Correcting the record books

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Thursday, the 24th of July.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Up first, the ongoing fight to restore fairness to female sports.

In recent weeks the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee updated its Athlete Safety policyto align with President Trump’s Executive Order barring men from competing in women’s sports.

TRUMP: I wanna make this a really good signature cause you know this is a big one right?

BROWN: That’s a big shift for the nearly 50 national sports governing bodies under the USOPC. They’ll have to comply as well. USA Swimming is reviewing what changes it may need to make. And USA Fencing already started; in August, its new policy is set to go into effect, allowing only females to compete in the women’s category. Everyone else will compete in the men’s category.
The change by the Olympic committee could trickle down from the elite level to local sports clubs.

REICHARD: And there is more. This week, Attorneys General from 27 states sent a letter to the NCAA, urging the collegiate sports body to reverse course. They want championships, titles, awards, and records returned to women who lost them to men.

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost was one of those who signed the letter. WORLD’s Lindsay Mast talked to him yesterday about what it’s asking of the NCAA.

LINDSAY MAST: Attorney General Yost, thanks so much for being with us.

DAVE YOST: It’s good to be with you.

MAST: Walk us through what the letter is requesting of the NCAA. What would be the ideal outcome of this letter?

YOST: Well, sure. During the somewhat chaotic years that we just came through, there were a number of female athletes who competed and placed just out of the medals or were displaced from a championship and competed against a biological male who had, you know, just candidly different, a different body type and, and was superior strength. So we think that, particularly after the Skrmetti decision, which was not on point, but kind of affirming that gender preferences are not really constitutionally required at the very least, it's the right thing to do to go back and make this right if the winning woman in a female sport ought to have the medal or the title.

MAST: What’s the relationship between the letter and Title IX protections for athletes?

YOST: Yeah, back in the bad old days before you were born, men had the ability to do sports and it taught them competition and resilience and tenacity and leadership and all these kinds of things and forged, you know, important relationships that have survived the school years and helped them later in life. Women had no such opportunities and title nine was designed to make sure that if a school is providing sports, it provided for boys and girls because both of them are equally going to benefit from the lessons and the experiences of sports. But in order to do that and have meaningful competition, you have to segregate the sexes. There's a reason there's a WNBA. Caitlin Clark is an amazing athlete. She would not want to post up against LeBron James. So the Title IX stands for the proposition that women get equal opportunities in sports. When those lines started getting blurred, those guarantees and statutes started meaning less and less. And you have somebody like Riley Gaines who is, you know, a champion and is displaced by Lia Thomas, a biological male. Things are starting to be upside down. So our letter is to say, let's turn it back right side up and recognize that this experiment just did not end well.

MAST: How does the restoration of titles and records help past female athletes? Future ones?

YOST: Yeah, so if you have a school record that is, you know, exceeded by 12% of the previous female record holder by a male competing against women, that's a pretty big jump. And as athletes continue to get better, you know, maybe someday there would be somebody that would think I could get there. But most records are hard to break. They represent an ever higher peak of performance. And when you introduce an XY chromosome pair into a double X league, you're setting the bar artificially high in a way that it just undermines the entire idea of a legal protection for women's sports.

MAST: The US Olympic committee just changed its rules regarding men in women’s sports… so with this letter and all else that’s gone on since the Trump EO…If this were a road, where do you think we are on the journey to restoring fairness in women’s sports?

YOST: Well, I think there's a way to go because there's an awful lot of pockets resistance out there. Every week I'm hearing about some school district or the other, where a group of progressives on a school board or a progressive faculty is trying to protect the, you know, status of transgender athletes to, you know, males who are transgender to compete in female areas. We also see the same kind of fights going on regarding separate locker and changing facilities and bathrooms. So I think there's a way to go before we can say we've reached the exit ramp. But I'm hopeful we're at least out of the traffic jam at this point.

MAST: Dave Yost is the Attorney General of Ohio. Thank you for your time!

YOST: It was wonderful to talk with you. Thank you.

MAST: We did reach out to the NCAA yesterday. They responded to the inquiry but did not directly answer our question as to whether they would restore any titles, wins or awards to female athletes who lost them to male competitors.

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