Spectators in their own sport

The mother of Alanna Smith, one of the Connecticut high school runners pushed out by two boys who “identify as” girls, points out how grotesquely unfair it all is:

Men are stronger than women. Boys are faster than girls. An influx of hormones doesn’t undo these realities.

Study after study has reaffirmed this basic fact about what it means to be human. Most recently, Swedish scientists followed 11 biological men whose testosterone was dramatically decreased due to cross-sex hormone treatments over a year.

Even when the men’s testosterone levels matched that of ­biological women, the men’s competitive advantages remained almost fully intact, with muscle size and bone density remaining virtually unchanged in some and decreasing only 5 percent in others.

Anyone can Google to learn that and more, she says, but they can’t Google what it is to be her daughter’s mother.

But you can’t Google my front-row seat as a mother of a high-school athlete who has been beaten out by a biological male athlete who identifies as a female — one who hasn’t undergone hormone therapy or gender-reassignment surgery and who competed a year earlier as a male.

My daughter, Alanna, now a sophomore, is a rising star in our home state of Connecticut. As a freshman, she led her high-school team to its third straight team championship in the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference by winning the 100-meter, 200-meter and 400-meter in one of the most dominant individual performances in meet history. She was an integral component in the team’s first-place finish in the State Open and in smashing a pair of records at the New England championships in Maine.

Alanna has devoted countless days, nights and weekends to training. She pushes herself to shave mere fractions of a second from her race times…

But she also knows it’s futile, because those two boys will always beat her.

Since 2017, our state’s high-school athletic conference has allowed biological boys to compete against girls. It’s enough that they subjectively identify as female. Since then, two biological boys have won 15 women’s track championships, titles held by nine different girls in 2016.

Not only that, the same two biological boys have taken away more than 50 chances for girls to compete at the next level of competition, running these girls right off the track and forcing them to be spectators in their own sport.

Our daughters deserve better than to have their athletic opportunities stolen from them. My daughter deserves to compete, to achieve, to earn the opportunity to advance to the next level of competition, to earn a college scholarship and to enter into adulthood with all the confidence of a fierce, proven champion — a champion who knows she won fairly.

No biological male should take those opportunities from my daughter, regardless of how he self-identifies. Redefining “sex” to mean “gender identity” — as our state’s athletic conference has done, as what the ACLU is trying to do at the Supreme Court and as the so-called “Equality Act” in Congress would do — destroys female athletics.

Why are so many “progressive” people happy with that outcome?

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