Three Connecticut high school girls have filed a federal discrimination complaint against the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference for allowing biological males who identify as female to compete in the same athletic events as biological females. The trio asserts that the inclusion of transgender athletes creates unfair competition and violates numerous federal rules.
"Girls deserve to compete on a level playing field," said the students' legal representative, Christiana Holcomb, an attorney for Alliance Defending Freedom. "Women fought long and hard to earn the equal athletic opportunities that Title IX provides. Allowing boys to compete in girls' sports reverses nearly 50 years of advances for women under this law. We shouldn't force these young women to be spectators in their own sports."
The Alliance Defending Freedom filed the complaint on behalf of the girls with the U.S. Education Department's Office for Civil Rights yesterday. According to CBS, the complaints "cites the federal Title IX rules aimed at equal rights in sports for female athletes."
The CIAC governs high school sports in Connecticut and argues that its "follows a state anti-discrimination law requiring students to be treated in school according to the gender with which they identify. That means that athletes can compete according to their expressed gender identity as opposed to their sex assigned at birth."
Earlier this year, national attention was drawn to Connecticut after the success of two transgender athletes were allowed to compete in what were supposed to be all girls track events. The two athletes in question, not surprisingly, absolutely dominated the rest of the league.
"We all know the outcome of the race before it even starts; it's demoralizing," Selina Soule, one of the Connecticut students who filed the complaint, said at the time. "I fully support and am happy for these athletes for being true to themselves. They should have the right to express themselves in school, but athletics have always had extra rules to keep the competition fair."
As pointed out last night on Tucker Carlson Tonight by Holcomb, the biological males are ruining women sports altogether in Connecticut.
"I'm sorry to underscore the inequity here, I'm going to highlight the fact one of these male athletes now holds ten records inside the state of Connecticut that were once held by ten individual girls and were established over the course of about a twenty year period," Holcomb told Carlson. "So it's fundamentally unfair to allow biological males to step into women's sports and frankly dominate them and take away opportunities not just to medal but to be at the podium to advance at the next level of competition and even compete for scholarships for young women like Selena."
The parents of the male-to-female competitors, however, say that it would be their children who are discriminated against if they were not allowed to participate in girls' track.
"As a human being — not as Andraya's father — it's disappointing that, in 2019, we're still debating who gets to participate and who doesn't," Rashaan Yearwood, father of the student in question Andraya Yearwood, told CBS. "You would hope we'd gotten to a place in 300-plus years as a country that we're not debating who should be included, and who should not be. There is no place for exclusion."
Last night Carlson asked Soule whether she has gained any supporters from her team. Her response shows just how serious this problem is.
"Selena, do other girls on your team feel the way that you do that opportunities are being taken from you by biological males?" Carlson wondered.
"Yes no one in the state of Connecticut is happy about this but no one has enough courage to speak up. And I haven't been the only one affected by this," Soule replied. "There have been countless other female athletes in the state of Connecticut as well as my entire indoor track team. We missed out on winning the state Open Championship because of the team that the transgender athletes were on."