Only a few hours after Jovan Belcher of the Kansas City Chiefs shot his girlfriend to death and then took his own life, grand pronouncements about the cause of this tragedy predictably made their way into publication, and on television airwaves.

With only threadbare facts available to them beyond the deaths that left an infant girl an orphan, the sports media rushed swiftly into high gear, tapping into touchy social and political terrain. This isn’t unusual, given the competitive 24/7 environment that demands instant reactions to feed page views, propels ratings and positions sports media figures prominently in the “conversation” still to come.

I won’t wade into the gun control comments made by Bob Costas on NBC’s Sunday Night Football, and similar sentiments expressed by Fox Sports columnist Jason Whitlock. This is a controversy that, not surprisingly, is taking on a life of its own, and now the expected pushback has commenced.

Lost amid this debate is an even more dubious claim by ESPN’s Jemele Hill. For her, the murder-suicide was cause to dust off stale gender feminist arguments about athletes and domestic violence dating back to the fractious 1990s.

Before I dig further into her column, it’s important to note two things: Her missive was posted on espnW, the Worldwide Leader’s female-oriented site.

Also crucial here is a sentence that Hill writes high in her piece, but only in passing and doesn’t bother to revisit:

“As of now, it does not appear Belcher had any history of domestic abuse.”

Kasandra Perkins was the victim of a violent act — a fatal shooting in her home at the age of 22, just three months after she gave birth to Belcher’s daughter.

But instead of stopping there, realizing that writing anything more along these lines would amount to sheer speculation, Hill descends down an unfortunate cultural rabbit hole:

Regardless of whether we ever learn the full story behind what led to this unspeakable tragedy, violence against women is a significant problem in our society. In sports, it’s sometimes met with indifference until something like this happens.

Hold on here. In the space of two sentences, we have an admission from Hill that we don’t know if the Belcher-Perkins relationship was a physically abusive one, to her broad-based lament about domestic violence in society, including the macho world of organized athletics.

The “full story” be damned — a deadline looms, after all — Hill’s argument spirals dismally from there. She cites former Syracuse quarterback Don McPherson, who proudly describes himself as a “feminist” member of the College Football Hall of Fame. Always prepared with the evergreen quote, McPherson bemoans how the sports world doesn’t want to grapple with these issues.

Next, Hill goes to another leading male critic of the male sports culture, professor Jeff Benedict, who tracks arrests of athletes, and who found a high percentage of them in a recent survey period involved domestic violence. Nowhere in her piece does she question how many of these arrests led to actual convictions. As during the ’90s, when this issue first resonated — including the debunked Super Bowl and domestic violence connection — accusation is tantamount to guilt.

Hill drops numbers from a National Coalition Against Violent Athletes survey — a survey from 1995, seventeen years ago, during the height of the hysteria that Benedict, among others, helped to foment.

More recently, she mentions a domestic violence case against former Oregon running back LaMichael James, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, as well as a nasty, threatening text message sent by former Florida running back Chris Rainey to a woman.

And then there’s the 2010 murder of Virginia lacrosse player Yeardley Love by George Huguely, a member of the Virginia men’s lacrosse team, which Hill references to set up her essential point:

“It also raises questions about how violence against women is marginalized by the legal system and how some coaches, based on the weak punishments, desensitize athletes to the issue.”

That we still don’t know anything about whether there was domestic abuse between Jovan Belcher and Kasandra Perkins doesn’t stop Hill from indicting the male sports culture on a platform designed for the consumption of female readers. It is a cheap and easy appeal to their sense of outrage before any relevant facts are known, and it prompts an emotional response instead of cultivating understanding:

“Sports is supposed to teach men the proper values — leadership, teamwork and accountability — but locker rooms also sometimes promote a twisted sense of masculinity and pander to jock culture that is firmly rooted in being anti-woman.”

To use a still-emerging story to rehash this litany of woman-as-perpetual-victim is disgraceful. It insults every actual victim of domestic violence, regardless of gender and whether it’s at the hands of an athlete or not.

As I wrote earlier this year about hockey players at Boston University, the culprit is not a “male sports culture.” To blame external forces for criminal behavior is to absolve individuals of responsibility for their own actions. Rae Carruth is sitting in a prison cell because he murdered his pregnant girlfriend. That he was a player for the Carolina Panthers at the time generated voluminous coverage, but he did not kill her because he was an athlete.

We may never completely know what drove Javon Belcher to do what he did on Saturday. Other speculation centers on mental illness, and the effects of concussions. But that’s all it is — speculation.

Jemele Hill would like for you to think, without any evidence, that the football universe he inhabited may have played a part in the murder of a young woman before he turned his gun on himself.

But from the Chiefs’ post-game locker room came this response from quarterback Brady Quinn, also a product of the “jock culture” denounced by Hill. His dignified and deeply humane thoughts, devoid of ideology and rampant speculation, have been largely ignored amid the hot air coming from the sports media:

“The one thing people can hopefully try to take away, I guess, is the relationships they have with people. I know when it happened, I was sitting and, in my head, thinking what I could have done differently. When you ask someone how they are doing, do you really mean it? When you answer someone back how you are doing, are you really telling the truth? We live in a society of social networks, with Twitter pages and Facebook, and that’s fine, but we have contact with our work associates, our family, our friends, and it seems like half the time we are more preoccupied with our phone and other things going on instead of the actual relationships that we have right in front of us. Hopefully people can learn from this and try to actually help if someone is battling something deeper on the inside than what they are revealing on a day-to-day basis.”

Janet Hyde, a former psychology department head and women’s studies professor at the University of Wisconsin, employs a familiar argument in explaining research showing that gender-based differences in the throwing of a ball are considerable:

“The more we argue for gender differences, the more we feed people’s stereotypes. A belief in large gender differences is incompatible with equal opportunity.”

But the theory forwarded by University of North Texas education dean Jerry Thomas is that these differences may be less biological than neurological, and that better techniques can help females improve their performance.

Whether those methods would fully close the “gender gap” is left unexamined — does it need to be closed at all? — but that’s not really the point as far as Hyde is concerned.

For when it comes to belief and science, those claiming to be scientists but whose first duty is to stamp out “stereotypes” are instead the blindest of true believers.

(See Part 4 of my book “Beyond Title IX” for similar examples from women’s sports activists.)

Hyde’s “scholarship” has gained plenty of mainstream currency, especially mathematical aptitude differences between the sexes that she insists are rooted in cultural stereotypes above all else.

When Larry Summers opened up his big mouth about all this as Harvard president, it was such easy low-hanging fruit to pick.

I’m neither a scholar nor a researcher, but a former youth athlete (and lousy at math) who had just as good an arm as the boys until puberty.

Perhaps it is too anecdotal to admit that I realized then that I was actually a girl, even though I’ve never thought I threw like one.

I would love to believe that continued research into these topics would include the scholarly freedom to honestly explore where the line between culture and biology exists, no matter how blurred.

But the virtually unchallenged respectability that Hyde enjoys is not encouraging.

The final part of my new book “Beyond Title IX:  The Cultural Lament of Women’s Sports,” includes many more calls to eliminate sex-segregated athletic competition than I imagined there would be when I began doing the research.

Some women’s sports advocates have argued that Title IX has ensured what they contend is second-class status by legally enforcing gender lines, and have likened this division to racial segregation.

In 2009, the controversy over Caster Semenya renewed old concerns over gender testing and putting male and female athletes in totally separate boxes. The critics would rather blame it all on the pressures of cultural conformity than biological reality:

“Gender testing critics and intersex advocates lashed out more harshly about the cultural implications of Semenya’s banishment than they sympathized with her plight. Canadian feminist theorists Amanda Nicole Schweinbenz and Alexandria Cronk:

“ ‘Female athletes have struggled to negotiate their desire to be strong, muscular, and competitive with heteronormative femininity. Those who have conformed to the accepted image of the heterosexual feminine athletes have reaped the benefits of media attention, endorsements, and even fan approval. Nonconformity continues to result in overt heterosexist discrimination.’

These assertions also fall into the standard academic feminist protest against what’s called the “gender binary,” or a distinctive definition of two clearly marked sexes. For those who believe that gender is a “social construct,” drawing any kind of a line, even for sports, is unforgivable.

“Alice Dreger, a bioethics professor at Northwestern University, told Ariel Levy of The New Yorker that concretely determining gender ‘is not a solvable problem’ because ’science is showing us how much blending there is. . . it becomes impossible to point to one thing, or even a set of things, and say that’s what it means to be male.’

“Even after the IAAF cleared Semenya to return to competition against women, Dreger was upset that its revised policy requires women who test for high levels of testosterone to undergo hormonal treatments:

‘The game being played seems to be a kind of controlling who will count as a sexually appropriate woman: submit to being made sexually ‘normal’ through hormone treatments or you cannot compete.

“But this isn’t a game, it’s about whether an athlete has a decided physiological advantage. Dreger’s insistence that the IAAF policy ‘is so sexist’ that it may constitute a Title IX violation is ridiculous, since she is only presuming it will be adopted at the scholastic sports level in the United States. More importantly, her protest doesn’t settle the quandary of how to classify women and men for competitive sports purposes.

“Will it continue to be left to bodies like the IAAF to draw lines — sometimes clumsily — without the guidance of so-called experts who categorically resist such an idea?”

This book was published right before the International Olympic Committee issued new guidelines that could bar women from competing with other women if their testosterone levels are as high as those of a typical male. Gender-testing critics were quick to be upset:

“The problem is the misperception and bias against people who are not gender-conforming.”

For those who insist that gender is a “social construct” and not a biological fact, they will always be tilting at these windmills.

But in this final section, “Apparitions of Androgyny,” I argue that the case for literal gender-blending doesn’t do much to advance the cause of women’s sports. In some ways, it’s a serious detraction.

The small handful of women athletes who biologically, hormonally and psychologically transgress gender lines are hailed as examples of the need to blur, and ideally eradicate, those lines altogether.

Ultimately, androgyny agonists want to drive out of sports culture anything smacking of traditional feminine dress, behavior, activity, symbolism and expression. This includes the laughable suggestion that it’s an insult to call a female athlete a “lady,” especially if her team includes the word in its nickname.

I’ve been grateful to those who’ve said they’ve bought the book and are reading it, and I even see a couple of “likes” on the Amazon link. If you “like” what you’ve read here, you can get the whole book for $3.99.

The third part of my new book “Beyond Title IX: The Cultural Laments of Women’s Sports” deals with what I refer to as the “representation obsessions” of so-called women’s sports advocates, and the portrayal of female athletes in the media.

When women athletes pose suggestively in magazines, with or without clothing, some of these ultra-feminist “sport media scholars” sound like your grouchy Aunt Betty. One such “expert,” espnW adviser Mary Jo Kane, is convinced that a 2010 Sports Illustrated Olympic preview cover photo of Lindsey Vonn etches out the shape of a male penis and somehow this is being done to objectify women athletes. I wrote:

“Now, I’m like a lot of Americans in that I don’t watch skiing except every four years at the Olympics. All I know about kinesiology is that it is the scientific study of human movement, a field in which Kane is a trained academic and a former department head.

“But as Vonn and other skiers flew down the Olympic courses of Whistler, all of them - female and male - were crouched just as she had been for Sports Illustrated with, to paraphrase Kane, their posteriors protruding and backsides arched. This was the gender-neutral, aerodynamically correct expression of the sport.

“This probably didn’t occur to Kane, who might as well have been Whistler’s Mother, feverishly imagining sexually incorrect poses whenever a female athlete is involved. Her reaction was not surprising, but hardly empirical.

“A male sportswriter friend said to me upon reading this excerpt: ‘Maybe my mind just isn’t dirty enough, but what does she see that I don’t?’

“Exactly.

“When a strident academic feminist can detect the male sex organ in a photo of a female athlete, fully-attired in the regalia of her sport, and an average guy cannot, then it’s entirely fair to wonder what’s really on her brain.”

This is part of a larger argument that Kane and like-minded advocates make that women athletes are being duped into disrobing for men and to make themselves “heterosexy” for general public consumption.

When they’re not condemning grown-up female athletic champions like Brandi Chastain and Amy Acuff they’re blasting the media for portraying Candace Parker and Katarina Witt in traditionally feminine ways.

But this isn’t a gender thing, as male athletes like Mark Spitz, Shep Messing and David Beckham can attest. They’re in this part of the book, too.

In another chapter, I take issue with another “sport media scholar” who insists that media coverage of the feats of female athletes is worse than ever.

As I explain, women athletes in America are on television and enjoy more high-profile status now than at any previous time (magazine spreads aside), and that emerging forms of digital media will be a boon for coverage of their exploits.

On Tuesday I excerpted from the first part of the book, “The Paradox of Equality,” which delves into Title IX matters, and on Wednesday it was all about “Tales from the Pink Locker Room.” On Friday, I’ll introduce you to advocates who want to break down the lines of sex-segregated sports, all in the name of equality.

If you like what you’ve read here, or the sample that’s on Amazon, you can buy the whole book for $3.99. If you’re an Amazon Prime user, it’s yours for no cost. I’d be honored if you give it a read, and I’d love to know what you think.

Today’s excerpt from my new book: “Beyond Title IX: The Cultural Laments of Women’s Sports,” details a prominent Title IX blogger’s first bout with media attention not that many years ago. But the national notoriety surrounding the Pink Locker Room at the University of Iowa is something that Erin Buzuvis does not mention these days, and it’s easy to understand why:

In 2005, while serving as a visiting law professor at the University of Iowa, Erin Buzuvis was horrified to discover that the visitors’ locker room at Kinnick Stadium was awash in light pink paint. Indeed, it was a very calming shade ordered up in the 1980s by former football coach Hayden Fry as a psychological ploy. It worked very, very well.

The late Michigan football coach Bo Schembechler hated the locker room for competitive reasons. Buzuvis hated it for cultural reasons, and on a blog furnished for her by the Iowa law school, she denounced it as a symbol of misogyny and homophobia (the post was soon deleted). As she later explained to an Associated Press reporter in Cedar Rapids:

“With a pink locker room, you’re saying that ‘You are a girlie man. You are weak like a girl.’ That implies that girls are non-dominant, therefore, lesser. And that is offensive.”

Hawkeye Nation went berserk, as Iowa football fans vigorously attacked her on message boards and blogs, with some regrettably making death threats and posting other vulgarities.

The story went nationwide, as the protests of Buzuvis and Jill Gaulding, another Iowa law professor, became a laughingstock. “Research shows brains pick up stereotypes like sponges soak up water,” insisted Gaulding. “One solution to reducing stereotypes, especially negative ones, is to not have them around.”

Buzuvis continued to insist that the pink locker room “belittles every female athlete out there,” although it’s doubtful she polled even one to reach her conclusion.

Iowa football coach Kirk Ferentz was at a loss for words: “I wish I had enough time to think about it. . . . But I really haven’t burned a lot of brain cells on it.”

This section of the book details the origins of the “football as the enemy” complaints by some women’s sports advocates that later led to a more general broadside against the “hegemonic masculinity” that rules American sports culture. Another Title IX legal expert, Deborah Brake, has alleged that the law is about more than “the place of women in sports” but also “the meaning of gender.”

Title IX is not what really gets her cracking in the morning, but a means toward a narrow cultural ideal.

Buzuvis, who now professes law on the East Coast, has ditched the worst of her academic verbiage on her blog. On Monday, her sidekick posted this about regarding calls to drop football from the Title IX calculations:

“Judy Dixon has said she’s tired of fighting football. A lot of us are tired of fighting football — or heck patriarchy in general — but it doesn’t mean we just capitulate.”

This a classic example of a sports feminist establishment whose ideas are hoisted as mainstream and are therefore considered unassailable. Peel away a layer or two, and you will find something very different.