One of President Joe Biden’s first acts as President was to issue an executive order characterized as combating discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Biden’s order mandates that any school that receives federal funding must treat biological males who claim to be female the same as females.
“Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports,” the order reads.
Male athletes who claim to be females must now be allowed to compete on women’s teams, receive women’s scholarships, and use girls’ or women’s locker rooms and bathrooms. Biden promised a radical transgender agenda while campaigning, supported by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Shumer (D-NY), The Federalist reports.
Female athletes interviewed by Budget and Tax News expressed concern that the inclusion of biological males will result in the demise of biological girls’ participation in athletics altogether, leaving only all-boys teams and co-ed teams. Girls will have lost all the opportunities female athletes had achieved under Title IX.
“It just makes me mad,” former athlete Terri Cline told Budget and Tax News. “It’s taken just about the entirety of my lifetime for girls to finally get involved in sports and feel encouraged to do so. There weren’t a whole lot of girls’ teams when I first started playing.”
Terri played volleyball and softball in junior high and high school, and basketball in junior high.
“It taught me confidence, perseverance, team spirit, and working together as separate parts for the greater good,” Cline said. “Just about every good memory I have involves sports.”
“Imagine how intimidated girls already are to try out for a sport, and now you tell them they are trying out against guys?” Cline said. “Why would girls compete to be second?”
Terri’s husband, Allen Cline, says the new policy changes the atmosphere of athletics and school in general, opening up a lot of other problems for kids.
“Boys just have a strength advantage,” Cline said. “It’s just going to be unfair. This [the Biden executive order] ruins it for everyone. It’s more about politics than sports.”
Patricia Dyrhaug was a three-sport athlete through junior high and high school, culminating in a full ride college scholarship to play basketball. She now coaches girls’ basketball and softball.
“We made all this progress, and now we are taking away opportunities for women,” Dyrhaug said. “It’s not fair to girls. In an attempt to create equality, you are actually causing more inequality for girls.”
The competitive advantage that boys have with greater average physical strength and height is particularly evident on the basketball court, says Dyrhaug.
“Our varsity girls basketball team would play practice games against the freshman boys to improve our skills,” Dyrhaug. “It helped us get better, but we didn’t stand a chance of winning.”
Amy Jacobson played high school volleyball and basketball and now coaches a girls’ volleyball team and a boys’ volleyball team. She would not have played under the Biden rules, she says.
“I would never have even tried out,” Jacobson said. “I would not have felt comfortable trying out with boys, especially at that age. Physically, you just know you are not as strong.”
The effects were already starting to be felt before Biden made the policy mandatory nationwide. Jacobson recently brought her junior high girls volleyball team to a championship game where the opposing team included two biological males.
“One was over six feet tall and he was playing at the net against much shorter players,” Jacobson said. “It was scary. The girls were brave. They played fearlessly, but it was a safety issue for my team. For the other team, I felt bad for those girls that got robbed of their time to play because the boys dominated. We worked so hard to get to the championship, and so did those other girls.”
In Congress, Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL) reintroduced the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act in response to Biden’s executive order, the Federalist reports. Steube says federal law requires schools to recognize biological genetics in categorizing athletic competitions by sex.
“Title IX was set out specifically to protect women and protect women’s sports,” Steube told The Federalist. Biden’s order “completely eviscerates the gains that women have had in sports by allowing that to happen.”
In addition to the opportunities for scholarships, trophies, awards, and camaraderie, girls are losing all the self-esteem gains that go with participation in sports, writes author Abigail Shrier for The Wall Street Journal.
“It isn’t even all the benefits sports have so long provided to young women—in self-esteem and health and camaraderie with friends,” Shrier writes. “It’s the profound and glaring injustice of it: the spectacular records and achievements that Jackie Joyner, Althea Gibson and Wilma Rudolph would never have achieved had the world pitted their bodies against men,”
Biden’s executive order places the value of boys above that of girls, says Cline.
“Women are very capable,” Terri Cline said. “We just don’t have the bodies that men have. God didn’t make us the same.”