Ex-tennis champion and feminist icon Billie Jean King once complained that sport was the only area in which males and females didn’t compete together. Be careful what you wish for. Now males claiming female “identity” are entering girls’ and women’s sports and often dominating — and some females are crying foul. In fact, three Connecticut girl athletes and their families are currently suing their state for sex discrimination for having allowed boys to take track titles from them.
As Fox News tells us, “Selina Soule, a senior at Glastonbury High School; Chelsea Mitchell, a senior at Canton High School; and Alanna Smith, a sophomore at Danbury High School, announced the lawsuit in a press conference on the steps of the state capitol in Hartford, the Washington Post reported.”
“‘Our dream is not to come in second or third place, but to win, fair and square,’ Mitchell said. ‘All we’re asking for is a fair chance.’” Providing more detail, WND.com writes:
“Girls deserve to compete on a level playing field,” charged Christiana Holcomb, a lawyer for the girls. “Having separate boys’ and girls’ sports has always been based on biological differences, not what people believe about their gender, because those differences matter for fair competition.”
She continued, “And forcing girls to be spectators in their own sport is completely at odds with Title IX, a federal law designed to create equal opportunities for women in education and athletics. Connecticut’s policy violates that law and reverses nearly 50 years of advances for women.”
She works with the Alliance Defending Freedom.
The lawsuit challenges Connecticut’s policy of letting boys compete in girls’ sports events, triggered by the transgender movement. That change was adopted by the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference to allow boys who think they’re girls to take part.
Since then “boys have consistently deprived Selina Soule, Alanna Smith, and Chelsea Mitchell of honors and opportunities to compete at elite levels.”
“All three plaintiffs have competed with, and almost always placed behind, two transgender sprinters, Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood,” Fox elaborates. “Mitchell finished third in the 2019 state championship in the girls 55-meter indoor track competition behind Miller and Yearwood. The two Connecticut high school seniors, who … [are] male but identify as female, have won 15 girls state indoor or outdoor championship races combined since 2017, the lawsuit said.”
I’ve written much about the MUSS (Made-up Sexual Status, or “transgender”) agenda, pointing out that it has no basis whatsoever in good science and that prescribing MUSS “remedies” for children constitutes malpractice. Moreover, the intersex athletics performance gap is profound, a reality perhaps best illustrated by how the 800-meter run record for 14-year-old boys is better than the women’s world record. Nonetheless, the Constitution State girls’ Title IX lawsuit doesn’t seem credible.
Title IX simply reads, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” It doesn’t mandate policies ensuring equal outcomes between the sexes — only opportunity.
Now, there might be a case if girls weren’t allowed on boys’ teams and in their events, but this has been allowed and has happened. In fact, there’s nothing in the statute preventing the elimination of sex-specific sporting categories altogether; and providing a separate, protected league for females that excludes males is itself discrimination (this doesn’t mean it is or isn’t unjust). A true egalitarian might say, “Let everyone compete together — and may the best sentient biped win!”
As for the social aspect here, while the Connecticut girls aren’t personally responsible for current policy, feminists are, well, just being hoisted with their petards.
Consider: If people believe the sexes are quite similar in terms of athletic abilities, will they be more or less likely to oppose having MUSS males (who often undergo treatments partially eliminating their biological advantages) compete with females?
Now ponder a story: It came to light when I worked with children that one boy, approximately 11 years old, supposed that the women’s mile record should be better than the men’s. Another male age-mate expressed the belief that the intersex athletics performance gap was “very slight.” These are extreme cases, of course, but experience has taught me that people generally underestimate that gap’s size today.
This raises a question: Where did these people get this unrealistic idea? From:
A. The Christian Coalition
B. The Southern Baptist Conference
C. The John Birch Society
D. The feminist-born, girl-power propaganda society has been inundated with for decades via the media, entertainment, and academia
If you guessed D, go to the head of the class.
As one commenter discussing MUSSmen in women’s sports here put it, “I’m constantly told that men and women are equal and that gender is a social construct. I’m constantly shown ‘bad[***] women’ on TV and in movies that can beat up men easily. I’m told a woman can do anything a man can do. So … why segregate sports?”
For sure. We all grew up hearing, “A woman can do anything a man can do! Case closed.”
It goes beyond that, though. For a couple of generations the dominant sexual-politics theory was “gender neutrality”; it dogmatically stated that the sexes are the same but for the superficial physical differences, and, therefore, if you raise boys and girls identically, they’ll end up identical in capacity.
So intense was this dogma that, related feminist Camille Paglia, angry feminists would corner her on college campuses in the 1970s and insist that hormones didn’t exist and that, even if they did, they couldn’t possibly influence behavior.
This was convenient, of course, when seeking to undermine traditional sex roles and open up once-all-male arenas to women. But the thesis that the “sexes are the same except for the superficial physical differences” ceased being convenient to feminists when pseudo-elites embraced and promoted one of its corollaries: “Change the superficial physical differences, and you can be the ‘opposite sex.’”
The former absolutely led to the latter — A begat B — and feminism absolutely laid the groundwork for it.
And so now we have people such as the aforementioned track “star” Terry Miller, who issued a statement defending himself in the Connecticut lawsuit’s wake and proclaimed, “I am a girl and I am a runner.” The lesson is that ideas have consequences, fantastical social-manipulation monsters loosed can turn on their creators, and you should be careful what you wish for.
If women can “be” men, men can also be women. White male and linear or not, that’s simple logic.
Photo: grinvalds / Stock / Getty Images Plus
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
