The Biden administration's proposed expansion of Title IX to accommodate transgender athletes would violate the law's "equal opportunity mandate" and roll back decades of progress the U.S. has made in promoting female athletic participation, according to a new report from the Independent Women's Forum.
The second edition of the 2021 report "Competition: Title IX, Male-Bodied Athletes, and the Threat to Women's Sports" looked at the legal basis and likely effects of two proposed Department of Education (DOE) rules.
Title IX of the Civil Rights Act bans discrimination on the basis of sex in federally funded institutions and requires colleges to spend equal amounts on men's and women's sports.
The DOE proposed expanding Title IX in June 2022 to include gender identity and require schools to allow males to participate in female sports if they identify as female. In April, the department proposed a more specific rule that would require schools to allow trans athletes to join teams of their preferred gender and make schools prove that allowing male participation would be unsafe to preserve sex-segregation.
"By allowing biological males to join women's teams, the proposed rules undermine Title IX's equal opportunity mandate," the report reads. "Every time that a biological male is selected for a women's team, a female athlete loses that spot. When a biological male takes the field in a women's game, a female athlete loses playing time.
"In each instance, the coach and the school that have allowed this to occur have denied a female student an athletic opportunity. And in each instance, the school is authorizing sex discrimination that violates Title IX, regardless of the new proposed rules, which cannot change the dictates of that law."
The proposed rules could reverse the spike in female athletic participation that occurred after Title IX was passed in 1972. According to the report, less than 5% of high school girls played sports before Title IX was passed. By 2019, that number was 43%, with college athletic participation, college scholarships, and Olympic participation following a similar course.
"I think it's incredibly unfair that girls and women have worked so hard to even be able to play and now everything's going in reverse," Payton McNabb, a female North Carolina high school volleyball player who was injured by a transgender athlete, told National Review. "They passed Title IX to expand opportunities for women and now they're getting taken away."
After McNabb's injury, the county wouldn't allow any of its schools to compete against the team with the male athlete, she said. Last month McNabb testified before the North Carolina legislature that she still suffers lingering effects from the incident, including impaired vision, partial paralysis on one side of her body, anxiety, and depression.
McNabb told National Review that she originally planned to play volleyball in college but "physically I can't get back into it the way I was, so I'm not doing it anymore."
According to a study published in Endocrine Reviews, males have significant physical advantages over females. The study's author, David Handelsman, found that men produce 20 times more testosterone than women after puberty and have "15- to 20-fold greater circulating testosterone than children or women at any age."
Handelsman also found that increased levels of circulating hemoglobin allow males to move oxygen from lungs to tissues much more efficiently, which improves aerobic energy expenditure and athletic performance.
Men also have "longer, denser, and stronger bones" than women, providing "leverage for muscular limb power exerted in jumping, throwing, [and] other explosive power activities," he wrote.
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