This month, three female high school athletes in Connecticut filed a lawsuit against their state’s athletic conference, arguing that their ability to compete on a level playing field has been violated.
The culprit: a state policy allowing biological males the ability to compete in girls’ sports as long as they “identify” as female. This has resulted in two male track athletes taking home a total of fifteen women’s state titles since 2017.
To most Americans, the sheer unfairness of this situation is obvious. Men and women are biologically different. Elite male athletes have a physical advantage over elite female athletes in competition. This age-old truth is the reason we have female-only sports to begin with — and it’s why Congress passed Title IX in 1972, to provide more opportunities for women.
However, in recent years the Left has embarked on an ideological crusade to abolish biological sex in favor of subjective “gender identity.” Female athletes are among the predictable victims. It goes well beyond Connecticut high schools — biological males have lately won collegiate women’s track and field titles and awards, professional women’s cycling championships, and even women’s weightlifting medals.
But instead of lamenting these attacks on the rights of women, leftists have embraced and celebrated them. In fact, in an especially insensitive move, the LGBT blog Outsports recently called Fallon Fox, a biologically male MMA fighter who gained notoriety for breaking the skull of a woman opponent, the “bravest athlete in history.” Apparently, this counts as progress.
The activists pushing this movement are not limited to the left-wing fringe — indeed, the Democrats have been complicit as well. During President Barack Obama’s last year in office, his administration released a guidance letter threatening public schools with a loss of federal funding if they did not open women’s athletic teams, as well as bathrooms, locker rooms, and other private spaces, to biological males. Congressional Democrats last year passed the Equality Act, a bill that would codify these mandates (and a whole lot more) into civil rights law. At the state level, Democrats have been supportive of similar policy changes, despite the negative impacts on women. Those women — even left-wing women — who have had the audacity to complain about the policies have been derisively branded as bigots, or TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists).
Thus, it has fallen to three young women in Connecticut to courageously stand up for their right to compete with other young women on a fair playing field — a right which should have been guaranteed long ago. Indeed, it is highly ironic that as Democrats push to pass the outdated and merely symbolic “Equal Rights Amendment,” they are ignoring the real threat to equal rights for women that their own actions present — the effort to systematically deny opportunities and protections for women in order to put biological males on a pedestal.
If Democrats will not protect opportunities for women athletes, Republicans should. Thankfully, many are already taking steps to do so. Shortly after his election to the White House, President Trump rescinded the controversial Obama guidance, making it clear that the federal government would not penalize schools for upholding fairness in athletics or private spaces for girls. And in a number of states this year, GOP lawmakers have introduced legislation to mandate that biological sex, not subjective “gender identity,” be the basis for qualifying to compete in girl’s sports.
The battle is only just beginning. With the 2020 elections approaching, and with nearly every Democrat in the presidential field demanding that “gender identity” supercede “sex” in civil rights law, it is important that supporters of equal opportunity for women make their voices heard. For the sake of future generations of U.S. girls, we cannot let these brave athletes in Connecticut stand alone.
Terry Schilling (@Schilling1776) is the executive director at American Principles Project.
