As the women’s Sweet 16 was set Tuesday, it was great to see how far women’s basketball has come in the 40 years since Title IX. Young girls and their parents now know from an early age that if they have exceptional talent and decide to stick with a sport, they have the same chance to eventually earn a college scholarship as the boys. However, the foundation of Title IX will be undermined if transgender athletes like 6-foot-6 college basketball player Gabrielle Ludwig (pictured) or MMA fighter Fallon Fox are allowed to take scholarships from women athletes in the future.
While there are certainly some flaws in the implementation of Title IX — the disappearance of most wrestling programs from universities with football teams, for example — the overall premise of Title IX has certainly led to an explosion in opportunities for women in sports.
Feminists may complain that viewer preferences still generate a lot more salary money for NBA than WNBA players, but the forced parity between men’s and women’s scholarship awards has opened many programs, giving rise to an incredible level of play: just ask George W. Bush, who witnessed three dunks by Brittney Griner in Tuesday’s Baylor win.
The entire basis of Title IX is the very simple truth acknowledged by common sense in the early 1970s. The average American man is 5-foot-9 and outweighs the average 5-foot-4 woman by about 30 pounds, and has about ten times as much testosterone. If you were simply to insist on only one team for every school – the team of the best players regardless of gender – then even the women who have worked the hardest and are much bigger and stronger are going to have trouble making the team and earning a scholarship. Unless, of course, the woman has the relevant bodily attributes of a man.
Steven Crowder of Fox News, who argues in great detail that transgender Fox should not be allowed to beat up women, is all but drowned out by the media’s praise of Ludwig and Fox, whose competitive presence is helping the public understand the challenges faced by transgender athletes.
According to The Frisky (for an opposing view on this topic, click the post here), “After six years of competitive MMA (mixed martial arts) fighting as a woman, Fallon Fox has come out of the closet — against her wishes — as trans.”
So a woman athlete can face an opponent who started with a ten-fold testosterone advantage, and not have the right to know it?
And she can spend her whole life training toward an athletic scholarship made available to her by Title IX, only to lose out to a former man? What is to prevent a male athlete who was passed over by the recruiters to pursue collegiate competition via an operation he is not required to disclose?
The progressive narrative of the sports world knocking down one bias after another, first giving women equal opportunity to compete but ultimately stacking that same opportunity against women who have been women throughout their athletic careers, is a narrative of the absurd. There is a difference between men’s bodies and women’s bodies that goes beyond what an operation can add or remove, and it is perfectly reasonable and fair to recognize it in offering scholarship opportunities.
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