The Heritage Foundation’s report “Title IX’s Failed Experiment: Why Accommodating Sex Differences Beats Engineered Parity,” opens with a blatant falsehood.
“In 2024, a Tunisian man defeated a Chinese woman for the Olympic women’s boxing gold medal,” the report states. It went on to describe the person, who is assumed to be Imane Khelif, as a “biological male.”
To the contrary, Khelif is a woman, is not transgender and “biological male” is a nonsense phrase often used to target individuals for harassment. And she is Algerian. Not Tunisian.
What this has to do with Title IX is unclear. Title IX is an American civil rights law that doesn’t apply to Tunisians, or Algerians for that matter.
But the author, Scott Yenor, insists that Title IX has evolved into a “powerful engine of feminist social engineering.” Yenor is a professor at Boise State who obviously has trouble with basic facts and overuses the phrase “social engineering.”
Considering Title IX’s Successes
Let’s take a step back: Title IX became law in 1972. Much of the reason the USWNT is so good can be traced back to the implementation of Title IX and the opportunities it created for women. Same for the U.S. women’s national basketball team.
Briana Scurry told me in 2022 that Title IX knocked down barriers that led to her illustrious career. But Yenor instead sees the law as central to the destruction of the family.
“The current Title IX regime as applied to sports (and elsewhere) is part of a sustained social engineering effort that is designed to produce a new sort of woman — one that is more aggressive, more competitive, more male, less relational, and less oriented toward the goods of family and motherhood,” he writes.
Yenor’s essay suggests women should be participating in “sports” like fitness classes or yoga that are more in-line with his vision of the biological differences between the sexes.
This is the general theme throughout, this idea that women are delicate – read: weak – and biologically unfit for strenuous competitive sports. Moderate exercise supports fertility, but vigorous exercise diminishes it, Yenor writes, citing a 1985 abstract entitled “Fatness, Menarche and Female Fertility,” which primarily sought to show a link between body fat and fertility, not competitive sports participation.
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Connecting the dots
It’s the same BS argument that Heritage and other groups use to deny transgender women and girls the ability to participate in sports. The idea that women can’t possibly hold their own against men is central to the argument.
The end game here is to strip all women of the ability to compete on a level playing field, while also diminishing women’s bodily autonomy. Those who don’t fit into a neat box of femininity — women who wear their hair short or have developed muscles or wear gender-neutral clothing — are suspect to this movement.
First it was abortion, now there’s a war on birth control and IVF. First it was transgender girls in sports, then it became transgender people in public spaces. And there are increasing signs that marriage equality and other LGBTQ+ rights are on the line. There’s even talk about repealing the 19th Amendment that gave women the right to vote.
So what does this have to do with women’s soccer? Well, because ultimately these movements impact all of us, professional athletes or not. The idea is as old as time: target the smallest and most vulnerable group before casting a larger net.
Rapinoe speaks out
Megan Rapinoe spoke eloquently about the issue during a recent appearance on The View.
“At first, it was like, well, nobody likes women’s sports and nobody wants to watch it. Or there was abuse happening and nobody seemed to care,” Rapinoe said. “Now all of a sudden we’re going to use a vulnerable group of people in the trans community to be like, ‘Oh well, we’re just protecting women’s sports and we care so much about it,’ when the Heritage Foundation is now going to go after Title IX. So, is it about reproductive rights or is it about just women’s rights in general?”
“We’re seeing the rollback of Roe v. Wade. Marriage equality, I feel like is getting put back on the table. That was settled law, and so all of these things, like yes, they’re going after trans people in sports, and they’re using this as a wedge issue because we love sports, and you know we don’t want our little girls to be unsafe in sports, and it’s like unsafe from who?” Rapinoe asked.
Rapinoe brought up the Washington State law that would ban transgender girls from playing girls’ sports in Washington’s public schools. It would subject all girls — transgender or not — to medical sex verification procedures before they are allowed to participate in girls’ sports, according to the ACLU.
Let’s let Rapinoe have the last word.
“They don’t like women in sports because it helps us with confidence and power, and we see so many women in the C-suite played elite-level sports, it’s just great for you physically and all of it. But it’s an attack on women in society. And I think the tie between the Heritage Foundation now wanting to go after Title IX is just like so blatant. Like let’s connect these dots: It’s more than just a couple of trans kids in the entire country and a couple in each state being able to participate in some youth sports,” Rapinoe said.
Soccer: Annie Peterson, @AnnieMPeterson, AP Women’s Soccer
Tennis: Joey Dillon, @JoeyDillon, Freelance Tennis Writer
Basketball: Howard Megdal, @HowardMegdal, The IX Sports
Softball: Maren Angus-Coombs, @Maren-Angus, The IX Sports
Golf: Marin Dremock, @MDremock, The IX Sports
Hockey: @TheIceGarden, The Ice Garden
Gymnastics: Jessica Taylor Price, @jesstaylorprice, Freelance Writer
