When the House of Representatives passed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, Rep. Mark Takano (D-CA) said that even debating keeping men out of women’s sports was “traumatizing.”
“And I thought I’d heard it all,” said Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D., President of the Ruth Institute. “So-called trans athletes are destroying women’s sports, and their supporters say that even talking about it is ‘traumatizing’? That’s an absurd argument used to avoid an honest debate.”
Morse charged: “A male cyclist competing as a woman just won a high-profile road race in New Mexico with a top prize of $35,000. A man’s anatomy doesn’t change when he calls himself a woman. He still has a larger lung capacity and more muscle mass to body weight than the women he competes against. Ideology doesn’t trump reality.”
The inability to compete on a level playing field with male athletes was part of the reason a 35-time winner of the national cyclocross circuit retired recently.
Hannah Arensman explained that despite years of intense training from an early age, she couldn’t compete with a male athlete whose body gave him an unfair advantage over her “no matter how hard I train.”
Morse responded, “But Rep. Takano says a woman athlete talking about a career ruined by politics is ‘traumatizing’ for men who demand to compete as women.”
“After decades of saying we must do more to promote women’s sports, the same people are determined to destroy women’s sports in the name of a spurious equality,” Morse said. “But efforts at intimidation won’t silence the critics of this insanity.”
Get more from the Ruth Institute’s Transgender Resource Center.