What is happening to America?
Jul 13, 2019 13:42:53 GMT -6
via Tapatalk
petefrankenschmidt likes this
Post by API on Jul 13, 2019 13:42:53 GMT -6
A Connecticut Girl Challenges Male Domination of Female Sports
Selina Soule, 16, says letting boys compete as girls violates Title IX.
As a star high-school athlete, Selina Soule doesn’t shrink from the spotlight—but she never planned to gain it in the manner she has. This year the 16-year-old has appeared on Fox News more than once to express her opposition to the transgender policy of her state’s athletic conference. Since 2017, Connecticut schools have allowed young men to displace Ms. Soule and other girls in sports competitions. Across the country, controversies around women’s sports have become one of the sharpest fault lines in the national debate about transgender issues.
Last month Alliance Defending Freedom filed a civil-rights complaint with the Education Department on behalf of Ms. Soule and two other Connecticut girls. They argue that allowing boys to compete in the female category denies girls “opportunities for participation, recruitment, and scholarships,” contravening Title IX’s prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sex.
Presumably, the legislators who passed Title IX in 1972 understood sex to be anatomical. But today its text poses an unforeseen challenge to administrators. They must decide whether the definition of sex includes “gender identity”—one’s sense of being male, female or neither. Connecticut’s is one of 19 state athletic conferences that allow athletes to compete based solely on their expressed gender identity. In contrast, both the International Olympic Committee and the National Collegiate Athletic Association require male-to-female transgender athletes to take testosterone-suppressing drugs to compete in the women’s category.
The results speak for themselves. Since Connecticut’s athletic conference enacted its liberal gender-identity policy, two men have won 15 women’s state championships—titles that were held by 10 different Connecticut girls the previous year.
“It’s just really frustrating and heartbreaking, because we all train extremely hard to shave off just fractions of a second off of our time. And these athletes can do half the amount of work that we do, and it doesn’t matter,” Ms. Soule says. “We have no chance of winning.”
Ms. Soule recalls that it was May 2017, at the Middletown Varsity Invitational, when she first saw a “very muscular person with long braided hair completely dominate the race.” She says she knew then that this athlete was “identifying as female versus biologically being a female,” but tried to put it out of her mind. Yet the following year she saw yet another athlete “wearing the men’s uniform but [competing] in the girls’ events.” As she and the other young women were two-thirds into the 100-meter race, two male competitors had “already finished and were doing the chest bump—the thing that the boys do when they do well.”
So far, Ms. Soule is the only complainant to come forward under her own name. She says that many agree with her but are reluctant to speak up for fear of retaliation (from which women are supposed to be protected under Title IX). Ms. Soule has been harassed on social media and says a coach told her and her father that he “would not be able to give a good report about her” to a college recruiter. The Hartford Courant newspaper sides with the state, saying “the greater risk to fairness is to exclude someone from a sport because of their gender identity.”
The Obama administration played a major role in blurring the distinction between the sexes in public schools. In 2016 the Education and Justice departments issued guidance to public schools, advising them to “treat a student’s gender identity as the student’s sex for purposes of Title IX and its implementing regulations.” The departments threatened investigation and withdrawal of federal funding for any school that didn’t comply.
Though the Trump administration rescinded the Obama-era guidance the next year, it has not yet replaced it. Doing so would reassert at the federal level that sex under Title IX means anatomy, until or unless Congress or the Supreme Court decides otherwise.
But if Democrats take the White House and the Senate in 2020, girls’ sports may face bigger problems. In May the House passed the Equality Act, which would amend the Civil Rights Act with a redefinition of sex that includes gender identity. Every Democratic presidential front-runner has pledged support for this bill, which would effectively force public schools in all 50 states to adopt a transgender policy like Connecticut’s. Carrying on the legacy of President Obama, Democrats seem to hope that no one will read the fine print or realize what the policies mean in practice.
The lack of awareness about this issue is one of the main reasons Ms. Soule has taken a public stand. “I don’t want to have all this attention on me,” she says. “And I certainly don’t appreciate having people attack me. But I think it is more important to get this issue out there, and to somehow find a solution, than for girls to end up being on the sidelines of their own sports.”
Ms. Kearns is a William F. Buckley Fellow at National Review
Copyright ©2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
TL; DR.
