Chelsea Mitchell, one of the young female athletes challenging Connecticut’s transgender sports policies, has written a courageous piece for USA Today. Mitchell is objectively one of the fastest female high-school athletes in the state, but when young men are allowed to compete against her, she doesn’t stand much of a chance. Not only does this policy make a mockery of sports; it is also demoralizing and cruel.
Having lost four women’s state championship titles, two all-New England awards, and multiple other awards and opportunities to young men, she feels that she is “not good enough; that my body isn’t good enough; and that no matter how hard I work, I am unlikely to succeed, because I’m a woman.”
Mitchell is one of four similarly situated girls to file a lawsuit with Alliance Defending Freedom against the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC), which has allowed this sexist policy to humiliate young women and deprive them of hard-earned opportunities. A federal district court recently dismissed their case. This truly is one of the most egregious setbacks to women’s rights in modern times.