Dream Team Rallies for America’s Daughters in Sports
One day, we're erased; the next day, discovered
WATCH testimonials of athletes and activists protecting female sports for women and girls.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — As the Biden administration and abortion rights activists rally around the women’s rights, it was a different story on Thursday, as a new Dream Team of athletes and advocates stood up to oppose another dynamic the administration is ironically pushing in schools and society: the erasing of women and girls from sports.
Stepping onto a stage here on Freedom Plaza yesterday, honored to be a part of this new team, I recalled moving to the college town of Morgantown, W.V., in the summer of 1975 as a 10-year-old Muslim immigrant girl from India. I found my stride running the rolling hills outside our home on Cottonwood Street.
Each day, I logged my miles as religiously as I did my prayers. Every morning, as I ate my cereal, I’d meditate upon the image of then-Bruce Jenner on my box of Wheaties. Competing in girls’ track empowered my awkward younger self and made me a lifelong athlete.
In recent years, girls and women have come under attack by an aggressive, well-funded campaign to allow boys and men who self-identify as female to compete in female sports. University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, a biological male who started swimming on the women’s team after self-identifying as female, notoriously dominated women’s swimming.
Too often, people who oppose biological males in women’s sports have stayed silent because transgender activists often shame naysayers as “transphobic.” But that is finally changing.
Earlier this week, the International Swimming Federation (FINA) approved a policy restricting most transgender athletes from competing in elite women’s aquatic competitions (while putting forward troubling guidelines that may push sex-change surgeries younger). On Wednesday, the International Rugby League ruled that transgender athletes cannot compete in women’s sports. In a TV interview this week, my childhood idol, Jenner—now Caitlyn—responded: “This is a good thing for women’s sports.”
New Dream Team
Then, yesterday, a new Dream Team of athletes and advocates walked in front of a bright red backdrop that read, “On the 50th anniversary of Title IX, let’s keep women’s sports female,” movingly testifying for two-and-a-half-hours as witnesses from the athletic fields, locker rooms, tracks, swimming pools and bleachers of women’s and girls’ sports in America.
The banner was punctuated by a simple campaign message: “Our Bodies, Our Sports,” led by a coalition of groups, including Independent Women’s Network, where I’m a senior fellow in the practice of journalism. On the sidewalk, a gaggle of mostly male protestors, one of them wearing a flag marked “ANTIFASCIST,” tried to drown out the women athletes by banging pots together and blowing on noisemakers.
One protestor told me: “I’m making s**t up.”
So is the Biden administration. It issued plans yesterday to expand the rights of biological males in female sports, a policy direction that will likely further alienate commonsense voters from the Democratic Party in the runup to the 2022 midterms and later the 2024 presidential election. Fifty years ago yesterday, Title IX, banning discrimination based on sex in education, went into law, but now transgender activists and political operatives are hijacking Title IX to push for biological males in female sports.
As a classic liberal and feminist, I was proud to stand with the athletes and advocates who spoke up eloquently and poignantly for girls and women in sports. It became clear yesterday this is not just an issue any longer of “conservative groups,” as the New York Times tried to claim yesterday. I created a Dream Team Who’s Who on Substack, complete with some of the rally’s playlist, including singer Meredith Brooks’ classic, “Bitch.”
‘This is misogyny!’
On this new Dream Team is women’s rights advocate Amanda Houdeschell, a leader at the Women’s Liberation Front, a “national radical feminist” nonprofit known as WoLF. She delivered an impassioned speech: “This is not inclusion. This is misogyny!”
Describing herself as a “Democrat, radical feminist, lesbian,” veteran lesbian rights’ activist Lauren Levey said to cheers, “I’m telling you. We are not going back to a presumption that only male athletes count.” She continued: “I’m telling you that injustice and that insult will not stand.”
Stepping forward, Democrat Maud Meron, running for U.S. Congress in New York City, told the crowd, “Our job is to not go away – to stand up for women and girls!”
In the crowd, local parent Harry Jackson applauded. A former Olympic-level athlete and father to two daughters, he is a lacrosse referee and he bluntly says that we must protect girls and women: “It’s a safety issue.” Beside him, local mother Ying “Julia” McCaskill recalls how her daughter’s volleyball coach instructed the team to let the spikes of a biological male, self-declaring as a female, hit the ground. Too many girls had gotten concussions from his spikes. McCaskill carried a homemade sign: “What is a woman? An adult female human being.”
One by one, athletes stepped forward. Class of 2022 University of Kentucky graduate Riley Gaines Barker, who swam against transgender Lia Thomas, recalled the "tears shed” as young women faced competing against the unfair advantage of Thomas, who infamously changed in the women’s locker room with penis exposed. Like a hyper-focused athlete, she spoke over the din of the “ANTIFACISM” noisemakers.
Skateboarder Taylor Silverman spoke about losing prize money at a Red Bull contest, competing against a male competitor in the female division, and, with incredible poise, told the crowd that after Red Bull ignored her protest, she decided to speak out because she didn’t want the legacy of staying quiet while women are “being made to feel unimportant in a space created for us.”
Tears in her eyes, Kim Jones, a former All-American tennis player and mother of a Yale swimmer, described how often-male NCAA and Ivy League officials “tossed aside” female athletes, delivering “blow after blow” to women swimmers, raising issues with competing against a biological male. “This is not the world that I want for my daughter,” said Jones, who cofounded the Independent Council on Women’s Sport, a new group hosting its first conference this weekend. Tennis star and gay rights activist Martina Navratilova is sending a message of support.
Spitting fire, former Democratic Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, original sponsor of the “Protect Women’s Sports Act,” told the crowd the Biden administration’s proposed Title IX changes seek to “erase the entire female sex.”
“This is the height of disrespect and what, at its core, is a hatred for women,” Gabbard said.
As someone who has faced death threats advocating for the rights of the gay, lesbian and transgender communities in Muslim countries, I know that all people must be affirmed in life. Just not boys and men in females sports.
We must protect our daughters. I still remember the call I got from Jane Thomas, a classmate at Suncrest Junior High School, inviting me to join a girls’ track relay team. Race day, as I passed the baton to Lynda McCroskey, I felt so empowered.
One day, a cousin saw me running in shorts and tank-top, the sun kissing my skin and the wind in my hair, and told my father, “That is haram,” or “illegal,” because I showed my skin. Too often, girls in religiously conservative Muslim communities aren’t allowed to bike or run for fear of breaking their hymen and “losing” their virginity.” Too many preachers deem sports haram. In Pakistan, women defied threats to run a road race.
My father – a feminist – ignored my cousin.
In 1978, as a freshman at Morgantown High School, I had to run cross country with the boys because we didn’t have enough girls for our own team. As much as I trained, I was only fast enough for the boys’ junior varsity team. It would take me four years on junior varsity to “letter” and get the coveted letterman’s jacket as a Morgantown High Mohigan. Alas, I couldn’t run senior year, my cartilage worn thin, and never got my varsity letter.
Yesterday, on stage, a dynamic Maryland lacrosse mom, Dee Dee Bass Wilbon, slipped over my shoulders a track jacket I’d styled into my own letterman’s jacket with a symbolic letter over my heart in blue duct tape: “W,” for the strong, empowered woman that sports has helped me – and so many girls – become. Now, as the athletes and advocates did a final huddle, we now we’ve got a Dream Team to keep it that way.
A former Wall Street Journal reporter, Asra Q. Nomani is a senior contributor to the Federalist. She is senior fellow in the practice of journalism at the International Women’s Network. She can be reached at asra@asranomani.com and on Twitter at @AsraNomani.
Congratulations on the success of your rally. Thank you for all the hard work you are doing in support of women in sports.
True feminists showing true courage standing up to politically correct hypocritical bigots who have zero principles and are giving men, regardless of how they identify, what they want. I and my daughter thank you.