CALIFORNIA (LifeSiteNews) — A California high school told a pair of female cross-country athletes that wearing “Save Girls’ Sports” and “It’s Common Sense. XX ≠ XY” t-shirts in the presence of gender-confused classmates is equivalent to wearing Nazi swastikas in the presence of Jews.
The Washington Stand reports that school officials at the athletic department of Martin Luther King High School made that analogy to students identified as Kaitlyn and Taylor, who wore the shirts after a gender-confused male transferred to the school and the team, displacing Taylor from her spot on the Varsity Top 7 and relegating her to the junior varsity team for an event that was critical for impressing college recruiters, even despite the fact that the male “didn’t consistently attend practices or meet key varsity eligibility requirements,” according to a Title IX lawsuit filed on behalf of the girls.
“My initial reaction was like, I was really surprised, because it was like, why is this happening to me?” Taylor told Fox News. “There’s a [self-professed] transgender student on the team. Why am I getting displaced when I worked so hard and gone to all of the practices, and this student has only attended a few of the practices.”
“[W]e’re by no means trying to be hateful. We’re just wearing a shirt that expresses what we believe in trying to raise awareness to a situation,” Kaitlyn said. The girls and the group representing them, Advocates for Faith and Freedom, noted that other students were allowed to wear and display pro-LGBT “pride” messaging without incident.
“The swastika was used to represent an ideology based on the lie that some people are less valuable than others and can be treated as such,” responded Family Research Council Center for Human Dignity director Mary Szoch. “The shirts these girls were wearing represent a basic truth that is meant to combat the lie that women can be treated unfairly. I hope these girls win their case. I hope that whoever authorized having a man on a girls’ team and whoever compared those shirts to swastikas is fired.”
Allowing gender-confused individuals to compete in opposite-sex sports is promoted by leftists as a matter of “inclusivity,” but critics note that indulging “transgender” athletes undermines the original rational basis for having sex-specific athletics in the first place, thereby depriving female athletes of recognition and professional or academic opportunities, as well as undermining female players’ basic safety and privacy rights by forcing them to share showers and changing areas with members of the opposite sex.
There have been numerous high-profile examples in recent years of men winning women’s competitions, and research affirms that physiology gives males distinct athletic advantages that cannot be negated by hormone suppression.
In a 2019 paper published by the Journal of Medical Ethics, New Zealand researchers found that “healthy young men [do] not lose significant muscle mass (or power) when their circulating testosterone levels were reduced to (below International Olympic Committee guidelines) for 20 weeks,” and “indirect effects of testosterone” on factors such as bone structure, lung volume, and heart size “will not be altered by hormone therapy”; therefore, “the advantage to [gender-confused men] afforded by the [International Olympic Committee] guidelines is an intolerable unfairness.”
Even the far-left United Nations has admitted as much. Last month, the international body released a report by Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem exploring “forms of violence experienced by women and girls in sport.” Among them was the allowance of “males who identify as women to compete in female sports categories,” which the report said led to more than 600 female athletes around the world losing more than 890 medals in 29 sports as of March 2024.
“[P]harmaceutical testosterone suppression for genetically male athletes – irrespective of how they identify – will not eliminate the set of comparative performance advantages they have already acquired,” the report acknowledged. “To avoid the loss of a fair opportunity, males must not compete in the female categories of sport.”