Over the past year, I’ve had numerous conversations with people, including family members, who believe the whole transgender issue is a big old nothing-burger. They say it’s just another political football used to score points with the right to drum up rage and, ultimately, votes.
I wish that were true. In its never-ending genuflection to extreme activists, the Biden administration continues to undo years of women’s rights efforts with the single stroke of a pen. Late last week, Biden, in coordination with Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, revised Title IX rules to “extend legal protections to LGBTQ students” and “roll back several policies under the Trump administration,” according to most mainstream media reports.
It’s a shame that sports, like almost everything else, has become so political.
What most of these stories fail to describe is how doing so undermines everything that Title IX was written to do — namely, protect women. Biden’s cohort has sacrificed women at the altar of some fringe activist movement.
The new regulations, which take effect August 1, extend the law’s reach to prohibit discrimination and harassment based on sexual orientation and gender identity, rather than sex alone. That means boys and men who “identify” as women, despite having all their male sexual organs intact, may enter women-only spaces like locker rooms in educational institutions from elementary school through college.
The rules also widen the prosecutorial scope of allegations of “misgendering.” If your kid refers to a transgender kid by biological sex and not preferred gender, your kid will be accused of misconduct, not the boy in the girls’ locker room. Because let’s face it, the reverse is rarely an issue. No real girl wants to enter a boys’ restroom.
Betsy DeVos said the inclusion of transgender students in the law gutted decades of protections and opportunities for women — protections that she advocated so strongly during her tenure as President Trump’s education secretary. Biden’s rules also reverse the sexual misconduct guidelines DeVos put in place in 2020 that helped prevent many young men from being unjustly accused of sexual assault, charges that could effectively ruin their lives.
Schools that fail to uphold the new regulations risk losing educational funding. Either comply with preferred pronouns or no school lunches!
Part of the reason so many seem to be burying their heads in the sand is that media outlets, and sports media especially, refuse to report on the outrageous offenses that seem to be increasing at an alarming rate.
Everyone knows about Will (aka Lia) Thomas’ stunt in NCAA women’s swimming only because Riley Gaines had the courage to stand up and talk about it. Otherwise, people — particularly administrators and coaches at the University of Pennsylvania where Thomas was a student — were all too happy to let a man steal medals from his female competitors.
Most sports outlets, like ESPN, are too busy pushing politics to report on the Massachusetts high school girls’ basketball team that was forced to forfeit a game after a transgender player on the opposing team injured three players. Or the volleyball player who suffered a traumatic brain injury from a man who aimed his spike at her. The video showing the incident has been removed from YouTube, but you can still watch it on Riley Gaines’ post on X.
The New York Times only wants to portray trans athletes as inspirational, rather than what they really are — cheaters. In 2021, the Times celebrated CeCe Telfer in a glowing feature titled “For My People” outlining the runner’s dream to compete in the Olympics after snatching the NCAA title in the 400 meter hurdles in 2019. Between 2016 and 2018, Telfer competed on the men’s team at Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire and didn’t even rank in the top 200 as a male.
That didn’t stop the Times from making Telfer the victim. “It’s important for me to do it for my people — whether it be women, Black people, transgender people, LGBTQ people — anybody who is scrutinized and oppressed,” said Telfer.
There it is — the magic word that gets you where your talent won’t. Oppressed.
It’s a shame that sports, like almost everything else, has become so political. It used to be the one thing that united people. But the left’s insistence on upholding lies — such as a woman can become a man — has given rise to parallel economies and institutions. In sports, OutKick is one of the only outlets that highlighted the brave teens from West Virginia’s Lincoln High School who protested the inclusion of a transgender athlete in a meet last week by refusing to throw shot put.
While ESPN honored Will Thomas during International Women’s Month, OutKick rightly upheld Riley Gaines as the role model young girls should look up to. OutKick’s reporter, Dan Zaksheske, was the one who asked Dawn Staley whether transgender women should be allowed to compete in women’s sports. As a result, OutKick was denied credentials to the WNBA draft, according to the publication’s founder, Clay Travis.
It’s a shame we all can’t agree on obvious truths. But until a new administration comes along to uphold the truth, the lies will persist, and so will the need for those who speak out against them.
Opinion, Politics
