We Can’t Let the Left Erase Female Olympians
By Elaine Gunthorpe
The 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris is underway, and young women everywhere will be watching female athletes from around the world achieve their dreams of reaching the podium. When you watch the Olympics this summer, I hope you will think about the hurdles that many female athletes have to face because of radical leftist gender-inclusion policies.
Historically, women’s sports steal the show at the Summer Olympics. With an average viewership of 16.8 million for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, the women’s events dominated USA TV coverage by more than 15% compared to men’s coverage.
Spectators in the past have flocked to their screens to watch legends like Simone Biles, Shawn Johnson, and Mary Lou Retton. This season again, little girls everywhere will be inspired to compete in sports because of the formidable female Olympians. But their ambition and hopes will be squashed by the intrusion of men into their arena. If we continue to allow men to compete against women, they will take opportunities away from, and potentially threaten the lives of, future female Olympians.
Some may scoff and say, “That will never happen.”
In the 2021 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Japan, transgender-identiyfing man Laurel Hubbard competed in weightlifting in the women’s over-87-kilogram division.
Today, Italian female boxer Angela Carini was soundly defeated by Algeria’s Imane Khelif in under a minute. After Khelif pummeled her with overwhelming force, Carini was forced to end the match prematurely. The International Boxing Association had previously stated that Khelif failed a gender test to enter the women’s category, registering too high testosterone levels and XY male chromosomes. Khelif was disqualified from competing in the world women’s championship on this basis. Khelif never identified as transgender, and was reportedly born female. However, her physical prowess and build seem to simulate what we could expect with male performance in the sport.
Men and women are biologically different in terms of their genetic makeup. On average, adult men are typically stronger, more powerful, and faster than adult women. As for athletic events and sports, “men typically outperform females by 10-30%,” according to a Consensus Statement for the American College of Sports Medicine.
That same study shows that men are taller with stronger limbs, have a larger heart size, larger muscle mass, and less body fat than their female competitors.
The article’s introduction states that “the top adult males almost always outperform the top females in events that rely on muscle power, strength, speed, and/or endurance.” The difference between men's and women’s bodies is basic biology.
Many female athletes have been outspoken critics of transgender-identifying male athletes participating in women’s sports. Female athletes Selina Soule and Riley Gaines have made it their mission to protect women’s sports. Gaines has spoken about her humiliating experience competing against Lia Thomas, a man who transitioned to female and was permitted to compete in collegiate women’s swimming. Through her work, she defends the truth and advocates for keeping men out of women's sports.
Bethany Hamilton, a surfing legend, in January wrote on X/Twitter, “Male-bodied athletes should not be competing in female sports. Period.”
USA Boxing recently became engulfed in controversy when the governing body allowed men to compete against women under its new “Transgender Policy.” Gaines promptly commented on the move: “The safety of women has been compromised.”
If we allow men to compete in women’s sports, we are putting women in danger of injury. Payton McNabb, a former volleyball athlete at a North Carolina high school, suffered long-term injuries including a concussion and partial paralysis to her body following a match in 2022 against a male athlete on the opposing team.
Equally as important as keeping women safe in sports is encouraging more opportunities for women to participate in sports, which benefits girls’ physical and mental. A study by the organization, Keeping the Girls in the Game, reported that sports provide young girls with many developmental benefits.
The Women’s Sports Foundation found that girls and women who play sports have “a more positive body image and experience higher states of psychological well-being than girls and women who do not play sports.”
A Journal of the National Cancer Institute article found that participation in exercise with as little as four hours each week decreased the likelihood of breast cancer by 60%, “a disease that afflicts one out of every eight American women.”
Under the original Title IX statute, women were recognized as equals in sports programs that received federal funding, therefore protected from discrimination based on their sex. As a result, women’s involvement in sports has grown exponentially over the years, a true sign of women’s empowerment. But on Thursday, the same day that Carini was brutally beaten in the Olympic boxing ring by a presumed man, the Biden-Harris administration’s radical Title IX rewrite went into effect. Their revision replaces the traditional, factual understanding of sex with gender identity, paving the way for more abuse and erasure of women’s sports.
After all the strides in women’s sports over the last few decades, we are regressing quickly. When little girls across the U.S. watch Simone Biles compete this summer and think, “I want to be just like her,” let’s ensure they have a fighting chance.
Elaine Gunthorpe is a graduate of Christendom College, a participant in the Network of enlightened Women’s 2024 Student Media Fellowship, and a former chapter leader of the NeW chapter at Christendom.
