By Riley Gaines
Thursday, January 25, 2024
In 2022, no college-sports fan could have missed the banners, commercials, and exuberant celebration of “Title IX at 50.” As a senior at the University of Kentucky on a full scholarship for swimming, having set Southeastern Conference records and achieved All-American recognition twelve times, I certainly did not. Title IX, part of the Education Amendments of 1972, has dramatically improved opportunities for women, myself included.
In 1970, only 8 percent of women held college degrees, and only 15 percent of college athletes were women. Today, almost 40 percent of women have college degrees, and we make up 44 percent of college athletes. High-school-sports participation tells a similar story. During the 1971–72 school year, fewer than 300,000 girls participated, but by 2018–19 almost 3.5 million girls did (while opportunities for boys increased as well).
This is a good thing. Swimming has given me friendships with teammates, leadership skills, and confidence that I will carry for a lifetime. Girls who play sports have higher self-esteem and lower rates of depression. We are less likely to have an unintended pregnancy, on average we get better grades, and we learn teamwork that helps us in the workplace — 80 percent of the female executives at Fortune 500 companies identified themselves as former sports-playing “tomboys.”
Despite the boon that Title IX has been for female athletes, the Biden administration, the NCAA, and various governing bodies threaten to dismantle it by pursuing policies that discriminate against women. The Biden administration, for its part, is pursuing an illegal administrative rewrite of Title IX that would substitute the law’s demand for equal opportunity between the two sexes with sports participation based on (undefined) “gender identity,” except when this would undermine an (undefined) “important educational objective,” a category that presumably includes safety and fairness in competition. This entirely subjective test would discourage schools from having single-sex sports at all, lest a bureaucrat disagree with the school’s fairness determination and cut off the school’s funding.
This proposed rule therefore would place the entire burden of “inclusivity” on women. Rather than request that men’s teams be more welcoming or that schools create coed opportunities, or ask anything of trans-identifying athletes, it would require women to give up roster spots, playing time, scholarships, and dignity.
The Biden administration is merely playing catch-up with the NCAA, however. The NCAA in 2010 announced that men could participate in women’s sports as long as they had undergone a year of testosterone suppression. In 2022, it amended this announcement to permit sport-specific policies, but it in fact reiterated the testosterone-level criterion.
Enter Will, now Lia, Thomas. Will Thomas swam at the University of Pennsylvania, ranking 554th nationally in the 200-yard freestyle and 65th in the 500-yard freestyle. After a year of testosterone suppression, Lia Thomas won the 500-yard-freestyle NCAA championship outright, this time against women. I too competed against Thomas, and, against all odds, we tied. But the NCAA awarded the trophy to Thomas, signaling loud and clear that a pharmaceutically altered man is not only equivalent to a woman but better than one. I asked officials why Thomas should be given the trophy over me. They responded that it was crucial that Thomas hold the trophy when photos were being taken.
On top of federal and NCAA changes come policies from sports-governing bodies. USA Boxing, for example, permits men to literally beat women up, so long as the men have been sufficiently drugged. The International Powerlifting Federation, USA Cycling, and other groups have similar policies.
This is madness, and these policies are unfair. A woman is not a handicapped man.
Without fairness, what are competitive sports? Every athletic division and category is designed to create an even playing field. Eighteen-year-olds can’t compete in the twelve-and-under league. Able-bodied Olympians can’t compete in the Paralympics. Heavyweight athletes can’t fight featherweights. These divisions have nothing to do with ageism, ableism, or fatphobia — instead they protect competition and safety. The same practice should apply to the sexes.
The report “Competition: Title IX, Male-Bodied Athletes, and the Threat to Women’s Sports” by Independent Women’s Forum details the unfairness that results when sex differences aren’t acknowledged. Men are on average 30 percent stronger than women of equal stature, punch 30–162 percent harder, accelerate 20 percent faster, and jump 25 percent higher. Testosterone suppression doesn’t solve the problem. As the report explains, not only do sex-based differences such as bone density, bone size, lung volume, heart size, muscle size, strength, endurance, and speed persist despite hormone impairment, sports associations’ guidelines do not generally require that males who wish to compete with women have testosterone levels comparable to those of females. For example, the normal, 95 percent reference range for healthy menstruating women under 40 years of age is 0 to 1.7 nanomoles of testosterone per liter, but USA Boxing permits male boxers with up to 5 nanomoles per liter to compete in the female category.
This is a matter of not just fairness but safety. Take Payton McNabb, whose dreams of playing volleyball at the collegiate level were shattered after a head injury that left her unconscious. A male athlete had spiked a ball so powerfully in her face during a girls’ high-school volleyball game that it became her last. She still suffers from memory loss, vision impairment, and partial paralysis on her right side almost 18 months after the incident.
Or consider the young field-hockey player in Massachusetts whose teeth were knocked out and whose jaw was permanently damaged after she was hit in the face with a ball slung by a male player. Her teammates couldn’t bear to look as she shrieked in pain. The male went on to score the only two goals of that game and was praised for his performance.
Such disasters happen at an alarming rate. Of course, injuries can and do happen in female-only contests, but allowing males to play women’s sports increases their likelihood and severity. Moreover, women who play coed sports accept the risks that attend them. Women who play women’s sports, however, do not consent to having a volleyball spiked in their face by a man.
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So where are the feminists? The National Organization for Women (NOW) calls itself the largest organization of feminist grassroots activists in the United States. It was founded in 1966, right before Title IX took form. Things have changed. Protecting women’s spaces and opportunities no longer makes its list of priorities, but “fighting discrimination based on gender identity” does. NOW “particularly thank[s] the trans community for their contributions to the feminist movement” and vehemently opposes sex-based sports. This androgynous brand of fourth-wave feminism does not prioritize the unique struggles of women but calls for their erasure; it’s a demand to eliminate “men” and “women” and render them always potentially interchangeable. Corporate America, academia, the medical field, the media, and churches have taken similar stances.
But not all hope is lost. For one, the majority of the public believes that sex-based protections are necessary, especially as they pertain to sports. Public opinion, when impassioned, is a powerful tool. As of this January, 24 states have passed legislation prohibiting males from participating in women’s sports. These bills permit trans-identifying individuals to play sports, but in the sex-based categories that would make competition fair and safe. This should not be controversial.
Some think that the number of males attempting to play women’s sports is too small to warrant concern. And yet in every statehouse, at every rally, and in too many casual conversations to count, parents have informed me that their daughters have been forced to change in front of and compete against males in sports from swimming to tae kwon do. Gender ideology has pervaded youth culture (consider that “#trans” on TikTok has almost 70 billion views). More than 5 percent of young adults now say they are trans or non-binary, almost an eightfold increase from the 0.66 percent who said so in 2016. How many girls must be injured before they are deemed worthy of safe competition? How many must be exposed to males in locker rooms? How many must lose opportunities for which they have worked their entire lives to undeserving males?
The legislative battle isn’t the final front, unfortunately. Bills protecting “women’s” sports aren’t worth the paper they are printed on if society loses sight of what a woman is. In 2022, the advocacy groups Independent Women’s Law Center, Women’s Liberation Front, and Independent Women’s Voice created the Women’s Bill of Rights to help state governments and courts define and apply commonsense terms such as “woman,” “man,” “girl,” “boy,” “mother,” “father,” “male,” and “female.” It has been adopted in four states: Kansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Nebraska. Such legislation should not be necessary — “woman” does not need a technical definition — but welcome to 2024.
The Women’s Bill of Rights does not call for new legal rights for women or place new legal requirements on the state. Nor does it prevent any laws that would provide benefits to trans-identifying individuals. In fact, the legislation does not contain the word “transgender” at all. But that does not stop the media from blasting biologically accurate definitions as anti-trans.
While thousands of us are working every day to turn the tide, no movement can be successful without the public. Here are three suggestions:
Don’t wait. I waited until I was personally affected before I stood up for women, and I regret it. By the time I was adversely affected, it was too late for me. But it doesn’t have to be too late for all girls and young women.
Consider your language. Initially, I adhered to the preferred-pronoun game because I wanted to be “respectful.” It was wrong. It’s not respectful to lie, deceive, or affirm delusions. A similar point applies to the term “biological female.” I myself used this term, trying to distinguish myself from Thomas in terms we’d all understand. But through my words I was implicitly conceding that a non-biological alternative to maleness or femaleness should enter into discussions of women’s sports. It shouldn’t. I am a woman and therefore biologically female. It should go without saying, and when it doesn’t, women can be harmed or disadvantaged.
Look beyond the slogans. Those who are undermining Title IX often do so under the banner of “inclusion” or “equity” or “women’s rights.” But slogans are not policies. Title IX was meant to protect and celebrate women. But how can we protect and celebrate what we cannot define? A lifelong liberal made this point to me, and it has stuck with me ever since.
It is up to us, the people, to hold our leaders accountable. If they can’t find it in themselves to defend girls and women, then we should elect new leaders.
I owe thanks to Lia Thomas. Never would I have imagined that I, a 21-year-old NCAA swimmer from Tennessee, could be empowered to fight for future generations of female athletes. Thomas — supported by the NCAA, the University of Pennsylvania, and other powerful institutions — perfectly exposed the injustice against women that had so often been ignored. I quickly understood how it devalues female athletes to consider them interchangeable with chemically altered men, and I have worked to fight against this absurd equivalence ever since.
Women are being asked to deny their uniqueness and nature to cater to males who infringe on their opportunities and spaces. But women are not the problem. Women are not doing anything wrong by affirming their biology and advocating to protect their rights. To believe that women deserve privacy, safety, fairness, and equal opportunity is not anti-trans. It is pro-woman. It is pro-truth. And truth is worth fighting for.
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