Among President Biden’s first executive orders was one that prohibits discrimination against transgenders, including in school sports. Amid court challenges, it’s unclear exactly how that will impact high school and college athletes governed by a mix of policies state by state. Earlier this season, we looked at a federal ruling that seemed to say the opposite – high school athletes in Connecticut were not allowed to switch from the boys’ team to the girls’ team because it deprives girls of athletic opportunities guaranteed under the 1972 Title Nine civil rights law. Here’s a look at our earlier report.
Sharyl: We were there last February, when the high school athletes lined up in New Haven, Connecticut for the 55 meter dash at the state track and field championships.
(video shows footage of dash at state track and field championships)
Chelsea Mitchell, the blonde with a red shirt in the middle was positioned next to Terry Miller, orange top, blue shorts. They ran on the boys’ team until about three years ago.
Same with Andraya Yearwood. In 2018, months after both athletes switched over from the boys’ team, they dominated the girls’ state championships, placing first and second. Together, they’ve won 15 state championship races since 2017.
(video shows interview with Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood)
Here they’re speaking to ABC.
ABC Correspondent: At what point do you decide actually it’s more appropriate for me to be on the girls team and competing with other girls?
Andraya Yearwood: I decided the summer before 9th Grade
Sharyl: But what some see as an important step forward for transgender athletes, others see as infringing upon the rights of non-transgender girls.
Sharyl: Have all of you lost races and competitions to biological males?
Selena Soule: Yes. We all have.
Sharyl: How many races?
Soule: Too many to count.
Sharyl: Chelsea Mitchell is one of the fastest sprinters in the country.
(video shows footage of Chelsea running in race)
She’s shown here in 2018, losing the 55 meter dash to Miller in red on one side, and Yearwood on the other.
The next year, Mitchell again loses to Miller in orange, and Yearwood to the left.
Chelsea Mitchell: It’s been very unfair for me and the other girl competitors to race against them. I personally lost four state championships to all New England awards and countless other opportunities because of it.
Sharyl: Mitchell, and two other athletes, Alana Smith, and Selena Soule, have filed a federal lawsuit challenging the Connecticut policy that lets students switch from the boys’ team to the girls’ team without surgery or hormone treatments.
Alana Smith: I would say that it’s unfair that us biological females have drawn against biological males, and that we really just want fairness in our sport and we just want change to happen.
Soule: I agree with Alana that, right now, the current Connecticut policy for athletics is that biological males can compete in with the girls with no hormone therapy needed. And we personally don’t think that’s fair, and we know that girls are missing out on opportunities to be able to advance and succeed and get titles.
Soule: We fully support these athletes and in the way that they choose to identify themselves. But athletics have separate rules because it’s about your physical,physical advantages and your physical differences.
Sharyl: It’s become a national conversation.
Last year (2019), CeCe Telfer, raised as Craig Telfer, became the first known transgender to win a women’s college track and field championship.
Visit The Sharyl Attkisson Store today
Unique gifts for independent thinkers
Proceeds benefit independent journalism
Schulyer Bailer was recruited to swim on the women’s team at Harvard but ended up deciding to compete on the men’s team, the first transgender athlete to compete at the highest level of sports, division one.
Earlier this year, (Feb. 2020) Megan Youngren didn’t run fast enough, in the end, to qualify but was the first openly transgender athlete to compete at the U.S. Olympic team trials, choosing to enter the women’s field.
And in New Zealand, Gavin Hubbard, who was a men’s weightlifting competitor, became Laurel Hubbard and dominated the women’s competition.
Last year (2019), the adult cartoon South Park featured an episode called “Board Girls.” It lampooned the controversial notion of athletes switching from the men’s field to women’s.
South Park clip: Miss Swanson, how does it feel to be competing today?
I can’t tell you how free I feel now that I’ve started identifying as a woman.
Further complicating the debate, some feminist allies normally counted on to support gay and transgender rights are coming down on the other side when it comes to sports.
Tennis icon, Martina Navratilova is outspoken, saying transgenders are robbing women of hard fought opportunities, and threatening women’s sports as we know them.
Martina Navratilova: It’s always been about fairness in sport. We cannot have sympathy and empathy for transgender on a smaller level, sport level, trump for lack of a better word, or overtake fairness for women and girls.
Christiana Holcomb: This is absolutely not a partisan issue and I think that’s playing out when you see radical leftist feminists as they identify linking arms with conservative feminist organizations saying, ‘No, this is not fair.
Sharyl: Christiana Holcomb is with the conservative Christian nonprofit representing Mitchell, Smith and Soule: Alliance Defending Freedom.
Holcomb: There was a study done that came out of Sweden just last fall that indicated that males generally have a 10 to 20% performance advantage over similarly fit and trained biological females. And those advantages are not undone by any length of hormone treatment or hormone replacement therapy. So even even if it did, frankly, you would still have a male displacing a deserving young woman in her own athletic competition, something set aside for her benefit and to allow her to compete for college scholarships, so it still wouldn’t be fair.
Sharyl: We asked for interviews with Miller and Yearwood, but neither wanted to speak with us.
Instead, we talked to Asaf Orr of the transgender youth project at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, which says transgenders should compete wherever they wish.
Asaf Orr: In sports, there’s always a competitive advantage of some sort, right? Someone got to train longer, trained harder or has some inherent athletic abilities that other athletes don’t have. And so really it’s sort of focusing on the fact that these transgenders, our student athletes, they really just want to compete.
Sharyl: If I’m describing it correctly, a man, or someone who has always been considered a man, including maybe himself considering himself a man, could wake up one morning and technically say, “Today, I compete as a woman,” and do that, and then say the next day, “I compete as a man again.”
Orr: And I think that’s a misconception of these policies is that it’s not that it’s not that easy and nor does that happen. As is often the case with transgender people, they recognize their gender identity, usually for years prior to them coming out, because of various social pressures or other things that kind of delays them from doing that. So this is not a situation where someone wakes up one morning and says, “Oh, I’m really woman, I’m just going to go compete on a women’s sports.”
Sharyl: With resentment building on both sides, there’s a confounding array of policies.
9 states require high school transgenders to have surgery or extensive hormone treatment to compete on the opposite-sex team.
In March, Idaho became the first state to bar transgender girls from participating in girls’ and women’s sports.
18 states and Washington, D.C. allow transgenders to join either team without hormones or surgery.
16 states are somewhere in between.
and 6 states have no explicit policy.
Connecticut athletic authorities say: “Connecticut law is clear and students who identify as female are to be recognized as female for all purposes, including high school sports.”
How did that race we saw in Connecticut last February turn out, after Mitchell had lost to Miller two years straight?
This time, Mitchell wins. Some say that proves transgender athletes do not have an unfair advantage.
Lawmakers in at least six states and Congress introduced bills aimed at limiting opportunities for transgender athletes to compete on the opposite sex teams.
Sharyl (on camera): Meantime, some high profile women athletes and advocates are trying to get an exemption from Biden’s executive order and exclude those “who have experienced all or part of male puberty” from competing on female sports teams. They could be offered separate events or divisions.
https://fullmeasure.news/news/politics/transgender-divide-02-05-2021
Thanks to the thousands who have already supported!
What will be done about it?
Civic participation at national and local level is about non existent.
There was a time in America when local Citizens went to local school board and teacher meetings.
Parents joined the PTA. Not so much any longer.
The GOP needs to refocus on the local level and not just every few years when election times roll around. We need to be organized to re-engage in our schools. We know the GOP will do nothing at the national level or take on the teachers unions. Best just to reflexively say teachers need another raise and beg for votes they will never receive
Why are Americans rank low second world in test scores yet our kids can quote communist slogans and be made to apologize for the race and gender they were born with? Why are 8yo boys being put on drugs, feminized while girls are told to escape racist patriarchy by being pansexual?
Why do we allow this to happen to our children?
Need we mention what we allow our kids to see on social media because we allow them unfettered access to the most deviant ideas the Left forces into their heads? We even allow them to take their phones to bed. Virtually leaving their bedroom door open to every pervert on the planet.
WE gave up on civil action, WE gave up on being parents.
WE gave up on our children
This is the result and it needs to change
William,
“Why do we allow this to
happen to our children?,”
you’ve asked.
We didn’t allow it, William!
We were duped by libertine Marxists,
using EMOTION-effective triggers—for
shutting down the Left-Logical side of
the brain.
.The Marxian A C L U cleverly has used the COURTS and MEDIA and Hollywood and DEMOCRAT PARTY and RADICAL FEMINISM and DRAMA-FILLED “entertainment” and “music” venues (( e.g., think of the “Fifty Shades” franchise AND afternoon soap operas AND ubiquitous rap and hip-hop lyrics AND . . . )) to fool otherwise RATIONAL men and women into abandoning REASON for MADNESS.
-Rick
How is this working on the international level? Will biological males be allowed to compete in women’s sports in the Olympics? What about tennis? Martina Navratilova has voiced opposition to biological men competing against women. The USA can be as politically correct as it wants to be, but that doesn’t mean other countries, particularly the Muslim nations, will fall in line with that.
The science says men are biologically different than women in every respect. Thus women compete against women. Maybe we should have a separate group for transgenders competing against transgenders and everyone is happy!
BTW where are the groups defenders of equal rights for women. Could it be this is politics as usual?
Time to bring America back to fairness, respect and common sense. Love America first!
Sam,
—and psychologically different :
Men = left-hemisphere LOGICAL (( access to pre-frontal, executive brain )).
Women = right-hemisphere EMOTIONAL (( access to primitive, reptilian brain )).
Generally considered to be that way,
by some Jungian psychologists.
-Rick
Sam and Sheryl, and Full Measure Team :
Many weeks ago, Glenn Beck had taken
exception to the use of the term, “moral
certitude,“ in my below psychology-based
report, about Radical Feminism (( in leftist
women and in libertine “men” )), as it —
the reptilian brain in LEFTISM — seeks an
enslavement of the West/WORLD to
Universal Communism.
[[ Copy to paper, then remove it ]] :
©1994
— TWO LEGS OF THE SAME WH_RE —
Physicality doesn’t necessarily reveal the psychological sex of an individual; ergo, many male Democrats in Congress are effeminate pimps for feminism.
America is gripped by the emoting feminine mind of feminism, which seduces the unwary by appealing to human weakness:
– rejection of moral imperatives,
– hunger for sexual arousal and orgasm,
– immediate gratification of material needs,
– denial of personal responsibility,
and
– reliance on something-for-nothing welfare benefits.
Radical feminism is narcissism, demanding that we become dependent and worship her for providing for our every need, until all of us meet her standard as set by the lowest common denominator among us.
She beckons all within her reach to worship at her feet. She promotes socialism and communism, and she rigidly extols egalitarianism in her politics while being promiscuous and indiscriminate in her breeding.
She is sedentary and lascivious, and she plies her sexuality and emotions to catch her prey. Her seeming passivity is disarming, so that by the time society is alerted to her choking embrace good civil order is destroyed, and any hope of recovery – of escaping her seduction – is lost.
Radical feminism’s purpose-to-destroy is ancient and relentless, and requires a philosophy or mantra which appeals to the heart; especially one that is impossible to defend against without appearing cold and ruthless, unfeeling and uncaring. “All men are created equal” is one such mantra (she has many others), which now drives all of America’s institutions to destruction by demanding equal outcomes between men and women and between racial groups, and through such sinister means as affirmative action, proportionalism, and quotas.
She uses feelings most artfully to seduce us, appealing to our emotions while inviting us to follow her path in rejecting reason, science, and historical lessons—all of which undermine her purpose and set us free. And although her sexuality has been subdued in the past by the rational masculine mind, to keep her from destroying civil society, she never loses command of it as means to control her victims and advance her purpose when on the march.
Her political philosophy is always left-wing. Liberalism (non-classical), which she owns, is freedom from any moral and authoritarian restraints–from the rational masculine mind of self-control, personal responsibility, good social order and human progress. And her lusting heart beats most rapidly in liberal Democrats, who garner political power by redistributing the hard-earned wealth of productive citizens to an ever-growing dependent class, both indigenous and foreign.
Liberalism necessarily rejects history and science because both expose the folly of her works, teaching us lessons she would keep hidden. History records the fall of both Greece and Rome by her hand, and science instructs us in the art of inductive and deductive analyses which, when applied to feminism, invariably refute her premises and conclusions as unsound and destructive to civil society.
Her fascination with youth calls her to give special attention to public education in America, where opportunities for plying her trade and recruiting new soldiers abound. She extols her feminism and denigrates the rational masculine mind by propagandizing her message, usually cloaked in a sexual tease. And she disseminates it most effectively through Hollywood’s television and movie industries and the dominant news media, the latter of which are controlled by glorified gossipers and would-be actors who champion the feminists’ cause (to a lesser degree she employs book publishing, especially novelists’ works, and left-wing “liberation” churches).
She offers only emotional stimulation and sexual gratification as gifts for abandoning America’s traditional values of hard work, delayed gratification, personal integrity and moral certitude—all requisite means for building grand societies. Evil fascinates her, and her attraction to it stems from her desire for the emotion that chaos engenders.
She has all but destroyed the soul of this once-great nation by guile and intimidation; a nation now in rapid decline. Her means for seduction in capturing the minds of the body politic are entertainment and news, two legs of the same wh_re: the EMOTING FEMININE MIND of Liberalism.
-Rick
An ex-Google engineer claimed that Google searches on certain subjects were deliberately re-engineered to further Leftist viewpoints favored by the owners. To prove his point, he suggested an experiment where readers typed two separate searches ‘men can…’ and ‘women can…’ in Google and in another search engine such as DuckDuckGo, and see what suggestions pop-up in the dropdown screen. I did this just a few minutes ago, and Google came back with ‘men can have periods, get pregnant and lactate, and women can produce sperm.’ DuckDuckGo’s dropdown suggestions came up with a totally different list of suggestions, none of which would have raised any eyebrows.
So I ask myself, what is this concerted effort across mainly the Democratic Party leadership and its followers to make this such a huge issue – the idea that gender is not determined by physical attributes and that it is ok for men to compete against women in sports as long as the men sincerely feel their gender is female? I mean why pick this issue?
I have a theory. If the purpose of a totalitarian regime is to turn their country into a nation of sheep, then getting the citizens to deny their own common sense and lifelong observations about life and gender identity is a brilliant step along that path. I submit that if you can get your citizenry to believe gender is fluid, then getting them to believe up is down and down is up and evil is good and good is evil is just one small step away. It will be a brave new world for the home of the brave where bravery is redefined as compliance.
James,
You’ve BRILLIANTLY explained it !
-Rick
I’m not the sharpest drawer in the knife, but, it does make sense to me that gender sports need to be done away with and replaced with two divisions, “XX” and “XY”