OPINION:
On Sept. 16, school officials in Bow, New Hampshire, paused a girls high school basketball game to order several parents to remove the pink armbands they wore that read “XX.” The state’s motto — “Live Free or Die” — evidently does not extend to First Amendment rights in government-run schools.
Not content with this egregious violation of parents’ free speech rights, school officials then prohibited at least two parents from attending future school events, describing their armbands as “intimidating,” “threatening” and “harassing.”
Strange as it may seem, this small-town controversy highlights the stakes of the 2024 presidential election for women and girls. This and similar disputes are the direct result of Biden-Harris administration policies — policies that a Harris-Walz administration can be counted on to continue and expand upon.
A little background: This past spring, a high school girls basketball team in Massachusetts was forced to forfeit a game after a player from the opposing team injured three players. Camera footage reveals the player to be quite a specimen by the standards of female sports: over 6 feet tall, with broad shoulders and a beard.
As confirmed by news reports, the player is not a girl. But he is competing with girls in girls team sports. He is not alone.
Two years ago in North Carolina, a transgender athlete inflicted brain damage and partial paralysis on a 17-year-old girl by spiking a volleyball in her face at 70 miles an hour. The injured girl’s school district subsequently voted to forfeit all future matches to teams fielding transgender players. Last year, again in Massachusetts, a male field hockey player knocked a high school girl’s teeth out with a shot that also seriously damaged her face.
Reasonable concerns that male athletes competing in female sports can make competition unsafe for girls drove parents of Bow High School students to protest allowing young men to play in their daughters’ games (the “XX” on their armbands refers to a woman’s double X chromosomes). These parents were right to protest.
Transgender athletes are crushing female sports. This is literally the case in volleyball, field hockey and mixed martial arts, where biological males are breaking their female opponents’ skulls and faces. It is also figuratively the case in other instances where male athletes are seizing competitive roster spots and setting records in events once reserved for women.
None of this is surprising, of course. The purpose of segregating sports by sex is to ensure that female athletes have the full opportunity to develop and display athletic excellence within the boundaries imposed by nature and physics.
Sex segregation is necessary because the physical differences between males and females are stark. Boys and men generally have larger hearts, greater lung capacity, greater blood volume and blood oxygen carrying capacity, higher bone density, greater muscle mass and superior neuromuscular efficiency. Taken together, these differences convey immense advantages to males in athletic events.
Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments addresses these biological realities by providing for equal access to athletic opportunities for school-age girls and women. Unfortunately, the Biden-Harris administration has perverted the plain meaning of Title IX by reassigning sex-based protections meant for women and girls to men and boys claiming a female identity.
The administration’s crusade reflects a fanatical adherence to radical gender ideology, which has also inspired efforts to use the federal government to:
• Indoctrinate school children in radical gender ideology concepts (e.g., “cisheteropatriarchy”) and terminology (e.g., preferred pronouns).
• Promote social and even medical transitioning (hormones and surgery) for children.
• Compel school boards to retain sexually explicit material in school libraries.
• Force health insurers and providers to cover child gender transition procedures and to lower age limits for such procedures.
Fortunately, in a victory for Republican state attorneys general and other advocates for the safety and dignity of women and girls, recent judicial interventions have temporarily paused implementation of the Biden-Harris Title IX revisions in 26 states and some other schools. This divided legal landscape, however, must be resolved either by a new administration or the Supreme Court.
In the meantime, girls and young women who attend the tens of thousands of schools left unprotected by the federal courts, including Bow High School, will continue to risk serious injury if they play team sports. Their athletic scholarship opportunities will continue to be stolen by second-rate male athletes.
Girls and young women will continue to be forced to undress in the presence of biological males — an indignity that comes with unwanted exposure to male nudity. They will be forced by transgender activists to endure sexual harassment and objectification in formerly sex-segregated intimate spaces.
A progressive journalist once defended Stalin, quipping, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” For radicals such as Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the “omelet” is a vision of a society where the “gender binary” has been obliterated. To this end, safety, dignity and fairness for young women and girls are just “eggs” to scramble.
• Riley Gaines is vice chair of Athletes for America at the America First Policy Institute and a 12-time NCAA All-American. Christopher Schorr is a senior policy analyst for the Higher Education Reform Initiative at the institute.
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