Shutting down women

It doesn’t seem to matter to those in power in Democrat-controlled states that most Americans—even some Democrats—are against letting male athletes compete against girls and women in sports.

Anyone who dares speak out against the inclusion of so-called “transgender” athletes in those states faces punishment.

Exhibit A: Frances Staudt, a sophomore guard/forward for the girls’ basketball team at Tumwater (Wash.) High. Staudt declined to play in a February game against league rival Shelton, whose roster included a male player, Andi Rooks, due to concerns about injury.

Refusing to play against a male opponent would be bad enough to most leftists. However, Staudt committed an arguably worse sin: She openly and unabashedly engaged in a so-called “misgendering” to Rooks’ face.

“I looked over and said, ‘You are a man,’ because that is my First Amendment right,” Staudt told Seattle TV station KOMO.

What did Staudt get for standing up? When she brought her concerns to Tumwater principal Zach Suderman and athletic director Jordan Magrath, it was she who got investigated for harassment. And the Washington Interscholastic Athletic Association sent Staudt a letter saying her actions had violated WIAA policy and threatening discipline if she dared speak up again.

Fortunately for Staudt, her story had a happy ending: Tumwater’s school board passed a resolution saying it would no longer require sports teams to allow athletes to compete based on their self-proclaimed gender identity, thereby complying with President Trump’s executive order on the matter.

Now, Exhibit B: Laurel Libby, a Republican lawmaker in Maine. After Katie (formerly John) Spencer of Greely High captured a state pole vault crown at Maine’s small-school indoor track and field championships—just two years after placing fifth at the state boys meet—Libby spoke out against Spencer’s dubious title on Facebook.

Last I checked—and I’m a lawyer who practices constitutional law—the First Amendment protects legislators’ right to speak openly on issues of public concern. It’s part of their job description, in fact. Yet that didn’t stop Maine’s Democrat-controlled legislature from censuring her. For more than a month now, Libby has been unable to vote on bills or speak on the floor of Maine’s House of Representatives until she issues a public apology—which she rightly refuses to do.

Libby’s actions prompted a confrontation between Trump and Maine Gov. Janet Mills, who vowed to defy Trump’s threat to pull federal funding from states that continue to allow boys who claim to be girls to displace actual girls in girls’ sports.

This brings me to Exhibit C: Melissa Batie-Smoose, an assistant women’s volleyball coach at San Jose State University in California. The school suspended her in November for filing a complaint with OCR about the favorable treatment given to Blair (formerly Brayden) Fleming, the male athlete whose presence on the court prompted multiple Mountain West Conference schools to forfeit matches against SJSU.

San Jose State’s website no longer lists Batie-Smoose as an assistant coach for the Spartans. Whether the coach was fired, resigned, or simply remains suspended indefinitely is unclear. What does seem sufficiently clear is that in über-liberal California, refusing to let male athletes who want to compete in women’s sports have their way simply will not be tolerated.

All of this, sadly, is par for the course. Ask former University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines, who spent several hours locked in a classroom at San Francisco State University while police begrudgingly protected her from an angry pro-LGBT mob. Ask Paula Scanlan, the former University of Pennsylvania swimmer who now speaks out about the emotional blackmail to which her Ivy League school subjected her after allowing Lia (formerly Will) Thomas to go from mediocre male swimmer to NCAA women’s champion. Ask the West Virginia middle-school shot putters who refused to compete at their county’s track and field championships, then had to go to court to win back their right to compete in future interscholastic competitions—all because they refused to participate in the farce of coming in second at best to a boy who calls himself Becky.

But there’s reason for hope.

The U.S. Department of Education is investigating the Tumwater School District, the Maine Department of Education, and SJSU for alleged Title IX violations. That would never have happened under former President Biden—and certainly not under a Kamala Harris administration. When not a single Democrat in the U.S. Senate voted in favor of a bill that would have kept interscholastic sports rightly segregated by sex, it was a public relations disaster.

Many of those same Democrats only made it worse at President Trump’s address to Congress in early March: They showed up wearing pink, claiming it was a show of support for women’s rights, to which Trump is supposedly a threat. They then sat silently and petulantly as Trump honored Payton McNabb, the former North Carolina high school volleyball player who became an advocate for fellow female athletes after a male opponent spiked a ball off her face, causing permanent injuries.

The pro-LGBTQ left appears to be losing this argument. But celebrating its defeat, which appears imminent, would be premature. Only when female athletes and their advocates can speak out against competing against boys without fear of punishment can the celebrating truly begin.