Taking on the contentious issue
A group of high-profile women athletes and women’s sports advocates is taking on the contentious issue of transgender girls and women in sports by proposing federal legislation to exempt girls’ and women’s competitive sports from President Joe Biden’s recent executive order that mandates blanket inclusion for all transgender female athletes.
In the Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation, signed on Inauguration Day, the Biden administration said that any school that receives federal funding must allow biological boys who self-identify as girls onto girls’ sports teams or face action from the federal government.
But the group of women’s sports leaders, including tennis legend Martina Navratilova, several Olympic gold medalists and five former presidents of the Women’s Sports Foundation, is asking Congress and the Biden administration to limit the participation of transgender girls and women who “have experienced all or part of male puberty (which is the scientific justification for separate sex sport),” while accommodating and honoring their sports participation in other ways. Options could include separate heats, additional events or divisions and/or the handicapping of results.
Now why would they do that? Oh yes, the reason’s obvious, isn’t it.
“We fully support the Biden executive order, ending LGBT discrimination throughout society, including employment, banking, family law and public accommodations,” Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a Title IX attorney and one of the leaders of the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, told USA TODAY Sports in an exclusive interview. “Competitive sports, however, are akin to pregnancy and medical testing; these areas require a science-based approach to trans inclusion. Our aim has been on protecting the girls’ and women’s competitive categories, while crafting accommodations for trans athletes into sport wherever possible.
“While the details of President Biden’s executive order remain fuzzy, asking women — no, requiring them — to give up their hard-won rights to compete and be recognized in elite sport, with equal opportunities, scholarships, prize money, publicity, honor and respect, does the cause of transgender inclusion no favors,” Hogshead-Makar said.
And even if it did do the cause of trans inclusion favors, it would still be outrageously unfair to women and girls, which ought to make it a non-starter.
While the controversy over transgender girls and women in sports is not new, the issue bubbled to the surface in the United States a few years ago when two transgender girls were allowed to compete in state track and field meets in Connecticut, winning a combined 15 girls’ state indoor and outdoor championship races from 2017-19…
Which is 15 wins they took away from girls, which is grossly unfair.
How many trans-men are filing grievances to enter men’s sporting events?
Crickets.
Isn’t this proof positive that biological men are different than biological women?
JUST ASKING
Unfair to women and girls? Pffft. If you want them to change direction, you have to show trans activists how it will be unfair to or somehow disadvantage them.
Of course TAs aren’t limiting themselves to truthful, good faith arguments, but relying on smears, lies and transperbole, so they’ll be fighting dirty. If those defending women and girls’ sports are able to recieve a fair hearing in a venue that permits and evaluates actual evidence and truth claims, the usual tactics of trans advocates might actually work against them. We can hope.
The 2020 Summer Olympics would’ve been that venue with the evidence being that only women’s teams with men on them would won gold medals.
Or just put them in the male league, on the basis that they’re male.
For that matter, why don’t you hear about trans women petitioning to compete in, say, women’s gymnastics?
WaM#5: Excellent.
This is purely anecdotal, but I bring it up because I am now seeing basically the same thing being said by many women on various social platforms: the performance difference between boys and girls, while generally the same when they are younger, becomes starkly different once puberty sets in. I’m not even much of an athlete, but in high school I could out-endure and out-perform pretty much every girl in every school sport, with the exception of running (and that is just because my Scandinavian genetics better suit me for extended plodding rather than bursts of speed). And this coming from a guy who was always picked last when teaming up to play dodge-ball in primary school gym class. I dunno, maybe “gym class” is no longer a thing–I mean, I’m ancient, having graduated high school in 1984–so maybe Kids These Days just aren’t getting the same exposure to these differences. I do note that the people whom I see on Twitter who are loudly supporting transgender athletes in women’s sports are, shall we say, not very sporty themselves. It’s almost as if they are just virtue-signaling and have no actual experience with the underlying situation whatsoever.
Just a youngster, really. I beat you by six years. Ouch, it hurts to think of.
Ha. I beat both of you, having left grammar school at the age of eighteen in 1976.
But I’m not old, because my mother says that she isn’t old. So there!