USA Today and progressive activists want Americans to think that this is a nonissue. They’re wrong.
Magic tricks rely on a simple technique: misdirection. It’s all about making the audience think they’re paying attention, when really, they’re being distracted. It’s in those moments when they can be deceived.
Right now in the conversation about males in women’s sports, some people are taking a page out of the magician’s handbook. Just look at a recent USA Today piece, wherein the reporters spend over 4,500 words arguing that having biological males in women’s sports is a nonissue. The piece trots out anecdotes, numbers, and non-contextualized statistics galore to make a case that’s not at all grounded in reality. According to USA Today and others in the mainstream media, the whole situation has been blown out of proportion — no one, they claim, actually cares that a few males are trouncing women and girls in athletic competition
Meanwhile, behind the curtain, law and public policy are telling a very different story. Even as the media try to downplay the numbers and effect that males have on women’s sports, there is a concentrated push from government officials — from the White House down to school boards — to pass laws and policies designed to dismantle women’s sports, and ensure that women lose the right to fair competition for good. The whole situation exposes the ridiculous lengths that people will go to undermine reality, and the sleight-of-hand that transgender activists use to mask their radical agenda.
The truth is that males have an undeniable physical advantage over females. It doesn’t take 4,500 words to demonstrate that — all someone has to do is pay attention. Across the world, female athletes are being forced to compete against males in their sports — and these women and girls are losing, not just individual races and competitions but also state titles, opportunities to compete for college scouts, and dreams.
The Reality in America
On his first day in office, President Joe Biden signed an executive order mandating that any school that receives federal money either allow biological boys who identify as girls onto the girls’ sports team, or else face the loss of that money, without which the school cannot survive. The White House made it clear that it simply does not care that every single male-bodied athlete on a women’s sports team necessarily displaces a female athlete, or that every victory by a male athlete in a women’s competition robs a woman of victory — and knocks every other female athlete down from the spot she deserves.
The executive order from the White House was reflected in new policies issued by the Department of Education, the Department of Justice, and other federal departments. Many local governments continue to propose and adopt similar policies to boot. The influential Loudoun County, Va., school board — which essentially determines policy for the entire state — is proposing a policy that would compel teams to allow transgender athletes to play on any team they want.
In Connecticut, the state’s athletic association allows males to compete in women’s sports. The consequence? In the past four years, two male athletes have taken more than 80 opportunities from girls. USA Today tries to minimize this injustice by falsely stating that all three of the girls in the lawsuit, being litigated by attorneys with Alliance Defending Freedom, have defeated these males. In fact, only one of them, Chelsea Mitchell, has ever defeated one of the male athletes.
Additionally, Chelsea never won a race in which both males were competing against her, and she lost four state titles where she was the fastest female in the race, because a male took first place. And further, any male who is even competing in a state or regional final displaces a female who should be there instead, regardless of whether he wins or not.
In Hawaii, 14-year-old female runner Margaret O’Neal lost to a male athlete in the only competition of the year, as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down school athletics shortly after. Margaret’s mother, Cynthia Monteleone, is no stranger to the devastating effects of allowing males to compete in women’s sports; a world champion track runner herself, she had to watch as a male runner beat her teammate in the 2019 World Championship indoor hurdles. When Cynthia raised concerns about the fairness of a male racing against females, USA Track and Field administrators told her that, “for her own safety,” she should keep her mouth shut.
The National College Athletic Association, which supports allowing males to compete in women’s sports, has gone so far as to try to bully state lawmakers, threatening to pull championship games from states such as North Carolina and Florida when state legislatures passed laws protecting women’s rights.
Now, leftist activist groups have gotten involved. Eight states have recognized the threat to women’s rights and enacted laws protecting women’s sports. The Human Rights Campaign, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the U.S. Department of Justice are all pursuing legal action in response. Just in the past week, HRC filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit against Florida’s law protecting women’s rights and announced that it was also targeting similar laws in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi. The Department of Justice joined the ACLU in attacking Arkansas and West Virginia for protecting women and girls.
None of this fits into the narrative being pushed by USA Today. If this isn’t a big deal, why is there a concentrated effort from the transgender activists — and their allies in government, from the White House down — to bully, threaten, and silence anyone who even asks questions about the fairness of forcing women to compete against males?
The Reality outside of America
The situation is not confined to America. With the 2021 Tokyo Olympics looming, the presence of male athletes in women’s sports has suddenly become international news.
In late June, during the Tokyo Olympic tryouts, a 43-year-old male weightlifter beat out Kuinini (“Nini”) Manu’mua, a 21-year-old female, for the New Zealand women’s team. When female athletes raised concerns about a middle-aged white male knocking a South Asian female out of the running for an international honor, they were silenced; Tracey Lambrechs, a New Zealand female weightlifter, told The Daily News that even though a number of female athletes believe it is unfair for a male to compete on the women’s Olympic team, “there’s nothing we can do, because every time we voice it, we get told to be quiet.”
These female athletes know that competing against a male is unfair; Anna Van Bellinghen, a female Belgian weightlifter who is competing in the Tokyo Olympics, said that while she supports an individual’s right to identify as transgender, allowing a male to compete in a women’s Olympic sport “feels like a bad joke.” She said that “this particular situation is unfair to the sport and to the athletes,” and that “anyone that has trained [in] weightlifting at a high level knows this to be true in their bones.”
After Nini Manu’mua was booted from the New Zealand team, her home nation of Tonga appealed to the Olympic Committee and secured a spot for Nini to compete for the Tonga team. That’s great news for her, but the question remains: Why should a female athlete have to go through an appeals process and be granted a special exemption to compete in a female competition? Why did Nini, a young woman, have to shoulder the burden of being bumped from the team and having to find a new team, while the male athlete sailed through to the New Zealand women’s team?
For all their words, USA Today and the transgender activists have no answer to that question.
USA Today wants Americans to think that this is a nonissue. But the aggressive actions of the Biden White House, HRC, the ACLU, government officials in Virginia, the NCAA, and the Olympic Committee — to name just a few — disprove that argument. So, too, do the experiences of the girls and women who’ve been robbed of their dreams by male athletes. No matter how hard the activists try, they can’t just magic all that away.