A group of high-profile women athletes and women’s sports advocates is taking on the contentious issue of transgender girls and women in sports by proposing federal legislation to exempt girls’ and women’s competitive sports from President Joe Biden’s recent executive order that mandates blanket inclusion for all transgender female athletes.
In the Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation, signed on Inauguration Day, the Biden administration said that any school that receives federal funding must allow biological boys who self-identify as girls onto girls’ sports teams or face action from the federal government.
In the Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation, signed on Inauguration Day, the Biden administration said that any school that receives federal funding must allow biological boys who self-identify as girls onto girls’ sports teams or face action from the federal government.
But the group of women’s sports leaders, including tennis legend Martina Navratilova, several Olympic gold medalists and five former presidents of the Women’s Sports Foundation, is asking Congress and the Biden administration to limit the participation of transgender girls and women who “have experienced all or part of male puberty (which is the scientific justification for separate sex sport),” while accommodating and honoring their sports participation in other ways. Options could include separate heats, additional events or divisions and/or the handicapping of results.
“We fully support the Biden executive order, ending LGBT discrimination throughout society, including employment, banking, family law and public accommodations,” Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a Title IX attorney and one of the leaders of the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, told USA TODAY Sports in an exclusive interview. “Competitive sports, however, are akin to pregnancy and medical testing; these areas require a science-based approach to trans inclusion. Our aim has been on protecting the girls’ and women’s competitive categories, while crafting accommodations for trans athletes into sport wherever possible.
“While the details of President Biden’s executive order remain fuzzy, asking women — no, requiring them — to give up their hard-won rights to compete and be recognized in elite sport, with equal opportunities, scholarships, prize money, publicity, honor and respect, does the cause of transgender inclusion no favors,” Hogshead-Makar said. “It engenders justifiable resentment, setting back the cause of equality throughout society. And either extreme position – full inclusion or full exclusion in sport – will make life much harder for transgender people. We must make sport a welcoming place for all.”
While the controversy over transgender girls and women in sports is not new, the issue bubbled to the surface in the United States a few years ago when two transgender girls were allowed to compete in state track and field meets in Connecticut, winning a combined 15 girls' state indoor and outdoor championship races from 2017-19 and highlighting the piecemeal nature of state laws governing the issue.
According to the working group, 10 states require males and females to participate in high school sports according to their birth sex, thereby prohibiting participation in girls’ sports by transgender girls, whether or not they have begun male puberty or have had hormone therapy.
Seventeen states and the District of Columbia require the inclusion of trans girls in girls' sports without regard to the extent to which they may retain the male-linked physical traits that otherwise justify excluding males from female sports on competitive fairness and safety grounds.
