Will Gender Identity Ruin Women’s Sports?

Gender identity is the personal sense of one's own gender. Gender identity can correlate with assigned sex at birth or can differ from it. (Wikipedia)

For fifteen years of my career in education, I coached girls’ sports. At various times and at various Texas high schools, I coached cross-country, volleyball, basketball, track, and tennis. Although I had not set out to coach girls, I took the first position I was offered and thanked God I had a job! Once I got started, I loved (almost) every minute of it.

When I first began (in the 80s), most of the young women I coached were decidedly less athletic than their male counterparts. Over the following years, I watched as they caught up. Granted there are still some small schools with poorly trained and coached athletes, but anyone watching women’s sports these days will find just how athletic the female can be. They are stronger, faster, and more highly skilled than the ladies I coached long ago, and they are a joy to watch.

Because of my love and admiration for female athletes, I have watched in wonder and horror as changes in society have had profound effects on women’s athletics. Title IX changed the face of sports for women. The feminist movement has empowered young women across our country. But now, the transgender movement, and Liberal politicians and their agendas are threatening to destroy all that has been built over the years. Recent legislation threatens to hasten the process. (Here’s a good article about the so-called Equality Act: https://reason.com/2019/05/16/equality-act-vote-in-house/)

Let me say up front, I am not in favor of discrimination. The problem with this act is that by expanding the definition of sex to include sexual orientation and gender identity, we are opening a Pandora’s box of epic proportions. (Gender identity is not just a slippery slope, it’s a whole damn mountain crashing down upon us!) I will ignore the tremendous political and societal impact for the time being and focus on just the effect such legislation will have on the future of women’s sports.

First, let’s take a moment to consider a few examples of transgender athletes in the news recently and how they have dominated their female competition. In Connecticut, the state track meet was hijacked by a couple of biological males who dominated the sprints. True female athletes had to be content with third place and down. https://pjmedia.com/trending/again-transgender-athletes-dominate-at-connecticut-girls-track-state-meet/

In Texas, a girl’s state championship in wrestling went to a transgender athlete for the second consecutive year. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2018/02/25/transgender-wrestler-mack-beggs-wins-second-texas-state-girls-championship/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.1068441eebec

And who would not be shocked by the devastating knockout suffered by the female athlete who had to face a biological male in the MMA ring? https://bjj-world.com/transgender-mma-fighter-fallon-fox-breaks-skull-of-her-female-opponent/

(As a conservative Christian, I have a definite opinion of the transgender movement. Without going into specifics, I will simply say that I have many problems with their beliefs. I am not trying in any way to impose my beliefs on others, but rather sharing my opinion on the impact on women’s sports. Allowing males, biological or otherwise, to compete against females will never be fair. At the risk of sounding very politically incorrect, there are profound physical differences in males and females. The best female athletes I ever coached could have competed against their male contemporaries, but they were the rare exceptions. The average female athlete will always be at a disadvantage when forced to compete against male athletes, regardless of the labels they wear.)

But the transgender athlete is just the tip of the iceberg. The biggest issue at the moment is that by protecting everyone under the banner of gender identity, many are at the point of seriously considering granting anyone the right to compete based entirely on their own preference. By that logic, any man who chooses to self-identify as a woman will be free to jump onto the track or field or into the ring and dominate the female competitors. Are we seriously willing to allow this to happen? Where are all the feminists who have fought for so many years to protect the rights of women? Have those rights now disappeared in order to satisfy the demands of those who claim gender is fluid and anyone can be anything they want if they just wish it so?

Of course, several well known female athletes including Martina Navratilova have spoken out only to be vilified by the Left. I’m not a big fan of Piers Morgan, but let me share a clip in which he clearly points out the potential problems we can anticipate if we don’t put an end to this nonsense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I75kfAVF64A

In conclusion, I will admit, I don’t have all the answers to the problem. I do have some opinions. The strongest one is simple – let’s do all we can to preserve women’s sports and keep them pure. I don’t really know where all those other non-biological female athletes will have to go to compete, but let’s keep them out of women’s competitions or simply put, those sports will cease to exist. And that would be a tremendous loss.