Tag Archive for: Girls Sports

House Girls’ Sports Vote Exposes Democrats as Unrepentant Extremists

The House bill to protect girls’ sports wasn’t remarkable for passing — it passed last year. What was remarkable is what the vote says about Democrats. In the first big test of whether Joe Biden’s party had learned its election lessons, the answer was a shocking and resounding “no.”

Every Democrat but two — Texas Reps. Vicente Gonzalez and Henry Cuellar — ignored the rallying cry of November 5 and stood stubbornly on the side of radical transgenderism, leaving our nation’s daughters vulnerable to injury, lost privacy, and stolen innocence.

Perhaps the most astonishing detractor of Rep. Greg Steube’s (R-Fla.) Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act was Massachusetts’s Rep. Seth Moulton (D), who spent the better part of November fending off the Left’s mob after he had the audacity to agree with 72% of Americans that biological boys don’t belong on girls’ teams, in their locker rooms, or atop their podiums. The Marine veteran spoke frankly and refreshingly about his party’s wildly out-of-step views on transgenderism after the election, declaring, “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

Turns out, he wasn’t afraid to say it — he was afraid to defend it. Proving that his party is still wearing an “ideological straitjacket,” as Moulton called it last year, less than 1% of Democrats sided with parents on an issue that most of us still can’t believe is an issue at all. “One of the most common-sense bills that we’ve had is the bill that says men cannot play in women’s sports,” Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) said Tuesday. Not a single Democrat supported the legislation when it was brought up in 2023, but that was before the GOP’s nationwide ad blitz outing the Left’s obsession with biological men in girls’ spaces.

And yet, even in deep blue states like New York, 66% of locals are demanding an end to this transgender madness — just a handful of points shy of the national average. “We all know that New York is a liberal state, so this tells you that this should not be a liberal, conservative or Democrat and Republican issue,” state Senator George Borrelo (R) insisted.

Now, Moulton, who was prematurely anointed as a voice of reason among Democrats, claims the bill is “too extreme.” “I’ve stated my belief that our party has failed to come to the table in good faith to debate an issue on which the vast majority of Americans believe we are out of touch,” the congressman told The Washington Post. “We should be able to discuss regulations for trans athletes in competitive sports, while still staunchly defending the rights of transgender Americans to simply exist without fear of danger or oppression. But instead, we’ve run away from the issue altogether. As a result, Republicans are in charge and continue to set the agenda with extremist bills like this.” As he once said to placate the party’s bosses, “I have nuanced views on these issues.”

Unfortunately for Moulton, voters’ views aren’t nuanced when it comes to defending the dignity and rights of women. If political expedience was the goal, this liberal failed miserably. He stood up to the bullies — then surrendered to them. And while not every constituent would have agreed with him, they’d have at least respected Moulton for going to bat for what he thought was right. Now he’s just another weak-kneed Democrat under the thumb of an inflexible, intolerant party. A fraud. In the words of incomparable Senator John Kennedy (R-La.), maybe it’s time to go to Amazon and buy a spine.

“I remember when Rep. Moulton was more concerned with what was best for his daughters than what his party thought. I wish this year’s Rep. Moulton could meet November 2024 Rep. Moulton and catch some of 2024 Seth Moulton’s courage,” FRC’s Quena González told The Washington Stand. “The flimsy reasons he gave for voting today against protecting women is hogwash. All obfuscation aside, there’s a word for not standing up to your little girls — it’s called moral cowardice. And there’s a word for not standing up on an issue that you concede lost your party the last election — it’s called electoral insanity.”

While it would be easy to get lost in the Democrats’ suicidal tendencies, the reality is, House Republicans did do what the country demanded — moving this crucial bill one step closer to reality. Doreen Denny, who, like many conservatives, has been waiting for the day when reason would prevail in Congress, celebrated with The Washington Stand that “the overwhelming mandate of the November election is getting results on Capitol Hill.” Denny, the senior advisor for Concerned Women for America, applauded the GOP majority “for standing for women.” “Now,” she urged, “it’s time for the Senate to get this bill across the finish line.”

But even Denny couldn’t help but shake her head at the asinine, self-defeating strategy of the Left. “Today’s vote could have been a turning point for bipartisanship on this issue,” she told TWS. “Instead, only two Democrats voted in favor of the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act. What a shame. It proves radical special interest groups promoting the trans agenda continue to have a death grip on the Democratic Party.”

The bill’s sponsor, Greg Steube, is flabbergasted that all but two members are willing to gamble on a proposal that has almost three-quarters of the country’s support. “This is going to be an election issue for them in two years,” he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Tuesday’s “Washington Watch.” “Maybe they think that two years is a long time from now. But we saw this as an election issue just a couple of months ago during the presidential race. … This is an overwhelmingly supported issue across America. So it is very shocking. … But it just shows you how out of touch Democrats are with the majority of America.”

Asked to speculate why Joe Biden’s party refuses to line up behind biological reality and fairness, the Florida Republican says it all comes down to fear. “The bottom line is, politically, they’re afraid of their left flank. And if a progressive Democrat comes along and fights them on this issue, the far Left of their party will root out any type of reason on these issues.”

And not only that, Steube argued, they’ll use lies to do it. Perkins pointed to Democrat Ayanna Pressley’s (Mass.) string of falsehoods on the House floor before the vote. “Imagine you are eight years old, trying out for the soccer team, and your coach demands that you show them your genitals. That is abuse. That is exploitation. That is egregious. But it is exactly what this Republican bill does.” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) went so far as to say the proposal would “unleash predators on girls,” without, as Fox News points out, explaining how.

Look, Steube countered, “None of this that they’re arguing is ever going to happen. It’s a lie. It’s to try to enrage people [to think], ‘Oh, that’s horrible,’ and ‘Republicans are bad.’ … And the mainstream media is going to perpetuate that lie. It’s just unfortunate … [because] the bill is very short. It’s like a page and a half or two pages or whatever it is. Read it for yourself if you don’t believe me. But that’s exactly what it [says]: the gender you were assigned biologically at birth will determine what sport you play.”

Understanding the pressure they must have faced, others, like González, applauded the two members who defected to support the bill. “The Congressional Hispanic Caucus still refuses to admit Republicans,” he pointed out to TWS. “It sounds like at least two Democrats realize that, on the policy of protecting little girls, most Democrats are out of step with actual Hispanics. I guess Latinos aren’t Latinxs after all,” he quipped. “Who knew?”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Reality Wins: Transwomen Are Men

We have reached the tipping point on the gender issue. If I had known that electing a trans-identifying man to Congress would so definitively advance the discussion of safety and privacy in women-only spaces, I might have donated to the campaign myself. For over a decade now, women have been speaking out about the problem of men who believe they are women seeking “refuge” in our bathrooms, locker rooms, college dorms, prison cells, and even sometimes our beds.

The pressure has grown as more and more Americans were confronted by the very real demands required by the “inclusion” of “gender diverse” people on their terms. Schools and sports teams have wrestled with whether, when, and how to accommodate the demands of transgender activists while ensuring the safety, privacy, and sanity of those folks unwilling to play along with pretending a person can change his or her sex.

The Biden-Harris administration was remarkable for shattering norms in this regard. In addition to appointing openly transsexual men to roles in the administration and hosting them for media appearances at the White House, President Biden creepily assured transgender students that he “had their backs.”

On the 50th Anniversary of Title IX, the Biden-Harris Department of Education released a sweeping rewrite of the policy that refused to acknowledge biological differences between men and women — while advancing the cause of gender ideology. The staggering scope of the proposed radical rule was met with greater backlash. The rule is now enjoined in 26 states nationwide as court cases proceed. We can be confident that the new folks in charge at DOE will waste no time in withdrawing this rule and offering common-sense protections for all students — and especially women and girls.

Then-candidate Trump and his campaign saw the backlash and heard thunderous applause from the crowds during rally speeches promising an end to the gender madness in our schools and medicine.

But in deep blue Delaware, political operative, former Obama official, and friend of Beau Biden, Sarah (formerly Tim) McBride campaigned for Congress and won election to the U.S. House of Representatives. And now we get to the action. Where would Representative McBride exercise and shower after those workouts? Which bathroom will he slip into during long sessions? And who decides these questions?

As the battle of the schoolhouse rose to the People’s House, South Carolina’s Nancy Mace (R) tried to lay down the law, literally. She wrote a bill that defined sex as male and female and protected sex-specific facilities for men and women in federal buildings.

Then, earlier this week, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) declared that under his leadership, men would be men, and women would be women. Representative McBride wisely agreed to follow these rules and sought to change the subject. Women across the country let out a cheer. After many years of fighting to preserve female-only spaces, this marks a turning point in the “transgender” march through the institutions. The work of ensuring these protections for women everywhere will continue, but now we have a wind at our back.

Women know we need men to protect us and honor each other’s needs for privacy. I’m grateful that Johnson handled this situation so quickly, setting an example for others to follow. I look forward to leadership from President Trump and appointees like Education Secretary nominee Linda McMahon, who I expect to use government power to protect women and children from the radical demands of gender ideology.

And the church will need to attend to the needs of those wounded by the very real consequences of crazy ideas like boys can become girls or vice versa. We have much to do! Let’s thank God for our victories along the way and continue to advance His Kingdom!

AUTHOR

Meg Kilgannon

Meg Kilgannon is Senior Fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council.

RELATED VIDEO: ‘A man cannot become a woman’ – House Speaker Mike Johnson on transgender remarks

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Olympic Boxing Controversy Shows Where Kamala’s Anti-Woman Policies Will Lead

For all of the heroic performances, all of the heart-tugging Olympic stories and emotional medal ceremonies, the saga of two boxers has managed to cast a long shadow over the Paris games. It’s the latest chapter in the global war over gender, and a string of women just lost everything they trained for at the hands of it.

By now, most Americans have heard about Italy’s Angela Carini, who quit her match earlier this week after a 46-second pummeling at the hands a boxer with male chromosomes. Telling reporters later that she had “never been hit so hard in her life,” she fell to her knees and withdrew. “She’s too strong,” Carini told her coach about Algeria’s Imane Khelif. “I didn’t give up,” she insisted, “but a punch hurt too much, and so I said I had enough. I go out with my head held high.”

She’d been warned it was dangerous, even pressured to drop out before fighting Khelif, but Carini was determined to do what she’d come to Paris to do. Watching from America, women’s sports activist and former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines said she felt “heartbroken.” “It was very clear that this athlete was different than the athletes from the fight before.” In reality, Gaines said of Carini, “She is the winner. She is a hero for every young girl watching…”

A handful of days later, on Friday, Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting overpowered Uzbekistan’s Sitora Turdibekova to advance to the quarterfinals of women’s boxing, despite being disqualified from the 2023 World Championships for also having XY chromosomes. Although Sitroa managed to last three rounds, she ultimately couldn’t match Yu-ting’s strength and went down in defeat. Since then, both men have clinched medals.

Since Carini’s fight, the international uproar has been deafening, even boiling over into the U.S. presidential race. “I WILL KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS!” Donald Trump thundered on Truth Social.

But the situation that’s grabbed headlines from New York to Taipei is a little more nuanced than a lot of people realize. As Denny Burk explains, whereas Lia Thomas is absolutely a biological male pretending to be a woman, Khelif’s situation is more complicated. “… [N]either fighter regards himself as transgender, and yet both fighters believe themselves to be female in spite of having XY chromosomes. If these reports are accurate, then it would suggest that they both have some sort of intersex condition,” which, he goes on to explain, would make them men with “malformed reproductive anatomy.”

And while “not all intersex conditions are the same,” Burk notes, their sex “is not ambiguous.” In these instances, the boxers would still be producing “male-level amounts of testosterone,” which would make them dominant in sports like boxing. A lot of children who are born intersex are raised and treated as female, which should, he urged, “evok[e] our compassion and sympathy.” That said, “It is neither compassionate nor helpful to pretend that the biological situation is somehow unclear when in fact it is not. And of course the discovery of a genetic male should have implications for athletic competition. Because they are biologically male, people with [this condition] should compete in male divisions, not in female ones.”

And that, critics argue, is where the International Olympic Committee (IOC) went wrong. In the uproar over Carini’s rout, committee spokesman Mark Adams claimed, “I would just say that everyone competing in the women’s category is complying with the competition eligibility rules. They are women in their passports.”

The International Boxing Association (IBA) vehemently disagreed, which is unsurprising considering that they disqualified both Yu-Ting and Khelif last year. “While IBA remains committed to ensuring competitive fairness in all of our events, we express concern over the inconsistent application of eligibility criteria by other sporting organizations, including those overseeing the Olympic Games,” the organization said in a statement. “The IOC’s differing regulations on these matters, in which IBA is not involved, raise serious questions about both competitive fairness and athletes’ safety.”

Regardless of the sympathy these athletes deserve for their condition, no one with XY chromosomes should be fighting women — in a contact sport like boxing or otherwise. “[T]he majority of Americans know it’s wrong,” Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Thursday’s “Washington Watch.” “And you saw on full display the how upset that female boxer was. She probably worked her entire life for this moment. And she has to go up against a male, [and] … the Olympic Committee even admits that he’s a male.” To Steube and others, “It’s just absolutely horrifying that the Left has perverted all types of women’s sports, whether it be Olympic sports, whether it be kids in schools, whether it’s women that are losing scholarships in Title IX in the United States, they have perverted it. And we now are seeing it on the world stage. And it’s really disgusting.”

It’s “unjust,” Perkins agreed, “but it’s also dangerous.” A male punch, he wanted people to know, “can carry about 162% more power than a woman.” That’s what experts mean by a “biological difference.” And yet, he shook his head, “We’re playing this charade, and now it’s here in the United States. You’ve tried to stop it,” he acknowledged in a nod to Steube’s Save Women’s Sports Act that passed the House earlier this year.

But the Biden administration “doesn’t care,” the Florida legislator argued. “They don’t care about … the safety of women in sports, and they don’t care about the fact that there’s going to be biological men in your daughters’ locker rooms in middle school or in high school or in college. They don’t care about that because they are pushing this progressive agenda on the American people. And you saw that with the recent release of Biden’s Title IX rules, which flies in the face of why Title IX was created in the first place.”

Those new rules, which put trans-identifying students above real girls’ safety, privacy, and opportunity, has been a constant source of frustration for the states, almost half of whom have sued — many successfully — to stop the White House from hurting America’s daughters. “Over 50 years ago … Title IX was created for women to have an athletic playing field to play each other in sports … and now they’re allowing biological men to compete. It’s absolutely ridiculous. I hope it enrages every American and they show up with their feet and they vote against these types of policies, because this is what the Left is today, and this is what the current administration pushes on our kids,” Steube fumed.

The Floridian, whose bill with Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) would have also leveled the Olympic playing field for U.S. athletes, put the blame for what we’re seeing on the world stage squarely at the feet of the American Left. When the time came to vote on his legislation, he points out, not a single Democrat could bring themselves to protect girls’ sports. “The argument from the Democrats was, ‘This never happens. [Girls don’t get hurt.] You never see that. [You’re] making this up.’ And we had example after example that was happening then. And now we see it all the time, and now we’re seeing it on the world stage. And they want to push this progressive ideology on America, on the world. And it’s just wrong,” he insisted. “It’s frustrating. It’s upsetting. Women have come so far on the athletic playing fields to now have such a setback, and it’s completely embraced by the Left. And this is exactly what they want to push on the American people.”

For Kamala Harris, that reality will be a difficult one to overcome in the general election. Her longtime advocacy for the trans movement won’t sit well with voters, 80% of whom are disgusted by the Biden administration’s bulldozing of girls’ sports. Already, it’s providing ample firepower to the GOP, who’s pounced on the Olympics as proof that Kamala is well outside the rational mainstream. “This is where Kamala Harris’s ideas about gender lead,” Republican vice presidential candidate and Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) posted, “to a grown man pummeling a woman in a boxing match. This is disgusting, and all of our leaders should condemn it.”

Others, like Gaines, want women to know that this is a female candidate who doesn’t represent them in the slightest. “Crickets from Kamala,” Gaines told Fox’s Jesse Waters on the boxing controversy. “And if I could implore you,” she said, “a vote for Kamala is a vote against your daughter’s future. I see lots of people on social media saying they’ll be voting for Kamala because she’s a woman. Well, let me tell you, Jesse, I will be voting for Trump because I am a woman.”

So is this a rallying cry, these Olympics? Is this one of those times, Perkins wondered, where people will say, “Enough of this insanity?”

Steube certainly hopes so. But to be honest, he acknowledged, “The only way that we can change this and save women’s sports is [to elect] Trump president. We flip the Senate, and we keep the House. That’s the only way that this is going to happen.” Otherwise, he warned, all we’re going to get is four more years of a White House claiming they care about women — only to do everything in their power to erase them.

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden-Harris Admin. Continues Streak of Convicting and Sentencing Pro-Lifers

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘Just a Disaster’: Biden’s Title IX Rule Empowers LGBTQ Movement, Erases Women and Justice

The Biden administration’s revision of a civil rights statute designed to protect women’s rights in education erases women’s protections, rewrites landmark civil rights legislation to advance the LGBT agenda by federal fiat, and waters down legal standards for those falsely accused of sexual harassment.

The Biden administration obliterates the unique rights intended for women and girls by claiming Title IX’s prohibitions of discrimination against females in education apply to men who identify as women — regardless of their outward appearance — as well as those who identify as homosexual. Its “unofficial final rule,” released on April 19, now claims LGBTQIA+ activists may cite protections intended for women to accuse their fellow students of discrimination based on “sex stereotypes, sex characteristics, pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity.”

The term “gender identity” appears 289 times in the 1,577-page document.

The new rule also requires that these “discrimination” allegations only meet the lowest standard of proof, known as the “preponderance of the evidence.” The rule — announced by Catherine Lhamon, the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights — also establishes “equitable grievance procedures.”

“They have completely demolished protections for women,” Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council, told “Washington Watch” guest host Joseph Backholm last week. “It’s just a disaster.” The new proposed rule “impacts speech. It impacts a free and appropriate education.”

In a comment emailed to The Washington Stand, Alliance Defending Freedom Legal Counsel Rachel Rouleau called the new rule “a slap in the face to women and girls who have fought long and hard for equal opportunities.” The Biden administration’s “radical redefinition of sex turns back the clock on equal opportunity for women” and “will have devastating consequences on the future of women’s sports, student privacy, and parental rights.”

The Biden administration’s federal fiat — never approved by legislation — rolls back regulations instituted in May 2020 by then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos that reestablished legal norms and standards for those accused of sexual harassment.

Obama administration rules — also drawn up by Lhamon, a former ACLU attorney — allowed college sexual harassment investigations to be carried out by a single investigator, who acted as judge and jury. Vague definitions proscribing any “unwelcome conduct,” whether verbal or “nonverbal,” led school districts to punish students for unwelcome staring.

Under the Trump administration’s revised Title IX rules, anyone accused of sexual harassment on campus enjoyed the presumption of innocence, as in any other legal proceeding. The defendant also had the right to know the charges against him or her, examine all the evidence presented in the proceedings, have an adviser cross-examine any witness’s testimony, and appeal the ruling. The administration had to meet the more robust and normative legal standard of “clear and convincing evidence.”

At the time, Lhamon asserted that the Trump administration’s revised guidelines would make it “permissible to rape and sexually harass students with impunity.” No epidemic of unpunished campus rape followed.

The Biden administration’s new Title IX rule eliminates all these elements, which are standard in other consequential accusations.

“The final regulations restore and strengthen vital protections for students,” Biden’s Department of Education contended in a press release Friday.

All parties seem to acknowledge these rules will supercharge the number of sexual harassment cases on campus after it takes effect on August 1. “This rule is designed to encourage reporting,” a Biden administration official told journalists on a call Thursday.

Newly empowered with looser regulations, activist bureaucrats in the federal government, and on college campuses nationwide, “are going to enforce this rule, and they are going to enforce it aggressively,” predicted Kilgannon. “The Education Department laid down their marker and said, ‘Yes, indeed, you will face a penalty for this.’” States that refuse to implement the strategy will “be losing federal funds for your education programs in your state.”

Since more affluent areas, like the D.C. suburbs, rely more on property taxes to fund their schools, the threat of losing federal education dollars falls heaviest on the most vulnerable students living in underprivileged districts. “It is the poorest places who will be most harmed by this, because they rely the most on federal funding,” Kilgannon added.

To avoid running afoul of an activist bureaucracy’s interpretation of the newly broadened rule, education officials may shut down any speech that could turn into litigation, and threaten federal funding.

“This change reverses decades of progress toward equality, open discourse, due process, and parental rights,” observed the Southeastern Legal Foundation. The new rule will cause students to “self-censor rather than risk being reported for harassment” and “significantly undermines the role of parents — who should be the primary caregivers for their children and who are entitled to raise their children to share certain values and beliefs — by requiring conformity to the federal government’s views on biology and so-called gender identity.”

The regulations drew fire from Congress over these specific concerns. “Evidently, the acceptance of biological reality, and the faithful implementation of the law, are just pills too big for the Department to swallow,” said Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee.

The new regulation pulls off a trifecta of administrative harm, as it “attacks the definition of sex, due-process rights, and free-speech rights,” said Inez Feltscher Stepman, a senior policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum.

The regulation also continues the decades-long trend of rewriting legislation through executive action. “Title IX was written in 1972 when ‘sex’ meant male and female, and no amount of interpretive jiujitsu permits a cabinet agency to rewrite the plain language of the law. Efforts to do so have failed repeatedly in Congress for one simple reason: Such an expansion of law is deeply unpopular, with opposition to these changes spanning both political and racial lines,” said Nicole Neily, president of Parents Defending Education, in a comment to TWS. Numerous polls have shown a supermajority of Americans oppose the extending of women’s rights to men, regardless of their self-identity.

“It is grotesque that the White House has chosen to capitulate to extremists in his party, sacrificing the First Amendment” in the process, Neily told TWS.

Women’s rights activists promise not to take the loss of their distinct place in the law lying down. “This is going to be the subject of lawsuits,” Kilgannon told Backholm, citing direct knowledge of multiple civil rights attorneys and organizations. Neiley told TWS explicitly, “This betrayal of students will not soon be forgotten by American parents, and we look forward to suing the administration over this policy soon.” Likewise, Rouleau told TWS that the “Alliance Defending Freedom plans to take action to defend female athletes, as well as school districts, teachers, and students who will be gravely harmed by this unlawful government overreach.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden Admin Wants To Send American Tax Dollars To Train Army Of Transgender Activists In India

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Gender Politics: Why Is it So Hard to Define Biological Realities?

Earlier this month, the revelatoryCass review was published. The report, conducted by former president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health Dr. Hilary Cass, found “remarkably weak evidence” that “gender affirming services” for children have any positive outcomes. The British Government responded to the results by announcing there will be “a fundamental change” in how they manage the gender identity politics concerning medical care moving forward. It now appears that the push toward acknowledging biological reality in the U.K. is moving beyond clinics.

This week, the British Government’s Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer dove into the males in female sports controversy when she made the argument that biological males have an “indisputable edge” over female athletes, concluding that male athletes who identify as transgender should be prohibited from “competing in top-level female sports events,” Breitbart reported. The biological differences between men and women “not only give transgender women an unfair competitive advantage,” Frazer wrote for The Daily Mail, “but threaten the safety of female athletes in the sports arena.”

She continued, “That’s why this week I called together representatives from key sporting organizations, like the England and Wales Cricket Board and Football Association, to encourage them to follow the lead of other sports in not allowing trans athletes to compete against women at the elite level.” Many are acknowledging how significant this development is, given that the definition of what a woman is can scarcely be answered these days.

The solution Frazer is presenting is that those who understand the biological realities of what a man is and what a woman is must join to proclaim the message more zealously. “The need for clear action from all sports becomes more pressing with each passing week,” Frazer added. “In competitive sport, biology matters. And … this should not be ignored.” And in direct response to the Cass Review, she emphasized “that inaction and a failure to confront the issues at stake cannot be an option.”

But how is progress made on an issue many claim doesn’t exist? Take Harvard University, for example. The editorial board of the Ivy League’s student newspaper published an article on April 16 titled, “There Are Many Obstacles Facing Women’s Sports. Trans Athletes Aren’t One.” In short, The Harvard Crimson’s Editorial Board writer Jonathan G. Yuan made the argument that “the science is … less conclusive” as it relates to whether “transgender women hold a biological edge over their cisgender opponents.”

Breitbart’s Warner Huston does well in pointing out the errors in Yuan’s argument, noting that “in the process of making the” assertions it did, “the article ignored all evidence to the contrary to support their own claim that transgender athlete participation is wholly benign.” But nonetheless, the push against true science continues — not only in a student newspaper, but also in government.

Just Tuesday, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs (D) “vetoed a bill to codify the meaning of ‘woman’ in state law, becoming the second female Democratic governor to nix such legislation over concerns about transgender rights,” The Washington Times wrote. Similar to a bill passed by Idaho Governor Brad Little (R) last week, Arizona’s Senate Bill 1628 would have provided biological “definitions for sex-based terms used in statutes, administrative rules, regulations and public policies.” But Hobbs’s veto, which was one of 13 in recent days, was not free from backlash.

In a statement, Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen (R) said, “Instead of helping these confused boys and men, Democrats are only fueling the disfunction by pretending biological sex doesn’t matter.” He continued, “Our daughters, granddaughters, nieces, and neighbors are growing up in a dangerous time where they are living with an increased risk of being victimized in public bathrooms, showers, and locker rooms because Democrats are now welcoming biological males into what used to be traditionally safe, single-sex spaces.”

State Senator Sine Kerr (R), the sponsor of the bill, urged, “The madness needs to stop.” She added that “real women must continue to push back, stand for truth, and make their voices heard to advocate for the protection of their rights.” But even though this fight is facing setbacks in some states, Louisiana is taking strides in the right direction.

While it’s not specifically related to the issue of defining gender, Louisiana is fighting to give parents back the right to decide what role gender ideology plays in the lives of their children. According to The Epoch Times, “The Louisiana House and Senate have advanced legislation this week that, if signed by newly seated Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, would prohibit sexual indoctrination and the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) in schools.”

Specifically, House Bill 121, also known as the Given Name Act, states that the “Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution … protects the right of parents to direct the care, upbringing, education, and welfare of their children.” As such, the legislation would require parental approval before students can be referred to by any name or pronoun other than their original name and biological pronouns.

Given all this information, the elephant in the room is: Why is it so hard for some people to recognize the biological differences between men and women? It’s a simple question, some would argue, and Meg Kilgannon, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for Education Studies, shared her insight with The Washington Stand. The reason such a simple reality is tossed aside, she explained, is because “they are not accepting there is a reality.”

Kilgannon emphasized what NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher said during a TED talk, namely, that truth is subjective. Maher stated, “[W]e all have different truths. They’re based on things like where we come from, how we were raised, and how other people perceive.” And for Kilgannon, it’s this mindset that leads the Left into a worldview where men can be women and women can be men.

“They don’t believe there is truth,” she added. It’s as though “they don’t believe anything except the fact that they don’t believe anything. It’s the age old trope of [they] say there’s no definitive truth and [they] say that in a definitive statement.” It’s a cyclical argument, she observed, which is hard to escape from.

So, why is it that the question of biological realities is hard for some to answer? As Kilgannon concluded, “If they answer the question, they have to admit that there is a value associated with the item.” Or in other words, a mindset like this means that answering a simple question leads to the collapse of an entire worldview.

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Trans-Identifying Female Boxer KO’d in 21 Seconds by Biological Male

April showers bring May flowers, as the saying goes, and there’s seemingly a shower of men dominating in women’s sports that has yet to cease. What has bloomed as a result? Social outrage.

Two recent events are surfacing in news outlets, in which many have argued serve as further examples of why men should not be competing in women’s sports (and vice versa). On Saturday, trans-identifying runner Aayden Gallagher nearly blew his female competitors out of the water during the 2024 Sherwood Need For Speed Classic track competition in Oregon. The biological male finished the 200-meter race in a time of 25.49 – roughly two seconds ahead of the other runners — a sizeable margin in the realm of track and field.

In a different heat, Gallagher barely came in second behind female runner Aster Jones. But despite losing his hold on first place, it’s notable that Gallagher hit the “fifth fastest time ever run in the state’s girls 200m,” and the “fourth fastest time ever run in the Oregon girls’ 400m,” The Post Millennial reported. But to make an accurate comparison against male-born athletes, PM continued, “Gallegher’s 200m time would have earned 61st place among the male athletes and 46th in the 400m.”

The online rage sparked by these circumstances were partly due to Gallagher specifically, but also by the bigger picture of men being able to compete in women’s sports in the first place. As the Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS) shared on X, “Championing boys in girls’ sports is blatant misogyny.” Libs of TikTok, a prominent conservative social media presence, also posted on X, “These high school girls just had their dream stolen from them because the school is catering the delusions of a boy who pretends to be a girl.” Gallagher “is a cheater,” the post stated.

One X user responded to that post, “This man is not just a cheater, he’s a criminal. He’s stolen from girls their opportunity for fair competition and to have a bright future in sports.” Another wrote, “One day, future generations will look back on this with pain, wondering how humanity ever got to this point. Such a sad situation.” And amid several other angry comments, one sobering comment read, “When will parents of girls get sick of their daughters taking second place?”

On the flip side of this social controversy is boxer Patricio Manuel, formerly known as Patricia. The biological female recently became the first trans-identifying pro boxer to compete in the men’s division. Before her transition in 2013, Manuel competed in the U.S. women’s Olympic Trial, but had to take a step back due to a shoulder injury. According to The Daily Mail, “Manuel was a five-time national amateur women’s boxing champion.” But eleven years later, she started boxing with the big boys. Literally.

While the female boxer had recorded three consecutive wins, the fight during the Golden Boy Fight Night in California on April 4 put an end to the streak. Manuel went up against her male opponent, Joshua Brian Reyes, and was knocked out within 21 seconds. Media Research Center (MRC) posed the question, “Ever wonder why you never hear stories about women who believe they’re men stealing actual men’s sports trophies and championships?” To which they concluded, “That’s because it doesn’t happen.” And as many have argued, this topic shouldn’t be up to debate.

Macy Petty, an NCAA volleyball player and former Family Research Council intern, warned, “[The Biden] administration continues to reduce sex-based competition to arbitrary hormone levels,” she shared with The Washington Stand. But “women are so much more than a hormone level, and our sports should reflect our unique design.”

According to Petty, “The female league is not a B league, or simply a league for athletes with particular hormone levels. It is a league specifically created for women to embrace the potentials of their God-created design.” She continued, “Male intrusion not only disrupts the protection of female opportunity but attacks the very design of male and female.” And it appears it’s not just men in women’s sports that causes controversy, as Manuel’s case demonstrates.

Petty concluded, “Male athletes beating women by seconds in track competition is a true mockery of the intentionality distinguishing the sexes. [And] in many cases, such as boxing, it places women directly in harm’s way.” But many have joined Petty in the pleas of keeping men and women’s sports distinct, including “over a dozen female athletes [who] are suing the National Collegiate Athletics Association for letting transgender athletes compete against them and use female locker rooms in college sports.”

The question is: will high school athletes and their parents follow suit?

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Dem Claims Men ‘Don’t Compete in Women’s Sports’ as Stolen Titles Near 300

Does Rep. Jerry Nadler (D) live in New York or an alternate universe? People certainly wondered after a House Judiciary hearing where the 76-year-old declared, “Men do not compete in women’s sports.” Is the president’s senility contagious or is Nadler living in complete denial of a global phenomenon that’s plunged communities into chaos? Not only are men competing in women’s sports, they’re winning women’s titles — a fact Riley Gaines was more than happy to point out.

“Ironic he says this on the EXACT 2 year anniversary of this photo being taken,” the former University of Kentucky swimmer posted alongside a picture of Lia Thomas holding a trophy he never should have had the chance to race for. “This 6’4” man isn’t fooling anyone with any amount of common sense,” Gaines fumed. “2 years ago today I had a fire lit under me and communists like Nadler continue to fuel it.”

And yet, Nadler was so determined to suppress reality that he actually moved to have evidence of the debate stricken from the record. Republican Rep. Harriet Hageman (Wyo.) had catalogued a number of times that biological boys had stolen girls’ titles and opportunities in the last several years. The group SheWon puts the number at an eye-popping 292 stolen first-place podiums. “I ask for unanimous consent to submit for the record instances of men hijacking women’s sports and the various examples that we have demonstrating not only injuries that have been suffered by women as men have participated in girls’ sports, but also the women — the girls and women who have been affected by this, including Riley Gaines, when Will Thomas decided to join the … women’s swimming team in Pennsylvania,” she requested.

Nadler, the committee’s ranking member, fired back, “I object to concluding these mistruths in the record.” Shocked, Hageman replied how telling it was that he didn’t want the facts included in the record — to which the New Yorker replied, “Men do not compete in women’s sports.”

That’s news to the 25 (going on 26) states who’ve stepped in to stop this madness from overtaking their girls at the pool, track, court, field, and gym. If it wasn’t happening, then this was sure a monumental waste of legislative time.

Slack-jawed, conservatives kept up the pressure, giving a passionate defense of girls and the opportunities, safety, and privacy they’re losing by this absurd introduction of men in women’s sports. Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) showed a video montage of girls who’ve been physically injured playing against biological boys in volleyball, field hockey, and basketball. From Massachusetts to North Carolina, members watched as girls screamed in pain, lost teeth, were carted off with head injuries. One of the victims, Payton McNabb, still suffers from blurred vision, partial paralysis, and memory loss.

We have examples, Spartz insisted, of “much stronger guys playing sports against biologically not-as-strong women.” “Girls actually get hurt by biological males playing sports,” she argued. “I mean, it is really unbelievable for me that this is an issue that we cannot stand with women and girls on.” Instead, Spartz went on, “the other side tries to really deter the conversation in a different direction and divert it. … Let’s talk about how we are going to protect our women and girls.”

When the talk turned to privacy rights, Democrat Eric Swalwell (Calif.) joined Nadler’s delusion, claiming that men in girls locker rooms “is not a thing.”

Tell that to the 16 plaintiffs suing the NCAA. One of them, Gaines’s teammate and SEC champion Kaitlynn Wheeler, describes in agonizing detail how they were put in a “fundamentally unfair situation that no student-athlete, let alone a teenage girl, should ever have to face.” The collegiate sports body “did not simply make my teammates in the 100-, 200-, and 500-yard freestyle races face a biological male swimmer in the pool,” she insisted. “The NCAA also decided that Lia Thomas, a 6-foot-4-inch, 22-year-old transgender swimmer with a male body and full male genitalia, would be undressing with us.” She writes of that traumatizing experience in a new Washington Examiner op-ed:

“The moment I realized Thomas would be sharing our most private space, I was engulfed by a whirlwind of emotions — shock, disbelief, horror. The sanctity of our locker room, a space that should have been ours and ours alone, was shattered without warning. The presence of male genitalia in a space that was supposed to be safe, where we were vulnerable and exposed, was not just uncomfortable; it was a visceral invasion of our privacy and dignity.

“Feeling my stomach churn as whispers turned to silence, I stood there, naked and exposed, not just physically but also emotionally, grappling with a reality I couldn’t comprehend. The NCAA’s decision to transform our sanctuary into a ‘unisex’ locker room without our consent felt like a betrayal of the highest order. It was a stark reminder that our voices, our comfort, and our boundaries did not matter.”

And yet, the effort to protect these girls is what Swalwell called “creepy” — not forcing innocent teenagers to share a room with a naked man. That’s what really stings, the girls say. No one has their backs. As so many female athletes admitted to Senate Republicans, they feel “helpless.” “This is kind of a theme that we got,” Senator Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said of his committee’s investigation on trans inclusion in sports: “‘Why am I even trying? I don’t have any hope whatsoever.’” “Our voices as women were completely silenced,” another admitted.

Fortunately for Wheeler and the thousands of American daughters living this nightmare, Republicans do care. Over the objections of Democrats, conservatives on the House Judiciary Committee passed Rep. Greg Steube’s (R-Fla.) Protection of Women in Olympic & Amateur Sports Act last Thursday. To Wheeler, who watched Thomas stand on top of a podium meant for her sport, maybe it will mean the end of the silence of the adults in the room. “That silence spoke volumes of the injustice, pain, and anger brewing in the hearts of not just the competitors but of every woman forced into silence by a system that refuses to listen.”

Until then, she vowed, women will “stand against the erasure of our voices,” whether or not this president or his party stands with them. “We demand a future where female athletes are respected, where our safety and privacy are not just acknowledged but fiercely protected.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Does Transgender Visibility Day Override Resurrection Sunday?

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Led by Riley Gaines, 16 Women File Groundbreaking Suit against the NCAA

The NCAA has ignored Congressits own committee membersstate legislators, parents, and female athletes, but it can’t ignore this. In what is being called “a day of reckoning” for President Charlie Baker, the country’s biggest collegiate sports association is being taken to court over a radical transgender policy that has physically hurt, traumatized, and robbed young athletes of opportunities across America. “This is the time to speak up for all the women in the future,” swimmer Reka Gyorgy insisted. “It’s been two years, and nothing [has] happened. When will we change things if it’s not now?”

Those two years Gyorgy mentions are personal. It was 2022 when she lost her All-American title to Lia Thomas, something she’d worked for five years to achieve. Because Thomas decided to swim as a female, Reka was bumped to 17th — one spot shy of the top-16 cutoff she needed. She thought back on that devastation in an exclusive interview with The Free Press’s Francesca Block. “I was in the best physical [shape] I have ever been,” she explained. “And [this was my] the last chance. I was a senior, I was ready for racing. I was ready [to] give it all.” And yet, “going into the race [where] you know that one spot is going to be taken for sure [by Thomas], that’s a totally different mindset.”

“[W]atching that last heat of the 500 freestyle, it was just so emotional,” Gyorgy remembers. “Looking at the screen after the last heat touched the wall [and] seeing my name at 17th, I was shocked, to be honest. I went through all the feelings. … I was surrounded by my teammates and my coaches, and I started crying. I broke down because I felt right away that I [wouldn’t] have the second chance to swim again. And it just wasn’t fair. It was so unfair.”

While Riley Gaines grabbed most of the headlines after tying with Thomas for the trophy, it was Gyorgy who sent the first public letter of complaint to the NCAA. After the 2022 tournament, “[Reka] was really the first athlete at that national championships to take a stand,” Gaines said. “Had she not done that and had I not seen that, I certainly would not have taken the stand that I did. So I could not be more grateful for Rica. And she certainly inspired and continues to inspire more people than I think even she could possibly realize.”

Now the two women are linking arms, along with college athletes across swimming, volleyball, track, and diving, who’ve all been victims of the NCAA’s indifference toward Title IX and the devastation their rules have done to fair play. The lawsuit, which was organized by the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, is considered the first of its kind — and, if you ask most Americans, long overdue. Among other things, it demands the association “revoke all awards given to trans athletes in women’s competition and ‘reassign’ them to their female contenders. It also asks for ‘damages for pain and suffering, mental and emotional distress, suffering and anxiety…” The Free Press explains.

Some of the most horrifying stories of Thomas’s involvement in girls’ swimming have come at the expense of girls’ privacy — another reason the women felt compelled to sue. As Gaines has shared before, most of the competitors at the NCAA Championships in Georgia had zero warning that a naked Thomas would be in the women’s locker room. “The first time we found out that this would be the case was when we were actually undressing next to this six-foot-four man who was also simultaneously undressing, fully exposing himself and his male genitalia,” Gaines said. “We were not given any prior acknowledgement. We were not given a way to make other arrangements for ourselves. This was something as women, as female athletes, that we felt uncomfortable with.”

One elite swimmer and fellow plaintiff, Kylee Alons, a 31-time All-American, was so embarrassed that she changed in a utility room after she encountered Thomas. “I was literally racing U.S. and Olympic gold medalists, and I was changing in a storage closet at this elite-level meet,” she told Block.

“… I can’t even put into words the feelings,” Gaines shared. “I mean, of course it’s awkward, it’s embarrassing, it’s uncomfortable, but really the feelings of betrayal and utter violation. And honestly, the locker room aspect of this whole thing was traumatizing. And it wasn’t even necessarily traumatizing because of what we were forced to see or how we as women were forcibly exploited without our consent. It was traumatic for me to know just how easy it was for those people who created and enforce these policies [to] totally dismiss our rights to privacy without even a second thought, without even bare minimum forewarning us.”

One thing people might not realize, Block explained after reading the lawsuit, is that a competitive swimming race suit “is much different.” “It’s really tight. It could take 15 to 20 minutes, sometimes 30, 40 minutes to put on.” So these young women aren’t talking about a few minutes of discomfort. “And let’s be honest here,” Gaines admitted, “a swimming locker room [is] not a place of modesty. I think we can all agree a locker room is not a comfortable place in general. But growing up a swimmer, I think, at least for speaking for myself, you grow to feel comfortable being vulnerable in that environment. But that vulnerability was entirely stripped from us. When you have your back turned, you’re undressing, and all of a sudden you hear a man’s voice in that changing space. … It was innate for every girl in that locker room to cover themselves, whether that was with their hands or their towels or their clothes — and to get out of that locker room as quickly as they could.”

Reka reminded people that this was a position the NCAA forced them into. “As Riley said, we didn’t get a heads up. … And it might seem silly for some people, but we had 18- to 22-year-old girls in the locker room — and some of them may not have seen a naked male before. And [it’s] just not right.”

At the end of the day, the women say, they’re all victims of the radical agenda of the Biden administration, the NCAA, and International Olympic Committee (IOC), whose main goal seems to be “actively and openly discriminating against women on the basis of our sex, which is everything that Title IX was passed to prevent from happening.”

And in a stunning admission by Baker to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the NCAA pursued this extreme trans policy without ever studying the “physical, psychological, or emotional harm” of the trans policy on female athletes. “That’s a bombshell,” Concerned Women for America’s Doreen Denny insisted after discovering it — buried — on page 18 of the president’s written response. That alone should be “grounds for the NCAA to cease and desist” from its policy immediately.

And it’s not as if the NCAA hadn’t been pressed to study the issue. Members of its own committees, including Bill Bock, who were experts on the science, urged the association to act. Bock’s years with the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency led him to believe that allowing men to compete against women was essentially “massive, authorized cheating.” And yet, as he explained after resigning in protest, “There was no real mechanism for me to bring that issue to anybody within my committee and force a decision on it or something like that. … The board of directors of the NCAA is the ultimate decision maker. And they were the ones that ultimately made the decision to continue to allow Thomas to compete.”

When people asked about protecting a level playing field, the NCAA “tried to avoid the question,” Bock said. “Mostly, they [tried] to talk about something else … [like] inclusiveness and the need to be open to whatever somebody feels about themselves. … And then they say, ‘This could cause people to self-harm if we don’t allow them to do this.’ And so, we should make sport unfair because people will self-harm.”

But the biological realities are real, most international sports bodies have conceded as they snap back to stricter, girls-only rules. “Women are not just a testosterone threshold,” Gaines argued. “That is not the qualification to being a woman. Even if Thomas had zero nanomoles per liter of testosterone in his body, there are still advantages that males possess over women that make this unfair. The bottom line is, even if this wasn’t a physical sport, it’s a woman’s category, and by allowing men into women’s category, you are, again, objectively discriminating against women on the basis of our sex.”

To the haters who say she’s just anti-trans, Gaines fires back, “My stance is not anti-anything. My stance is pro-reality. It is pro-fairness. It is pro-common sense. It is pro-woman. And if being pro-woman is deemed anti-trans, then it must mean that being pro-trans is deemed anti-woman. And what do we call someone who’s anti-woman? We call them a misogynist.”

At the end of the day, she argued, “Reka and myself and the other athletes who are signed onto this lawsuit, we are standing for something. We are standing for women again. We are standing for women’s sports. We are standing for reality. We are not standing against anything. There’s certainly a place for people who identify as trans to compete in sports. Of course there is. And I encourage everyone, regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation or race … to play sports, but play in a category that is fair and that is safe. Thomas competing against us was neither of those things.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED VIDEO: Female University Athletes File Lawsuit Against NCAA Over Transgender Policy

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

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 swimmingtrack and fieldgolfvolleyballdancecross 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.

RELATED VIDEO: Anti-White Gemini | TONIGHT on TIPPING POINT

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Ohio Becomes 23rd State to Protect Minors from the Transgender Industry

The bellwether state of Ohio has become the 23rd state to protect children from transgender injections and surgeries, and the 24th to safeguard fairness and privacy in women’s sports, as lawmakers voted overwhelmingly to override the Republican governor’s veto. Yet Democratic opponents claimed Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesus Christ would have supported transgender surgeries for kids, a transgender activist changed the words of a Christian hymn to support transgender surgeries, and liberals likened withholding cross-sex hormones from children to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

The Ohio State Senate voted 24-8 on Wednesday afternoon to reverse the veto of Substitute H.B. 68 by Governor Mike DeWine (R). (The Senate erroneously announced the tally as 23-9 immediately after the vote.) The bill — which combines the Save Adolescents from Experimentation Act (SAFE) and the Save Women’s Sports Act — bans the use of puberty-blockers, cross-sex hormone injections, and gender mutilation surgeries to anyone under the age of 18. It also prohibits men from competing against women in sports, prevents courts from denying or limiting custody to a parent who refuses to “affirm” their child’s transgender identity, and refuses to fund minors’ transgender procedures through Medicaid.

The Ohio House of Representatives overrode the veto on January 10 by a 65-27 margin — four more votes than when the House first passed the bill on December 14. The bill will become state law in 90 days.

“Given that five legislatures have overridden gubernatorial vetoes of legislation protecting minors from the transgender activists pushing experimental drugs and surgeries, any governor who vetoes these SAFE Act-type laws is either politically tone-deaf or being influenced by those who profit from this morally devastating, but financially lucrative industry,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. (Emphasis in original.) Supermajorities of state legislators voted to override Democratic governors’ vetoes of various gender protection bills in KansasKentuckyLouisiana, and North Carolina in 2023. Arkansas lawmakers also enacted the first SAFE Act over the veto of then-Governor and failed 2024 presidential candidate Asa Hutchinson (R).

Ohio to Trans Industry: ‘We Reject Your Junk Science’

“Today, Ohio has told an exploitative medical industry that we reject your junk science and will no longer allow you to experiment on our children,” said Aaron Baer, president of the Center for Christian Virtue (CCV), an Ohio-based citizen action group that spearheaded support for the override. “This marks a turning point in Ohio: we will not remain silent when our children are being harmed.” Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Matt Sharp thanked Ohio lawmakers for rejecting “the politicized and harmful practice of pushing minors towards irreversible drugs and surgeries in favor of compassionate mental health care that gives them time to grow into comfort with their bodies and true identities.”

“No one has the right to harm children, and, thankfully, states have the power — and duty — to protect them,” said Sharp. “Our most basic duty as parents is to protect our children,” said Peter Range, CEO of Ohio Right to Life, in a statement emailed to The Washington Stand. “Our children are our greatest legacy, and today’s vote ensures our children are protected in Ohio.” Thanks to the vote, “Child gender mutilation and gender ideology as a whole will end with a whimper,” said Chloe Cole, a detransitioner who testified in favor of the bill and returned to Columbus for Wednesday’s vote.

Democrats Invoke Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr., and Japanese Internment Camps to Argue for Transing Kids

The override vote overcame procedural roadblocks, disruptions by radical transgender activists, and disputes over whether the bill represented God’s will. Sen. Bill DeMora (D-25) moved to adjourn before the chamber could vote on the measure.

A transgender activist interrupted the very first speaker, Sen. Kristina Roegner (R-25), by singing an edited version of “Jesus Loves the Little Children” after fellow transgender activists booed and raised their middle fingers. “Jesus loves the little children. L-G-B-T-Q-I-A, He would be here — Jesus would be here — on their side today!” the activist belted out in the manner of a show tune, before being escorted out of the Capitol.

Democrats picked up the talking point, as Sen. Paul Hicks-Hudson (D-11) insisted overriding DeWine’s veto “does not show that Jesus does love all of us.”

“That same Jesus has determined the gender of every child. Let’s respect truly what Jesus” created, retorted Sen. Jerry Cirino (R-18). “Jesus does love all the little children, including the women who compete [in] sports,” said Sen. George F. Lang (R-4).

Yet Senate Democratic Leader Nickie Antonio (D-23) — who announced, “I’m a lesbian” during her floor speech — said refusing to experiment on children “wasn’t the Christianity I was brought up with.”

Hicks-Hudson also told lawmakers, “We are slapping” the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., who once said it is necessary to become “maladjusted.”

Another Democrat compared Republicans denying minors cross-sex hormones and gender-reassignment surgeries to Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s order herding Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II. Sen. Kent Smith (D-21), who noted he encountered men who identify as female in his “side-hustle” as a part-time roller derby announcer, compared his fellow Democrats to then-Colorado Governor Ralph Carr (R), who opposed Roosevelt’s order.

Smith, who accused his opponents of the “systematic dehumanization” of trans-identifying people, said one public school official told him she had more trans-identifying children in school than those who identified as homosexual.

Antonio invoked Issue 1, stating, “A majority of the voters spoke when they told us in November that the government shouldn’t be involved in their own personal, private health care decisions.” Yet during the debate over Issue 1, proponents steadfastly denied the amendment had any impact on transgender procedures for minors.

DeMora also inveighed that H.B. 68 “is anti-science and very hateful,” “horrible,” and “the inevitable outcome of this bill will be loss of life.” Legislators should pass laws “to make it easier” for children to get hormone injections, he stated.

Cross-sex hormone injections have caused females to suffer from side effects including “erythrocytosis, severe liver dysfunction, coronary artery disease, cerebrovascular disease, hypertension, increased risk of breast and uterine cancers, and irreversible infertility,” states H.B. 68. “For biological males,” such injections cause “thromboembolic disease, cholelithiasis, coronary artery disease, macroprolactinoma, cerebrovascular disease, hypertriglyceridemia, breast cancer, and irreversible infertility.”

“Suicide rates, psychiatric morbidities, and mortality rates remain markedly elevated above the background population after inpatient gender reassignment surgery has been performed,” the bill notes.

Lawmakers reluctantly added a grandfather clause for children who had already begun transgender procedures before the bill’s passage at DeWine’s request; yet he vetoed the bill anyway.

Transgender procedures are not what gender-confused minors need, said Sen. Roegner. “What they need to know is that they are loved for who they are. They need compassion; they need counseling. What they do not need is chemical castration, sterilization, or physical mutilation. We cannot let this happen to the children of Ohio,” she said. “It is medical malpractice, and it needs to stop.”

Similarly, Sen. Shane Wilkin (R-17) said safety guided his support for allowing girls to have their own space. “I, along with many in my district, do not want shared locker rooms with boys,” he said. “I find this issue is not as difficult as we’re making it out to be.”

Ohioans largely agree. Sen. Andy Brenner (R-19) revealed on Wednesday’s “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” that 90% of the constituents who contacted his office urged him to protect children.

DeWine Yielded to ‘Experts’ on Transgenderism and COVID

Some in Ohio expressed surprise when DeWine, a centrist Republican, vetoed H.B. 68 on December 29. One week later, DeWine banned transgender surgery for minors by executive order, and he announced new regulations requiring greater psychological counseling for adults before and after transgender procedures. “I think it’s a good way to take this issue off the table” and “talk about other things,” said DeWine.

Brenner said, in lieu of longitudinal studies tracking the long-term impact of puberty-blockers on children, DeWine yielded to the dubious “consensus” of “experts” on transgender studies — much as he did “masking and lockdowns a few years ago” in response to COVID-19. “They don’t really have the data to back up what they’re doing,” Brenner noted.

Between DeWine’s executive actions and H.B. 68, “Ohio now has one of the strongest pieces to protect children in the nation,” said Cole at a press conference alongside the bill’s sponsor, State Rep. Gary Click (R-88), shortly after the vote.

“The SAFE Act and Save Women’s Sports Act are the civil rights issues of our day, ensuring that children have the right to grow up intact and that women are no longer subject to men invading their spaces,” said Click.

Wednesday was a “great day for Ohio women,” agreed State Rep. Jena Powell (R-80), who championed the Save Women’s Sports Act. “I promised to fight for integrity in women’s sports, and I did not give up until we won.” Liberty Counsel Action also called H.B. 68 “a win for the safety of women and children.”

Not everyone was pleased. “F*** the Ohio Senate,” cursed the Ohio Women’s Alliance Action Fund (which did not censor its message). OWA helped craft Issue 1, which opponents said was written to create a constitutional “right” to transgender procedures for minors without parental notification — a position OWA and many of its sponsors support. OWA Deputy Director Jordyn Close, who describes herself as “a sex and pleasure advocate … working on destigmatizing and uplifting sex work,” has said “all barriers to abortion are racist,” because “every abortion is essential.” Similarly, the capital city’s chapter of the Young Women’s Christian Alliance — YWCA Columbus — excoriated the allegedly “discriminatory bill” as “another demonstration of the state weaponizing control over bodily autonomy.”

Ohio Republicans said they stand ready to protect the state’s progress toward protecting the vulnerable and creating a more compassionate state. “I am prepared to defend it against the inevitable legal challenge,” said Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (R).

While the bill’s passage is “a milestone for Ohio and the nation, there is still more to be accomplished,” said Rep. Click. “We must ensure that all individuals who experience regret have full access to both medical and mental health resources as they realign with their authentic selves.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Riley Gaines Demolishes Dems’ Trans Defense in the Senate’s ‘Protect Pride’ Hearing


Former University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines was chased, threatened, and held hostage in a room for three hours while a mob of leftist students raged outside, but it’s trans-identifying “children” who are “in danger,” Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) told her. That was just one of the staggering statements made by Democrats in a Wednesday hearing full of phony victimhood. And judging by the Left’s desperation, they won’t be the last.

While Americans continue to put the hurt on pro-trans companies, Joe Biden’s party is right to worry that the script may have permanently flipped. In a nod to the defense the Left is now playing, the Senate Judiciary Committee hosted “Protecting Pride: Defending the Civil Rights of LGBTQ+ Americans” to sound the alarm on the shifting opinions of the country.

Some of the most dramatic moments centered around girls’ sports, where the Republicans’ witness, Gaines, expertly gutted the Left’s arguments. In an exchange with Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), she recounted the nightmare at San Francisco University earlier this year where students surrounded her and demanded a ransom “if I ever wanted to make it home to see my family again.” “I’m totally fine with people protesting,” she explained. “It’s their right to protest. But what I’m not fine with is when it does turn violent in the way that it did, because protesters afterwards, they rushed into the room, they turned off the lights, they rushed to the front. [We] were assaulted.”

Hawley acknowledged that the former NCAA All-American has been the target of “unbelievable amounts of abuse … intimidation, threats of violence.” He asked her to explain why. She said she believes it’s because she’s refused to take the erasure of women and girls lying down. “If we do speak up… they will call you everything under the sun — whether it’s transphobic, homophobic, racist, white supremacist, domestic terrorists. They will throw them all at you in hopes to deter you and hopes to silence you.”

For Gaines, who competed against male swimmer Lia Thomas, there was no other option. Apart from the injustice of competing — and losing — to a biological male, the things she and others were forced to endure in the locker room were demeaning and cruel.

“You were talking about just the incredible surprise, shall I say to put it gently, of finding a biological man, a 6-foot-4 biological man, in your locker room and having to accept that without being asked about it, without being told about it even,” Hawley said. “What was that like for you?”

Gaines explained that the girls “only became aware we would be undressing next to a man when we had to see a man undressing while we were simultaneously undressing.” An NCAA official told the women that Thomas was allowed because of a rule change that made the spaces “unisex.”

“And so I’m thinking to myself in these brief moments … you acknowledged that we do not share the same sex, first and foremost,” Gaines continued. “Secondly, unisex [means] any man could’ve walked into our locker room, any coach, any official, any man who wanted to would have had full reigns to and bare minimum we weren’t forewarned about it — and that’s the traumatizing part. Of course the experience in and of the locker room itself is traumatizing, but I think for me, it was so easy for them to dismiss our rights to privacy.”

Worse, she shared, Thomas’s teammates at the University of Pennsylvania “were forced every single week to go to mandatory LGBTQ education meetings to learn about how — just by being cisgender — they were oppressing Lia Thomas. They were told that they’re not allowed to take a stance because their school has already taken their stance for them. They were told, ‘You will never get a job,’ ‘You will never get into grad school,’ ‘You will lose your friends,’ ‘You will lose your scholarship and playing time if you speak out.’”

And yet, Durbin’s concern is not for America’s daughters, but for the trans-identifying children who might be listening. “When these young people, who are already struggling, hear … hateful rhetoric that denies their very existence, what message does it send?” he demanded to know.

Gaines took the senator head on. “… [M]y comeback to that is, what message does this send to women, to young girls, who are denied these opportunities? So easily, their rights to privacy and safety [are] thrown out the window to protect a small population, protect one group as long as they’re happy,” she said. “What about us? That is the overall general consensus of how we all felt in that locker room.”

Durbin didn’t answer her questions, instead firing back, “Since reference was made to my earlier statement, I would just like to add something for the record: There is no evidence that transgender athletes are an issue in certain levels of sports.”

Trans activist Kelley Robinson of the Human Rights Campaign tried — but failed — to give Durbin cover. When Senator John Kennedy (R-La.) asked the Democrats’ witness for an example of a woman playing in the NBA, Robinson replied with an incoherent answer about Serena Williams.

“There’s been this news article about men that think they can beat Serena Williams in tennis — that they think they can actually score a point on her,” Robinson said. “And it’s just not the case. She is stronger than them.”

Gaines immediately interjected, “Both Serena and Venus lost to the 203rd-ranked male tennis player.” As Breitbart pointed out, the swimmer was right. The famous sisters were both crushed by Karsten Braasch in 1998, who, at 31, was older than either of them.

More than a decade later, the world’s number one women’s player was open about the fact that women couldn’t measure up to men on the court. “So, if I were to play Andy Murray, I would lose, 6-0, 6-0, in 5 to 6 minutes, maybe 10 minutes,” Serena told David Letterman. When he disagreed, she shook her head. “No, it’s true. It’s a completely different sport. Men are a lot faster, and they serve harder and hit harder, it’s just a different game, and I only want to play girls, I don’t want to be embarrassed …”

And yet, four times Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) asked Robinson, “Do you believe there’s a difference between men and women?” Four times, the HRC chief refused to answer. “… [L]et me ask you this question then, why do women’s sports exist?” After all, Cruz said, “If you can’t find a difference between women and men, why not abolish women’s sports and just tell little girls to swim with little boys and see who wins?” Robinson replied that there were “many positive benefits to sports.”

Benefits, Gaines insists, that will vanish if the Democrats’ agenda succeeds. “Feminism is not a fluid term,” the swimmer insisted. And an overwhelming number of Americans agree. In an NPR, PBS NewsHour, and Marist poll released the same day as the hearing, 61% of the country — up 10% from May 2022 — agree “defining gender as the sex listed on a person’s original birth certificate is the only way to define male and female in society.”

“The original and the meaning of what it means to be a feminist is to uphold, respect, honor, embrace and celebrate women on our own physical ceilings, our own uniqueness.” No matter what the Left says, Gaines stressed. “That term has not changed.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED TWEET:

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Gaines Goes Toe-to-Toe with Dems on Biden’s Push to Erase Girls

“Why is it always women fighting against sex-based protections?” Riley Gaines wondered. “That will forever be beyond me.” The former All-American swimmer could only shake her head at the latest attack on girls’ sports by Congresswoman Katie Hobbs (D-Calif.), the latest high-profile Democrat to throw her sex overboard in the raging battle for transgenderism.

“It’s an extraordinary state of affairs,” “Fox Nation” host Piers Morgan said afterward, “when two middle-aged men, me and Bill Maher, were standing up vociferously for women’s rights to fairness and equality, and a congresswoman who wants to be a senator was incapable of doing that. And that, to me, exposed the fragility at the heart of this woke position on this whole transgender debate.”

Hobbs was a guest on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” when the conversation turned to Gaines’s push to save girls’ sports. The California Democrat announced that she disagreed with the former University of Kentucky athlete “strongly.” When Morgan pressed her about what Gaines had done or said that she disapproved of, Hobbs claimed Riley was “using things to kind of get likes and get clicks.” “That’s not what she’s doing,” Morgan fired back. “It’s not?” Hobbs asked incredulously.

The Brit insisted, “All I’ve seen her do is stand up for women’s rights to fairness and equality. She competed against [biological male] Lia Thomas, and it was obviously unfair.” Then “our sporting bodies should be dealing with it,” Hobbs argued, before claiming she respects Riley’s “free speech.”

Later, Morgan seemed appalled by the whole exchange, arguing on his home network, “It’s time that female politicians, in particular in America, Democrat politicians, stop this nonsense and stood up for women’s rights.”

As for Hobbs’s allegation that Riley was “speaking up for herself,” Gaines clarified, “I’m not speaking up for myself… I’m done playing sports. I’m not fighting for me. I’m actually supposed to be in dental school this year. But I’ve changed my life plans because I see what’s at stake if someone doesn’t fight for the present and next generation.”

Someone who’s obviously not fighting for present and future generations is President Joe Biden, who announced Monday that if Rep. Greg Steube’s (R-Fla.) girls’ sports bill makes it to his desk, he’d veto it. In the White House’s Statement of Administration Policy, the president’s team called the proposal “discriminatory.” Siding with the woke ideology that’s erasing women from fields, courts, and diamonds across America, the White House claimed, “Politicians should not dictate a one-size-fits-all requirement that forces coaches to remove kids from their teams.”

According to Family Research Council’s Meg Kilgannon, “one size fits all” is “a Biden administration specialty when it comes to the transgender agenda. They will sacrifice safety and fairness for women and girls to advance the cause of men/boys who think they are women/girls. This is a movement driven from the top down,” she told The Washington Stand, “and the Biden administration is doing its part to suppress opposition by threatening and bullying even Members of Congress.”

With a whopping 93 Republican co-sponsors, Steube is making it clear that Americans don’t share the Democrats’ extreme views. “This is an 80% issue,” the Florida congressman told “The Faulkner Focus.” And frankly, he said, “I think every American should know where their member of Congress sits on this issue.” Let’s not forget, Steube explained, “Title IX was created by Congress 50 years ago for women’s sports — to allow women to be able to compete with each other at collegiate levels and activities and sports. And this [would] completely [do] away with [that] … by allowing biological males to compete with women in women’s sports.”

And, as Steube reminded everyone, “The other piece of this, too, is having biological men that are identifying as women in girls’ bathrooms and girls’ locker rooms changing with them [and] all the things that come with that. The American people don’t support that.”

Neither, presumably, do a majority of the House, who will have an opportunity to vote on the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act later this week.

As for Gaines, she’ll continue to put her own safety at risk to stop an agenda that she calls “manipulative” and “violent.” “This whole movement,” she insisted, “it’s vengeful, it’s hateful. I’ve never seen a movement quite like this movement.” She should know after her April visit to San Francisco State University, a school she’s now suing after being attacked on campus and barricaded in a room after an angry mob chased her out of a discussion on Title IX and threatened her.

“I thought I knew what I was getting myself into when agreeing to speak at this university,” she wrote in a new op-ed, “but I was wrong. There was no way to prepare myself for what happened.”

“People always wonder why more women aren’t speaking up,” Gaines went on, “(especially the female athletes who have firsthand experience competing against a male). This is why,” she insists about her own horrifying experience.

Even so, Riley believes, “The protestors’ plan backfired on them. They intended to silence me, but they only gave me a larger platform. My social media following quadrupled, and the public support around the world to protect women’s sports and sex-based rights skyrocketed. The general public is now more eager to get involved in the fight than ever before.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Noem’s Pro-Trans Ties Spark Protests, 2024 Skepticism

Even the frigid temperatures couldn’t keep angry South Dakotans away. Despite the blistering, nine-degree cold, as many as 150 people gathered in the snow outside the 2023 Midwest Gender Identity Summit in Sioux Falls Friday morning to protest Sanford Health’s unwelcome presence in their state. Standing by snow drifts, with a long convoy of cars heading to join them, organizer Adam Broin insisted, “This is NOT South Dakota!” But according to a bombshell report by NRO reporter Nate Hochman, it may already be South Dakota, thanks to the transgender movement’s unlikely ally: Republican Governor Kristi Noem.

For Noem, who’s been trying to rehabilitate her image for 2024 after a series of conservative betrayals, the timing of Hochman’s piece couldn’t be worse. Two years removed from her shocking veto on a girls’ sports bill — and three from her behind-the-scenes death blow to a ban on child-mutilating surgery — Noem was hoping she could put the questions about her bona-fides behind her. Instead, she’s staring down another career-crushing controversy over her cozy relationship to one of the largest providers of puberty blockers and sex change surgeries in the Midwest.

Of course, the ties between Sanford Health and the state’s establishment Republicans haven’t exactly been a secret in South Dakota. What has come as a surprise is just how deep those political tentacles run — often, as Hochman points out, dictating policies at complete odds with the states’ social conservative roots.

“I think it’s impossible to understate or to overstate how powerful Sanford Health is in South Dakota,” Hochman told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch” Thursday. “It’s a $7.5 billion company.” They employ almost seven times more people than the second largest employer in South Dakota, he explained. “And they fund the campaigns of a lot of Republican leaders in the state, including a bunch of the Republicans who sit on the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, which is the committee that killed the bill” protecting minors from gender transition procedures.

As for Noem, Hochman explained, “She has a very close relationship with Sanford Health. It’s her top career donor.” In exchange, she’s bowed to their demands on LGBT issues, even when it’s in direct conflict with her state’s wishes or her party’s agenda. In a state where the number of self-identified conservatives outweigh liberals by more than 30 points, it’s not a place “where one would expect to find a major trade conference for transgender medical specialists,” he wrote.

But unfortunately, Sanford Health’s influence runs deep — so deep, the country learned in 2020, that Noem was willing to do their bidding on a profoundly popular policy to protect kids. At her behest, the bill’s sponsors said, the committee voted to sink a measure that would give teenagers and their families more time to weigh a decision that could destroy them forever. It’s a “pause button” on transgender surgery, Rep. Fred Deutsch (R) called it. “Nobody is saying that kids can’t pursue these treatments later on — but surely, we can all agree that children who can’t even drive shouldn’t be steering themselves into permanent medical procedures.” Despite having the committee majority, Republicans voted 5-2 to sink the only hope South Dakota parents had.

That was the first inkling that the “most conservative governor in the country,” as Noem likes to call herself, wasn’t as advertised. The second shoe dropped in 2021, when the fight to protect women’s sports started to break out in state legislatures. Buoyed by Idaho’s momentum, both chambers of the South Dakota legislature rushed a bill to the governor’s desk to make biology the determining factor of any athlete’s team.

It wasn’t a heavy lift. As Perkins pointed out, “Almost every state that’s even pink has embraced that.” Noem herself seemed to be on board with the idea at first, tweeting that she was “excited to sign this bill very soon.” Two weeks later, after meetings with left-wing activists (including, Hochman writes, Sanford Health), the governor abruptly changed her mind. On a Friday afternoon, to the astonishment of Americans everywhere, she announced she was vetoing HB 1217 — caving to the mob in spectacular fashion and reaping a whirlwind of backlash so intense that people wondered if her career would recover.

Noem went on a face-saving media tour to try to mitigate the damage, but it was too late. She was tagged as a phony, a squish, a sellout to the liberal interests of the state. Her cowardice was helpful in one way, conservatives would say later. More than a dozen leaders raced to sign sports bills into law, hoping to avoid the wrath the South Dakota governor endured for capitulating.

In the months since, Noem has tried to rebuild her status as a GOP firebrand — an effort that’s fizzled with every failed bill. As Hochman points out, “Conservative lawmakers have struggled to get any number of social-conservative bills, particularly as they pertain to transgender issues, across the finish line” — including more conscience rights for medical practitioners (HB 1247), a ban on sex change surgeries and drugs for children (HB 1057), a ban on changing South Dakotans’ sex on birth certificates (HB 1076), a requirement for teachers to inform parents if their child is struggling with gender identity issues (SB 88), a requirement that students use bathrooms and locker rooms that matches their biology (HB 1005), and the establishment of the “fundamental” parental right “to make decisions concerning the upbringing, education and care of a child” (HB 1246). As of February 2021, there had also been seven failed attempts to protect women’s sports, according to the ACLU.

By all rights, South Dakota has become a state where conservative bills go to die. That’s been incredibly frustrating to the state’s grassroots organizations. Norman Woods, director of South Dakota’s Family Heritage Alliance, told Hochman, “We see [Sanford] attack good social conservative ideas all the time.”

It’s no wonder, Hochman told Perkins, since plenty of Sanford Health employees are either South Dakota legislators themselves or lobbyists — or both. “One thing that I found through a lot of digging through old … legislative hearing files is that Sanford lobbyists show up often, literally in lab coats, to effectively lobby against a lot of these bills that are on the record as testifying and lobbying against things like the ban on the chemical castration of children. And they’ve lobbied against a variety of other social conservative bills, almost all of which have died.”

Sounds like “an enormous conflict of interest,” Perkins shook his head. “And did they recuse themselves,” Perkins asked, “from voting on issues of interest to Sanford?” “Not only do they not recuse themselves,” Hochman replied, “but they actually actively champion the efforts to kill a lot of these bills.”

Meanwhile, for Woods, Noem’s alliance with the far-Left is personal. After South Dakota State University hosted a “kid-friendly” drag show on state property, he dashed off a December 20 letter to the governor, urging her to act.

“Considering you have the power to hold the South Dakota Board of Regents accountable and fire at will, I am greatly disappointed you and your administration have taken no action to rectify this situation or to ensure that drag shows for children never happen again on South Dakota soil. The only answer we have seen from your office is for South Dakotans to reach out to the Attorney General. Our children deserve our protection, and as Governor, you have not only the duty, but the responsibility to act.”

Noem flew into a rage, publicly calling for Woods’s head if the Family Heritage Alliance ever wanted to work with her again. The disproportional response to Woods’s run-of-the-mill call to action was a stunning, over-the-top display.

“I am disappointed in Mr. Woods’ decision to attack me publicly by sending this letter out of the blue and releasing it to the media at the same time, instead of reaching out to my office to have a productive conversation about how we can work together. This behavior is both counterproductive and unbecoming of the executive director of your organization, but unfortunately, it has become a pattern in recent years,” Noem wrote.

“As a result, my office will no longer work with the Alliance until and unless its executive director chooses to act professionally.” She goes on to claim that she shares the Alliance’s goals of “faith, family, and freedom” (despite a checkered record to that effect) and expresses “disappoint[ment]” that the Alliance’s Woods “has made it impossible for us to work together to accomplish our shared goals.”

“I’d encourage the Family Heritage Alliance to evaluate the purpose of your organization. Is it to promote family values—or is it to attack the most conservative governor in the country? I believe it is the former and urge you to focus your efforts on bringing our shared pro-family message to the people of South Dakota. I suggest you find an executive director who agrees.”

Shocked, Woods told reporters, “As an organization exclusively lobbying on behalf of South Dakota families, we naïvely thought we could engage America’s ‘most conservative governor’ (her words) in an effort to put an end to the explicit sexualization of children on our public university campuses. Sadly, she misconstrued our efforts. Regardless, just like Protecting South Dakota Kids was successful this fall, so will we be when it comes to putting an end to these grooming events.”

As for the governor’s insistence that the Alliance should have reached out to her privately, conservative organizations understand firsthand how futile that would have been. At the height of the debate over gender transitions for minors in 2020, Family Research Council’s Perkins requested a phone call with Noem to discuss the bill. In a letter obtained by The Washington Stand, FRC’s president outlined the urgency of the conversation, writing, “I would love to talk to you as soon as possible, to alleviate any concerns you may have about this bill and to receive your assurance that you will do everything possible to protect vulnerable children in South Dakota.”

The governor never responded, despite a follow-up call to then-General Counsel Tom Hart. The only time she did reach out to FRC, ironically, was a year later when she needed help cleaning up the PR mess of her girls’ sports veto.

Unfortunately, Noem’s vindictive streak toward Woods won’t come as a surprise to the state’s conservatives, many of whom found themselves primaried in 2022 for upholding true South Dakota values. The Blaze’s Daniel Horowitz was “shocked” to discover that the governor was “declar[ing] war” on social conservatives like Fred Deutsch, who wrote the child protection bill. Together with Sanford Health, who Hochman explained had “dumped a really significant amount of money into efforts to [unseat] all of the conservatives … who got in their way,” Noem began openly campaigning against several solid Republicans in the midterms.

“All of the people on her target list are true Christian conservatives, and those are the people she wants gone,” Rep. Rhonda Milstead, the lead sponsor of the girls’ sports bill told The Blaze. Noem aligned with “liberal leader of the Senate,” Republican legislators warned, working to purge incumbents with a 90%+ rating from the Family Heritage Alliance.

Less than two months later, the same governor was on Fox News, angling for a spot on the 2024 ticket and insisting her state is “thriving because we put forward and put in place conservative policies.” If those “conservative policies” include rolling out the red carpet to dangerous transgender extremism, count voters out. As Hochman explained to Perkins, he’s been “inundated” with emails and messages from South Dakotans saying they had no idea this was happening in their state — and they’re appalled.

“You know, South Dakotans are a good, solid conservative people. This does not represent their interests or their views, but … a lot of it has been sort of happening under clandestine circumstances. And the Republicans who lead the state aren’t broadcasting that. … The average South Dakotan often isn’t aware. And I think they would be horrified — and they are horrified — when they find out that it is.”

Broin, who organized the event outside of Sanford’s transgender conference Friday, talked about the passion of the protestors who showed up “at the crack of dawn,” shoveling the snow-covered sidewalks outside the event to make room for more. “A lot — a lot — of people want to stand up [to this agenda],” he told “Washington Watch” guest host Jody Hice, including freshman state Representative John Sjaarda (R), who joined the crowd.

“We wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing as a group if the political folks of South Dakota would truly represent the people,” Broin said. “But unfortunately, even though there’s great people in our in our state … [who] say a lot of really nice things, the most important conservative legislation seems to always fall through the cracks, not make it through committee, get vetoed for mysterious reasons …”

That’s why, he believes, more groups are springing up to fight the “secrecy” and duplicity of the state’s Republican leaders. “With everything in the national media,” Broin said, “we’ve really started to pay attention and realize that our party isn’t doing what they should be doing. … [W]e are pushing back” on anyone urging the GOP to “cleave itself from grassroots engagement,” he insisted. “And hopefully, we can get our party to represent the third most conservative voting population in the nation.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.