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Selina Soule, a high school runner from Glastonbury, Connecticut.The Daily Signal

PETITION: Keep Girls' Sports For Biological Girls ONLY – #IStandWithSelina. Sign the petition here.

June 29, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — A petition supporting a female athlete who now must compete against biological males because of Connecticut's law requiring that boys who identify as “girls” be admitted into girls' sports competitions has been launched by LifeSiteNews. The petition supports Selina Soule and her discrimination complaint lodged with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

Soule, a female high school athlete from Connecticut, has had her sporting career jeopardized by a state policy requiring that boys who call themselves “girls” be admitted to girls’ sports competitions.

Selina competes in track at Bloomfield High School in Bloomfield, Connecticut. She wasn’t able to qualify for the 55-meter event in the New England regionals because two spots were taken by boys, as The Daily Signal’s Kelsey Bolar documented in a recent video report on the 16-year-old’s situation.

Christiana Holcomb, legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal aid group, said the organization filed the complaint to bring justice to Selina’s situation.

“Alliance Defending Freedom, on behalf of Selina and a couple of other brave female athletes, has filed or is in the process of filing a Title IX complaint asking the Department of Education to step in, to investigate, and to restore a level playing field for Selina,” Holcomb said.

The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights enforces Title IX, the federal law that “protects people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance,” according to the agency’s website.

If the two boys who consider themselves “girls” had not been allowed to compete with the girls, Selina says, she would have placed sixth and had the opportunity to run the 55 in front of college coaches at the New England regionals.

One of LifeSiteNews’s campaign coordinators, Scott Schittl, was encouraged by the amount of traffic Selina’s story has been getting over the last week. “With over 400,000 pageviews over the last two weeks, this has been the biggest story for LifeSite in recent months.”

“That’s because people know that there is fundamentally something wrong with boys playing girls’ sports,” Schittl went on to say. “They know it’s about safety. They know that when boys compete in girls’ sports, they win because they have a natural advantage. It’s scientifically proven, and it’s also common sense.”

Competing with boys crushes the motivation of girls who have worked hard to compete, only to enter into competitions they can never, or rarely, win, despite all of their efforts.

It also puts girls into harm’s way in contact sports, and it deprives female athletes of the chance to compete for college scholarships and other accolades.

That’s why this petition supports Selina’s complaint to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights on the same matter.

Thank you for READING and SIGNING this petition, TODAY!