Where are “protectors” of women’s sports now?
The self-designated “protectors” of women’s sports who loudly oppose allowing a few transgender girls and women to compete remain oddly silent about practices that unfairly give hundreds of women’s playing slots to cisgender men year after year after year.
An excellent USA Today article this week exposed some of the ways that college athletics programs routinely shortchange women’s teams. Three big ones: counting men who practice with women’s teams as women, double-counting women athletes, and packing so many women onto a team that most never get a chance to play, instead of creating more teams for women.
For example, I randomly looked at federally collected data for the University of Michigan. Half of Michigan’s student body is women, so they should get half of the school’s positions on NCAA teams. But women get only 45 percent of chances to play at Michigan if you don’t count the 18 male practice players on women’s teams as women. You can check any college’s numbers in online Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act reports.
We can’t just blame Michigan for this obfuscation. The federal Department of Education tells schools to report it that way. What a sham! It’s fine for women’s teams to invite men to scrimmage with them, but they shouldn’t use that as an excuse to not give women the playing positions they deserve. Michigan offers no women’s ice hockey or wrestling, instead packing 120 women onto its rowing team on the first day of events. How many of those “rowers” got to compete? It’s a shell game.
Giving 18 of women’s playing positions to men may not seem like a big deal. But multiply that by all the colleges and universities that steal this way. They’re robbing women of hundreds of chances to play in NCAA athletics every year. And even 18 is far more than the handful of transgender athletes who are being attacked for competing, especially by conservative groups that are stoking hate and passing discriminatory laws.
I say “hate” very intentionally. For weeks now I’ve noticed a sudden slew of posts and articles hyping an ongoing Title IX investigation in Wisconsin that showed up in my daily Google Alert feed. The parents of four middle school boys claim the boys are accused of harassing a transgender student because they won’t use use the pronouns they/them. Before the investigation is finished, many copycat posts have been shouting that this infringes on the boys’ First Amendment rights, trying to turn this into a culture war. They may be right that the boys can use hurtful pronouns if they want — that remains to be seen — but the posts’ inflammatory tone could inspire violence. Even culture wars can produce casualties.
The incessant and hateful framing in these posts led to four bomb threats against the school last week and threats to district staff. The district moved students to virtual sessions for the rest of the school year. The city had to cancel its Memorial Day parade because of the risk of violence.
Circling back to athletics, figuring out the best way to include transgender athletes won’t be an easy process. A New York Times article this week on transgender swimmer Lia Thomas and others gives a good overview of the issue but doesn’t examine any solutions. What I want to know is, when will people who claim they want to “save women’s sports” or “protect women’s sports” leave hypocrisyland and do something about the far more prevalent practices described above that blatantly rob women of so many chances to play? Because if they ignore these bigger problems, their hollow words seem intended only to foster hate, transphobia, and conflict, not to help women.
Elsewhere
The University of California’s payouts for sexual abuse by a UCLA gynecologist reached a record $700 million this week when the system settled complaints from 312 former patients. A woman sued three Louisiana universities for allowing her accused rapist to avoid consequences from earlier alleged assaults by transferring three times until he eventually graduated. Survivors of sexual assault settled their lawsuits against an Eastern Michigan University fraternity and sorority. Princeton University fired a Humanities professor for sexual misconduct. An interesting article by the Dartmouth College student newspaper explores a perceived increase in the use of date-rape drugs at parties and a general reluctance to report it.
The Knight Commission criticized the NCAA for gender and racial inequities in how it distributes revenues and proposed alternatives. High school softball and baseball teams often get different resources, an Oregon survey found. An Albany (N.Y.) High School administrator suspended 13 girls’ track athletes who were practicing in sports bras on a hot day and who objected to being told to cover up.
Oklahoma’s governor signed a bill to prevent transgender students from using restrooms corresponding with their gender identify. Indiana lawmakers overturned the governor’s veto and banned transgender girls from school athletics teams.
On the up side
Check out this impressive package by USA Today exploring multiple topics for Title IX’s 50th anniversary.
Where you’ll find me
June 9, 6:00 p.m. PT — Join me and Lucy Jane Bledsoe, author of the new Young Adult novel No Stopping Us Now, in conversation with teenage student activist Lily J. in a virtual event hosted by Green Apple Books on the Park, San Francisco.
June 14, 6:00 p.m. ET — I’ll be in Washington, D.C. for a Title IX 50th Anniversary event hosted by the National Women’s Law Center, speaking with NWLC President Fatima Goss Graves and civil rights lawyer Pamela Price. Stay tuned for details.
June 22 — Lucy Jane Bledsoe and I will Zoom with residents of Rossmoor, Walnut Creek, Calif.
June 23, 3:00-4:30 p.m. ET — It’s Title IX’s 50th birthday! I’ll be Zooming with members of the Association of Title IX Administrators (ATIXA) to celebrate. Read details here. And watch a 30-second promo video with moi here.
*** Want to set up an in-person or Zoom session with me for your organization or book club? Reach me through my Contact page.***
Read about the Supreme Court’s history of curtailing Title IX and other civil rights laws in my article in The Washington Post Made by History section, published May 9, 2022. I am delighted that former Chancellor of the University of Illinois, Springfield Susan Koch wrote a glowing review of 37 Words in the Des Moines Register. The Nation magazine published an excerpt from my chapter 5, which introduces Title IX’s application by the movement against sexual violence. The Washington Monthly gave 37 Words a fine review — check it out! The Wall Street Journal published a review of my book and I wrote a Letter to the Editor correcting some misinformation in that review.
My virtual fireside chat with Kenyora Parham, executive director of End Rape on Campus, gives a good overview of the book and shares video clips of interviews with some of the book’s main characters. The New York Historical Society’s Center for Women’s History & Academic Affairs posted a discussion with me and some of the earliest Title IX activists, available on YouTube. If you registered for the American Historical Association 2022 conference, you can watch a video that will be available through June of our panel session on “Fifty Years of Title IX: Evolutions in the Struggle Against Sex Discrimination in Education.”
The Washington, D.C. chapter of the National Organization for Women interviewed me on the DC NOW podcast. Here’s a Facebook Live video of my book launch event at the Norwich Bookstore, though you may want to just listen instead of watch because the first four minutes are sideways. (Oops!) It’s still a wonderful discussion with Kate Rohdenburg of WISE.
Lastly, here are links to order your copy of my new book, 37 Words: Title IX and Fifty Years of Fighting Sex Discrimination (The New Press, 2022).
#titleix #37words
