After Male Basketball Player Injures 3 Female Players, Team Forfeits Game

J.K. Rowling, the famous author of the “Harry Potter” series, has received vehement backlash from LGBT activists over her belief that men who identify as women should not be held in women’s prisons. “If you support putting violent and sexually predatory men into women’s prisons, you are knowingly forcing those women to live in fear of, and, in some proven cases, to suffer abuse that many of them will have endured pre-incarceration,” she wrote on X Tuesday.

She concluded, “Women have the basic human right not to suffer cruel and unusual punishment.” And while Rowling’s grievances centered on trans-identifying men in women’s prisons, her sentiments reflect what many fear within the realm of women’s sports, namely, girls getting hurt by physically stronger boys.

Since the presence of trans-identifying men in women’s competitions have increased, the number of women winning first, second, and third has decreased. The women and girls in swimming, track and field, golf, volleyball, dance, cross country, and other sports, are repeatedly defeated by men. For some, this alone is enough to demand a change. But when women losing to men isn’t enough to spark change, many are asking if women being hurt by men, which has happened repeatedly over the last few years, will prove to be the final straw.

Footage from a girls’ high school basketball game earlier this month is raising a lot of questions about the safety of trans participation. In a viral video from a game between Massachusetts Collegiate Charter School of Lowell and KIPP Academy, a large, male figure (who reportedly is six feet tall and has facial hair) from the KIPP team throwing a female player from the charter team to the ground as he seized the ball from her — a move that resulted in the girl gripping her back in pain. But this wasn’t the only incident.

A total of three injuries resulted from the play of this trans-identifying athlete, all of which happened before halftime, and with only five players able to play, KIPP chose to forfeit because they couldn’t afford to have any more girls get hurt.

Allegedly, the male athlete was competing among girls to reflect “the school’s commitment to ‘inclusivity and safety.’” Riley Gaines, a former NCAA All-American swimmer, posted on X, “A man hitting a woman used to be called domestic abuse. Now it’s called brave.” She added, “Who watches this [and] actually thinks this is ‘compassionate, kind, and inclusive?’”

Mary Szoch, director of Family Research Council’s Center for Human Dignity, expressed her concern to The Washington Stand. “As a former Division I basketball player at one of the top women’s basketball programs in the country, at practice, I competed against men every day.” She said this was common for Division I women’s basketball teams, because it gave the women a chance to practice against men who were “stronger, faster, and quicker.”

However, Szoch emphasized that the male players were instructed “to be humble enough to know they are there to help the women’s team become better — not to use their physical advantages to humiliate or hurt a player.” Szoch added that men, on average, are stronger and better at sports when competing against women, and “when we don’t recognize this, women get hurt. … [A]nd deep down, everyone knows this.” But it’s a truth that “people don’t want to acknowledge … because they are afraid of being called a bigot.”

FRC’s Meg Kilgannon also commented to TWS, “It seems abusive to make the girls endure this situation.” However, she added that “seeing girls on the opposing team physically injured by ‘inclusive’ athletic participation policies is only half of the story.”

“We have to also consider the girls on the team with the male player, who have to share a locker room with him, change clothes in front of him, and pretend that he is ‘just one of the girls,’” she pointed out. “I can’t say which situation is more abusive, but both are intolerable.” For Kilgannon, it seems evident that “Massachusetts public schools, charter or not, don’t protect the educational interests or rights of women and girls, but rather advance the interests of men and men who identify as women.”

Kilgannon insisted, “This story is all the more enraging because we knew it would happen, we tried to prevent it, and now girls are getting hurt.”

Szoch added that, ultimately, “telling a biological male that he is a female and allowing him to play women’s sports doesn’t help anyone — least of all the man.” She concluded, “As a former athlete who now has a daughter, I am hopeful that the presence of men playing women’s basketball will be a wake-up call for our country. Women deserve a chance to compete on a fair and safe playing field.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

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