The rules and standards of athletic competition were established to prevent athletes and teams from having a competitive advantage over their opponents by creating “a level playing field.” Consider:
• Athletes are prevented from completing in the Olympic games and other sports if they test positive for “performance enhancing drugs,” such as steroids.
• Youth sports teams and leagues are age bracketed to prevent the competitive advantage of older youths competing against younger ones.
• Boxing and wrestling use weight brackets to prevent the competitive advantage heavier and often larger athletes have over lighter and mostly smaller athletes.
• The PGA has a separate Senior Tour to avoid the competitive advantages younger and stronger golfers would have over their older counterparts.
• Youth, high school, college, and professional sports teams are based on physical gender of either male or female athletes - boys or girls, men or women.
These are just a few of the protocols used to “level the playing field.”
Since it is irrefutable that biological adult males are stronger, faster, and generally larger the biological adult females, it is axiomatic that transgender females have a decided competitive advantage in female athletic competitions. The classic recent example of this Lia Thomas, a 6’ 4” transgender female swimmer for the University of Pennsylvania. Thomas swam as a male during his first three years at the university. He competed as a transgender female last year and won the NCAA Division I national championship in his event, setting the national record for women. Placing second was Riley Gaines, a 5’ 7”, 12 time All-American with 5 SEC titles for the University of Kentucky. Adding insult to injury of his stolen victory, Thomas exposed his still intact male genitalia to the other female swimmers in their locker room. Since then, she has spoken out on multiple occasions about the injustice of transgender females competing against biological females. Riley was recently assaulted by transgender activists while speaking at San Francisco State University after she pointed out the hypocrisy of ardent feminists Megan Rapino and Billie Jean King for supporting transgender females in contradiction to their long standing staunch support for female athletes.
Apparently lacking in comprehensive critical thinking and succumbing to a vocal activist minority, President Joe Biden is rolling out new Title IX rules to extend the meaning of sexual discrimination to include gender identity that would prevent schools and colleges from banning transgender athletes. The Consent Decree to Title IX was adopted several years ago by colleges and universities to give female athletes the opportunity to compete in the same number of sports as their male student athletes based on the proportionality of the female enrollment in those institutions. The Consent Decree was never intended nor considered the competitive advantage a transgender female athlete would have over a biological female athlete. Codifying the proposed rules change is insidious in nature certain to be fraught with endless controversy and legal challenges. In short, it stinks! If this rule is passed, then Lia Thomas’s record and those of other transgender females should be noted with an asterisk.
It is appalling to see the continuing devolution of our society extend itself to female sports. How sadly unfair for those young girls and their parents for the countless hours they spend in training and practice to become the best they can be only to be robbed of their hard earned victories by transgender females because of their biological competitive advantage. It is time to stop this insanity now!
Angelo Haddad is a lifelong resident of Bakersfield, a retired Commander in the Coast Guard Reserve, Bakersfield Colleges’ first women’s soccer coach, and a lay minister at Trinity Anglican Church.