth when he suggested that innate sex differences might be one of the reasons for the dearth of women in the hard sciences. It was his subsequent attempts to tamp down feminist outrage that have made him a liar. He has been forced to say repeatedly what he and virtually all serious social scientists believe to be a lie: that there are no inherent differences between men and women that contribute to their different interests and abilities.

The same kabuki dance corrupts the debate about Title IX, the law banning discrimination on the basis of sex in collegiate sports. As universities continue to ax men’s teams in order to comply with women’s athletic-participation quotas under the law, politicians nonetheless speak in glowing terms about Title IX and all the good it has brought to girls, women, and other defenseless creatures. When the Bush administration created a task force to look into the enforcement of Title IX, the commission heard nine months of testimony about how the law is systematically discriminating against men in college sports. Then the Bush administration turned around and did … absolutely nothing. Bowing to the protests of gender feminists, they rejected the commission’s modest proposals for reform.

And so it was with a sense of justice long delayed that I opened Welch Suggs’s new book, promisingly (sub)titled “A Place on the Team: The Triumph and Tragedy of Title IX” (Princeton University Press, 288 pages, $27.95). Mr. Suggs is senior editor for athletics at the Chronicle of Higher Education and has long graced the publication’s pages with excellent news coverage of Title IX. But just a few pages into “A Place on the Team,” it becomes apparent that Mr. Suggs has opted for coexistence with, rather than dissent from, the rigid ideology of the American academy.

Part of his motivation is undoubtedly commercial. The landscape is littered with cheerleading, propagandistic tomes on Title IX. So Mr. Suggs added “Tragedy” to the “Triumph” in his subtitle to signal critical distance and evenhandedness. But the joke, dear reader, is on us. The “tragedy” referred to in “A Place on the Team” is not that a law designed to outlaw discrimination against girls and women has been turned into a crude instrument of discrimination against boys and men; not that, to comply with Title IX, schools routinely kill men’s teams without adding opportunities for women; not even that universities desperate to attract male undergraduates have been forced to cut their men’s athletic opportunities by at least 10% in the past decade.

Mr. Suggs documents all of this, and concedes Title IX’s pivotal role in colleges and universities discriminating against male athletes. Still, the “tragedy” he refers to is that Title IX has made female athletes too successful. Women’s sports have become so competitive that they are beginning to resemble high-stakes, win-at-any-cost men’s sports. Competition for a place on women’s teams like soccer and basketball (and the full-ride scholarships that often accompany them) has become so fierce that young girls, like young boys, are being pressured to play year-round, attend expensive summer camps, and engage private coaches. Once they’re in college, their lagging academic credentials, underperformance in the classroom, and declining relative graduation rates increasingly resemble those of male athletes.

Mr. Suggs points to some real problems, and makes a marginally interesting point. But in the context of the controversy that continues to surround Title IX – even 33 years following its passage – his decision to concentrate on the negative consequences of Title IX’s success smacks of a way to sell books without offending feminist political sensibilities.

The author does an admirable job of documenting the history of the court challenges and bureaucratic manipulation that have shaped Title IX, but he does not advance the debate over gender equity in athletics. At the heart of the controversy over Title IX are the differing interests and abilities of men and women. Current enforcement of the law starts from the assumption that men and women are equally interested and able to compete in collegiate sports, then penalizes men when women fail to turn out in equal proportions.

The Bush administration recently challenged the assumption of androgyny behind Title IX by promoting online surveys to measure actual interest in sports by women on campus as part of Title IX compliance. Supporters of endangered men’s sports like wrestling and gymnastics welcomed this modest change, but gender feminists let loose the usual chorus of protests.

The reason? Surveys consistently show that girls and women have more varied extracurricular interests than boys and men – i.e., when females are asked, they declare themselves, as a group, less interested in sports. Feminists would rather this question not be asked, of course, because the answer exposes the lie of gender sameness. And when this lie is exposed, the artifice of feminist grievance crashes to the ground.

Tragically, Welch Suggs knows this. Academics don’t return phone calls from reporters who claim innate differences between men and women. And so the lie lives on.

Ms. Gavora is the author of “Tilting the Playing Field: Schools, Sports, Sex, and Title IX” (Encounter Books).