Black Community News News and Commentary for Christians
The NCAA requires men who want to compete against women in college sports to take testosterone-suppressing drugs for a year before they’re eligible.
Some believe these men should not be required to suppress the hormone. The United Nations, for example, calls the suppressant requirement “unnecessary, humiliating and harmful.” Testosterone gives men a huge advantage over women physically, but critics apparently don’t care whether losing to men pretending to be women is humiliating and harmful to women.
The issue became high-profile after Idaho’s Governor Brad Little signed the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act into law to protect women’s equal opportunities in athletics and fair competition in high school and college sports. The law barred males from competing in female sports, but a federal judge blocked it. The Idaho legislature passed the bill after news began circulating that boys pretending to be girls ran against and defeated girls during high school track meets.
Four high school girls in Connecticut who ran track sought to protect their rights under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. They filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education (ED) and a lawsuit against the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference for allowing male athletes to compete against female athletes. ED’s Office of Civil Rights warned government schools that they could lose federal funding. The federal government stood behind these girls and others who expected a fair opportunity to win races and scholarships for their hard work.
But what will happen with these pending matters under a Biden administration? Most likely, ED will either stop defending fairness for female athletes or do the opposite of the Trump administration: threaten states that don’t allow boys to compete against girls.
The NCAA might have to change its one-year requirement, because even after a year of taking testosterone-suppressing drugs, men are still stronger, bigger, and faster than women. The Christian Post reported on an important new study from the British Journal of Sports Medicine. An excerpt:
The 15–31% athletic advantage that transwomen displayed over their female counterparts prior to starting gender affirming hormones declined with feminising therapy. However, transwomen still had a 9% faster mean run speed after the 1 year period of testosterone suppression that is recommended by World Athletics for inclusion in women’s events.
The study’s lead author, Dr. Timothy Roberts, told NBC News that for “the Olympic level, the elite level, I’d say probably two years is more realistic than one year.” Anyone with common sense knows that a man could take such hormones for two years, or 10, or 20, and he’ll still perform better physically against a woman.
An advocacy group called Save Women’s Sports seeks to protect women’s rights to compete in sports against other women by preserving biology-based eligibility standards. Founding member Linda Blade told the Christian Post that it’s “clear that no amount hormonal reduction or time in that state will cause reduction in structural enhancement such as bone size, heart size, neural adaptations, blood volume, lung capacity, upper body strength and other attributes that impact sport performance.”
Allowing men to compete against women in physical sports will be the end of women’s sports. The question is, how long will women put up with it?
