For seven years, the Heritage Foundation and its allies have used the slogan "protect women's sports" to undercut the rights of transgender athletes. But after winning a Supreme Court ruling allowing states to ban transgender girls from girls’ school athletics, those same forces are now going after—you guessed it—women's sports as a whole.
My colleague Madison Pauly has been following the legal campaign to push trans people out of public life for years. And for years, she's shown how that campaign intersects with, and amplifies, plain old sexism and misogyny. Now that the Heritage Foundation got a lot of what it wanted in terms of banning trans girls from playing sports with their friends, they suddenly don't seem all that interested in protecting the rights of cisgender girls, either. As Madison reported:
The paper, by Heritage senior research fellow and Boise State University professor Scott Yenor, argued for “restoring a flexible approach to athletics” by exempting sports from Title IX, the 1972 federal law that bans sex discrimination in education, or else loosening the law’s requirements. The paper is laced with stereotypes about women’s “natural preferences”—describing women as having “gentle, graceful, cooperative tendencies” and being “oriented toward motherhood and traditional feminine graces.”
The whole thing doesn't make me feel particularly gentle or graceful. But that's just my opinion.
— Sophie Hurwitz
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