Biological Males Dominating Women’s Track and Field Competitions

LGBT,

We’ve written before about efforts to force public schools to let boys enter girls’ showers, locker rooms, changing areas, and restrooms at school.

These radical policies are part of the movement to embrace transgender ideology, and they put children at serious risk.

In some states, these same policies are spilling over into high school athletics — and they are hurting students.

Recently our friends at Alliance Defending Freedom filed a complaint with the federal government on behalf of a group of female high school athletes in Connecticut, writing,

Selina Soule is a 16-year-old high school student at Glastonbury High School in Connecticut. Like many prep athletes her age, Selina has devoted countless days, nights, and weekends to training, striving to shave mere fractions of a second off her race times. She does so in the hopes of personal satisfaction of victory, an opportunity to participate in state and regional meets, and a chance to earn a college scholarship.

Yet, despite her best efforts, Selina has gone into races over the past two years knowing that she has little chance of winning. . . .

At the Connecticut indoor track championship in late February of this year, Selina missed out on qualifying for the New England regionals by two spots—both of which were taken by female-identifying boys. Not only that, but the two boys claimed the top spots at 6.95 seconds—a girls state indoor track “record”—and 7.01 seconds. The third-place contestant crossed the line at 7.23 seconds.

Selina didn’t get a chance to compete at the New England regionals and make an impression on college scouts—all because of the CIAC’s policy that prioritizes beliefs about gender over biology. . . .

This week, Selina and two other anonymous girls’ track athletes took a major step to correct the situation in Connecticut. As the named complainant on a Title IX complaintthat Alliance Defending Freedom filed with the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, Selina is asking that the OCR investigate illegal discrimination against the Connecticut athletes. The complaint also notes that CIAC’s policy and its results directly violated the requirements of Title IX, a federal educational regulation designed to protect equal opportunities, including in athletics, for women and girls.

Letting male athletes who claim to be female compete against women can be more than just unfair. In some cases, it can be dangerous.

As John Stonestreet at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview noted in 2016,

In a 2014 Mixed Martial Arts fight, a transgendered fighter, Fallon Fox, destroyed Tamikka Brents, giving Brents a concussion and breaking her eye socket. As Brents put it, “I’ve fought a lot of women and have never felt the strength that I felt in a fight as I did that night.” She continued, “I’ve never felt so overpowered ever in my life” and “I’m an abnormally strong female in my own right.”

And mind you, Fox underwent reassignment surgery in 2006 and had been on hormone therapy ever since. In other words, Fox is as “transitioned” as a transgendered athlete can be, and still the competition was blatantly unfair.

All of this is simply another example of the consequences of radical LGBT policies.

Photo by Kolleen Gladden on Unsplash

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New Federal Memo Could Roll Back Some Radical LGBT Policies

Transgender,

Last week the New York Times triggered outrage and hysteria on the part of LGBT activists by publishing a column claiming a Trump Administration memo “would essentially eradicate federal recognition” of transgender people.

To put it plainly, the New York Times got this one wrong.

The administration simply is looking to undo some of the extreme policies that the Obama Administration implemented during President Obama’s second term in office.

According to the Times, the new federal Department of Health and Human services memo instructs government agencies to define “sex” as “a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth.” That’s a major shift from the Obama Administration’s decision to define “sex” as a person’s self-identified gender identity.

You may recall in May of 2016 the Obama Administration issued “guidelines” instructing schools that receive federal tax dollars — in other words, virtually every public school and most colleges and universities — to let male students who claim to be female use the women’s locker rooms, showers, restrooms, and similar facilities on campus, and vice versa.

The administration also told colleges that men had to be housed in women’s dormitories if they claim to be female, and vice versa.

The Obama Administration did all of this unilaterally, without going through Congress or following the proper channels for changing federal rules and regulations.

Needless to say a lot of people pushed back against the Obama Administration’s radical “guidelines.” Arkansas and several other states actually sued the administration.

Since 2017 the Trump Administration gradually has rolled back many of these policies. This latest memo is simply another step in that process.

As John Stonestreet writes at Breakpoint,

When Congress passed Title IX in 1972, it never anticipated that the word “sex” would be applied to include “gender preference.” But after numerous failed attempts to align federal anti-discrimination laws like Title IX with the new sexual orthodoxy, the Obama administration decided to amend the law via a memo.

Of course, that’s not how the constitutional system is supposed to work. Redefining “sex” for the purpose of federal law is the job of Congress, not the Executive Branch.

All that’s being proposed here . . . is a reversal of extra-constitutional lawlessness.

Besides being lawless, the Obama Administration’s irresponsible policies threatened people’s safety and privacy.  Giving men an excuse to loiter in or around women’s restrooms, showers, and changing areas is a bad idea.

Earlier this month we learned the federal government has opened an investigation into whether or not a kindergartner in Georgia was sexually assaulted because of the Obama Administration’s transgender policies. Last year men in New Jersey and Idaho were arrested for allegedly filming women in fitting rooms at Target stores.

In light of all of this, changing the Obama Administration’s radical policies on gender identity sounds like a good idea to me.

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