Men are stronger than women. Boys are faster than girls. An influx of hormones doesn’t undo these realities.
Study after study has reaffirmed this basic fact about what it means to be human. Most recently, Swedish scientists followed 11 biological men whose testosterone was dramatically decreased due to cross-sex hormone treatments over a year.
Even when the men’s testosterone levels matched that of biological women, the men’s competitive advantages remained almost fully intact, with muscle size and bone density remaining virtually unchanged in some and decreasing only 5 percent in others.
While such studies are crucial evidence in the debate over biologically male athletes competing in girls’ sports, I don’t need to list all of them here. You can Google that yourself. But you can’t Google my front-row seat as a mother of a high-school athlete who has been beaten out by a biological male athlete who identifies as a female — one who hasn’t undergone hormone therapy or gender-reassignment surgery and who competed a year earlier as a male.
My daughter, Alanna, now a sophomore, is a rising star in our home state of Connecticut. As a freshman, she led her high-school team to its third straight team championship in the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference by winning the 100-meter, 200-meter and 400-meter in one of the most dominant individual performances in meet history. She was an integral component in the team’s first-place finish in the State Open and in smashing a pair of records at the New England championships in Maine.
Alanna has devoted countless days, nights and weekends to training. She pushes herself to shave mere fractions of a second from her race times, yet she positions herself at the starting line knowing that, even with all that training and with her best effort, the odds are against her, the numbers are against her and that fairness doesn’t really exist.
Since 2017, our state’s high-school athletic conference has allowed biological boys to compete against girls. It’s enough that they subjectively identify as female. Since then, two biological boys have won 15 women’s track championships, titles held by nine different girls in 2016.
Not only that, the same two biological boys have taken away more than 50 chances for girls to compete at the next level of competition, running these girls right off the track and forcing them to be spectators in their own sport.
As a parent, it is gut-wrenching to know that no matter how hard my daughter works to achieve her goals, she will lose athletic opportunities to a pernicious gender ideology. Left unchecked, this ideology will in the long run eliminate fair play for all biological females in all sports. As we are seeing in Connecticut, a biological boy’s subjective sense of his gender doesn’t cancel out his physical advantage over girls.
Lest I be assailed by the PC crowd: This has nothing to do with “white privilege.” My daughter is a beautiful young woman of color. Nor is it about lifestyle — I believe love is love. It is about fairness of play, about women not being spectators in their own sports, about a level playing field.
Our daughters deserve better than to have their athletic opportunities stolen from them. My daughter deserves to compete, to achieve, to earn the opportunity to advance to the next level of competition, to earn a college scholarship and to enter into adulthood with all the confidence of a fierce, proven champion — a champion who knows she won fairly.
No biological male should take those opportunities from my daughter, regardless of how he self-identifies. Redefining “sex” to mean “gender identity” — as our state’s athletic conference has done, as what the ACLU is trying to do at the Supreme Court and as the so-called “Equality Act” in Congress would do — destroys female athletics.
That’s why Alanna and a small but steadily growing number of courageous young women have stepped forward and publicly called upon the federal government to restore the fair playing field they deserve. It’s why more than 30,000 Americans have signed the #FairPlay petition — to keep all girls like Alanna from ending up on the sidelines of their own sports.
This is not a battle I sought. I would rather the contest take place on the track. But when my daughter’s dreams are at stake, I can no longer stay silent. And neither should you.
Cheryl Radachowsky is the mother of Alanna Smith, a Connecticut high-school female athlete and complainant in an ongoing Title IX investigation with the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.