‘I think it’s incredibly unfair,’ said Payton McNabb, a high-school volleyball player who was injured while playing against a male athlete.
The Biden administration’s proposed rules governing transgender participation in collegiate sports entirely undermines the spirit of Title IX and threatens to roll back the tremendous progress the U.S. has made in promoting female athletics in recent decades, according to a new report drafted by the Independent Women’s Forum.
The second edition of the 2021 report, Competition: Title IX, Male-Bodied Athletes, and the Threat to Women’s Sports, obtained by National Review, examines the legal underpinnings and likely effects of two proposed Department of Education rules and finds that they constitute an all-out assault on Title IX, which bans sex discrimination in federally funded institutions and therefore requires colleges to spend equally on men’s and women’s sports.
In June 2022, the DOE proposed an expansion of Title IX’s prohibitions on sex discrimination to include gender identity, requiring schools to allow men to participate in female sports if doing so is consistent with their professed gender identity. In April 2023, the DOE proposed a more specific rule demanding schools allow trans athletes to join teams of their preferred gender, placing the burden on the schools to prove that allowing male participation would be unsafe as a prerequisite to preserving sex-segregation.
“By allowing biological males to join women’s teams, the proposed rules undermine Title IX’s equal opportunity mandate. Every time that a biological male is selected for a women’s team, a female athlete loses that spot,” the report reads. “When a biological male takes the field in a women’s game, a female athlete loses playing time. In each instance, the coach and the school that have allowed this to occur have denied a female student an athletic opportunity. And in each instance, the school is authorizing sex discrimination that violates Title IX, regardless of the new proposed rules, which cannot change the dictates of that law.”
The rules threaten to reverse the explosion in female athletic participation that followed the passage of Title IX in 1972, the report states. Prior to Title IX’s passage, fewer than 5 percent of high-school girls played sports. That number rose to 43 percent by 2019. College athletic participation, college scholarships, and Olympic participation have followed a similar trajectory.
“I think it’s incredibly unfair that girls and women have worked so hard to even be able to play and now everything’s going in reverse,” said Payton McNabb, a female North Carolina high-school volleyball player who was injured by a ball spiked by a transgender athlete. “They passed Title IX to expand opportunities for women and now they’re getting taken away.”
McNabb, a senior at Hiwassee Dam High School and now a spokeswoman for IWF, said that her school has been very supportive after the incident. “All of my teachers are very proud of me,” she said.
After McNabb got hurt, the county wouldn’t let any of the schools in its jurisdiction compete against the team with the male athlete from Highlands High School, she said. In April, McNabb testified to the North Carolina legislature that she has lingering injuries from the incident. She said she got a concussion from the impact, and is still experiencing impaired vision, partial paralysis on one side of her body, anxiety, and depression.
Female players from other schools who faced the same male athlete in games reached out to McNabb in solidarity, she said.
“They were expressing how scared they were,” she said.
McNabb said she originally contemplated playing volleyball at the collegiate level, but “physically I can’t get back into it the way I was, so I’m not doing it anymore.”
Riley Gaines, the female former University of Kentucky swimmer who tied with biological male Lia Thomas in the 200-yard freestyle event at the 2022 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championship, told National Review that transgender interference in women’s sports is happening “at all levels, ranging from elementary school through college to masters’ sports and older divisions.” Gaines is now an advisor at Independent Women’s Voice.
After speaking at a California university in April about her experience, Gaines was assaulted and held against her will for three hours by transgender-rights activists, who demanded a ransom for her release.
Most of the bodies governing K–12, collegiate, and professional sports have not taken a common-sense approach to the transgender-participation issue, McNabb said.
Those organizations “are so focused on being inclusive that they’re excluding all of the women,” McNabb said. “We look towards the adults in the room to protect us and they’re just not because they’re afraid of being called names.”
While the NCAA and the governing bodies for each sport (i.e., USA Swimming, US Rowing, etc.) are not technically covered by Title IX because they don’t receive federal funding, colleges with athletic programs that are members of the NCAA are subject to Title IX, and therefore must comply with the law, the report notes. Therefore, when it allowed Thomas to compete against Gaines and other female athletes, who’ve worked their entire lives to earn a trophy at the tournament, the NCAA “directly violated a federal law,” Gaines said.
Thomas’s participation was blatantly unfair to her and her teammates, Gaines said, but “what I think the NCAA is going to do about it is nothing.”
Most sport-specific governing bodies either have no official position or requirements for trans-identifying athletes, require declaration of gender identity, or mandate that males’ testosterone levels be lowered in order to join the women’s category, the report adds.
In February 2022, USA Swimming issued a policy requiring trans-identified biological males to lower their testosterone levels to five nanomoles per liter or less for at least 36 months. However, this level is not within average female range. The normal 95 percent reference range for healthy menstruating women under 40 years of age is 0 to 1.7 nanomoles per liter, according to a 2018 scientific study.
The study’s author, David Handelsman, found that males have profound athletic advantages over females. After puberty, men produce 20 times more testosterone than women and have “15- to 20-fold greater circulating testosterone than children or women at any age,” Handelsman found. Increased levels of circulating hemoglobin allow males to transport oxygen from lungs to tissues much more efficiently, which improves aerobic energy expenditure, he also discovered. Men have “longer, denser, and stronger bones” than women, he wrote, providing “leverage for muscular limb power exerted in jumping, throwing, [and] other explosive power activities.”
In her recent book T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us, Harvard University evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven wrote that it is not possible to reverse these advantages by artificially suppressing testosterone.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that men do not shed their unique agility and strength after reducing their testosterone levels, the NCAA said in January 2022 that it will defer to the various individual sports’ governing bodies rather than develop its own policy on trans inclusion.
“I think they want no accountability,” Gaines said. “I think it’s because they know it’s wrong. They know it could be liable for an injury or sexual harassment in the locker room or a lawsuit.”
June 23 marks the 51st anniversary of Title IX.
“In my grandma’s lifetime, she saw the benefits of Title IX and now she’s seeing those entirely being taken away,” Gaines said. “I think that people forget that women were once historically oppressed not that long ago. Now we’re at this point, especially in sports, where we’ve made such great strides in terms of equal opportunity and equal access. . . . Now that’s being entirely undermined by the party that once fought for this.”