A mother's plea over transgender athletes

There was a rather heartbreaking op-ed in the New York Post on Sunday that’s probably worth your time to read. It was written by Cheryl Radachowsky, a Connecticut mother of a daughter, Alanna Smith, who is a rising star in high school track and field competition, particularly the 100, 200 and 400-meter sprinting events. But like too many parents of promising young female athletes, she is watching her daughter’s collegiate dreams be derailed by a pair of boys who “identify” as girls, though they have never had hormone therapy or surgery.

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Cheryl first goes through all of the studies that have been done saying that no amount of hormone therapy or other “corrections” fully remove the inherent advantage males have over females in competitive sports. From there, the emotional overload is on display.

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…

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.

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We’ve discussed those two male athletes here before. For the past two years they were wiping out the field in girls track and field meets in Connecticut. It’s a disgrace and something that’s having a real-world impact on actual girls across the state, robbing them of chances at scholarships that could lead to acceptance in better colleges.

It’s not easy to stand up publicly against the social justice warriors and the collective madness that has seized the modern American liberal movement. Cheryl and the rest of the parents signing a massive petition demanding fair play in women’s sports will likely be pilloried or doxed in their own communities by the LGBT mobs. But what they are standing up for is important.

As Cheryl points out, efforts to redefine sex to mean “gender identity” as is being done at both the state and federal levels is madness. And if Democrats in Congress win back total control and pass the so-called “Equality Act,” this insanity will be enshrined in federal law. It will also essentially mean the end of competitive women’s sports in America.

I’ll close with one more quote from Cheryl. And everyone who is still on board with having boys competing in girls’ sports should really take this to heart.

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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.

Well said, Cheryl. And I hope there’s still time to derail this train before it drags everyone off a cliff.

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Jazz Shaw 7:20 PM | March 18, 2024
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