Three Connecticut high school girls filed a federal discrimination lawsuit against the state for forcing them to compete against several biological teen boys, who claimed to be transgender girls.
The biologically female litigants say that the boys who identify as girls and who won state championships likely beat them out of college scholarships unfairly, the New York Times reported on Tuesday.
The complaint was filed Monday with the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. It was spearheaded on behalf of the girls by the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom.
“Girls deserve to compete on a level playing field,” Alliance Defending Freedom representative Christiana Holcomb said. “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 complaint cites federal Title IX rules that are supposed to level the playing field for female athletes.
The Times adds:
The Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference, which governs high school sports in the state, says its policy 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.
The suit contends that “gender identity amounts to an unfair advantage in sport.”
The suit echoes a recent survey of British Olympians who came forward to insist that transgenders in women’s sports should be stopped until more research is done on the matter.
A group of natural-born female Olympians demanded that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) suspend rules allowing transgender athletes to compete as women.
According to the Guardian, the survey of 15 British female Olympians found that most feel that allowing transgenders to compete alongside natural-born female athletes is likely unfair to the women and they want more research before new rules are made.
The survey taken anonymously found that eleven agreed with the statement that “it can never be fair for transgender athletes who have been through male puberty to compete in female sport.”
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.
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