More women in sports need to speak out loudly on this issue. That is what it is going to take to make a difference.
FOX News reports:
I’m a Team USA World Masters track athlete, mom and coach calling for the protection of women’s sportsI’m a mom, a coach and a Team USA World Masters track athlete who is fighting for something greater than another gold medal: I’m standing for the protection of women’s sports.If male-bodied athletes continue competing on female teams, it will be the end of women’s sports. This is no exaggeration; this is reality, and it’s happening right now.At the 2018 World Masters Athletics Championships in Málaga, Spain, I competed in the 200-meter race against a male-bodied athlete, whom I beat by only a few tenths of a second. The next year, the same athlete beat my teammate in the hurdles for a place on the podium at the 2019 World Championship indoor meet in Poland. My teammate had trained harder than anyone I know.It wasn’t just on the world stage that I experienced the demoralizing trend of male-bodied athletes displacing females from their own competitions; it was also on my home island of Maui, Hawaii.A year and a half after my experience in Spain, my daughter lost to a biological male identifying as female in her first-ever high school track race. I had watched proudly as my strong and determined girl did all the right things – made personal, difficult sacrifices to train her body to be as fast and fit as possible for her first race.Yet all her hard work seemed to drift away along with the male-bodied athlete, who had just transferred from the boys’ volleyball team to the girl’s team the season before. The athlete breezed right by her to win first place, leaving her to finish second.It’s not only the fact that my daughter placed second behind this individual in her first race, but we also began to witness all the other ways this injustice impacts families like ours: the mental health impact on girls who have to race male-bodied athletes, the personal lessons in effort rewarded and goals achieved, and future scholarships, awards and accolades.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY