What do Charlie Baker, president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins have in common?
They’re both in deep denial about the inherent unfairness of transgender faux females competing in collegiate (and, by extension, high school) athletics against real girls and women. Apparently, like Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, neither Baker nor Jenkins is “a biologist” or they would know better.
But now, better late than never, even the Biden administration—the foremost cheerleader for transgenderism, not only in athletics but in all its forms—has capitulated on the issue.
President Joe Biden’s Department of Education on Dec. 20 withdrew a proposed rule that would have prohibited schools from barring transgender athletic interlopers from joining teams that comport with their gender identity, rather than their biological sex.
Three days earlier, Baker, a former RINO Republican governor of Massachusetts, testified at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Although the hearing was nominally about legalized sports gambling, news accounts focused instead on how Baker was excoriated by two Republicans—Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and John Kennedy of Louisiana—over the NCAA’s cavalier attitude about allowing transgender “women” to wreak havoc in girls and women’s athletics.
The Independent Council on Women’s Sports—a group comprising current and former collegiate and professional female athletes and their supporters—went further, calling out a smug Baker for what the council said was “his false testimony” before the Judiciary Committee.
“Baker repeatedly lied and gaslighted the committee, falsely claiming that the federal courts have upheld the NCAA’s malicious and discriminatory policies, which allow men to take women’s places and enter women’s locker rooms in college sports,” the council said.
Kim Jones, cofounder of the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, added: “[T]he NCAA continues sacrificing fair competition and safety in women’s college sports for profit and ideology. [Baker’s] false testimony confirms what his inaction has made clear for the past two years: The NCAA prioritizes revenue and power over truth, fairness, and the protection of female athletes.”
Three weeks earlier, the Post’s Jenkins engaged in condescending psychobabble when she wrote in a Nov. 28 column criticizing those opposed to transgender “women” encroaching on female athletics: “Sport doesn’t tell us who we are biologically, but spiritually, and psychologically, and the first thing it tells us is not to be victims. So, it’s a step backward for so many women athletes to cry frailty in the debate over trans participation.”
Jenkins’ column, not surprisingly, made no mention of SheWon.org, a website “dedicated to archiving the achievements of female athletes who were displaced by males in women’s sporting events and other types of competitions expressly for women.”
It’s hardly “crying frailty” to note that She Won has documented the number of female athletes to date (725) who have been deprived of medals and other awards (1,043) in competitions (505) across a wide array of sports (36).
Perhaps if Jenkins had a daughter or sister among those 725 who had lost a trophy or even an athletic scholarship to one of those faux females, she would have more empathy toward those who have experienced just that.
Criticizing a lawsuit “brought by San Jose State co-captain Brooke Slusser and 10 other Mountain West volleyball players asking emergency injunctive relief to bench a San Jose State player for, in their view, not being a proper woman,” Jenkins contended that the legal action makes “female athletes out to be fretful weaklings.”
“There may be an unanswerable argument against transgender women competing on the basis of overwhelming physical advantage, but it hasn’t been made here,” Jenkins wrote, patronizingly, of the lawsuit. “Instead, the suit is just a litany of suggestions that wilting women are endangered.”
Also not surprisingly, Jenkins didn’t ask former North Carolina high school volleyball star Payton McNabb, whether she considers herself a “wilting woman” or a “fretful weakling.” In September 2022, McNabb suffered a traumatic brain injury from a ball spiked in her face at an estimated 65 mph by a transgender player on the other team.
Baker and Jenkins—and other apologists for this transgender madness—would do well to watch a sobering minidocumentary on McNabb released Dec. 17 by Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative nonprofit.
“Kill Shot: How Payton McNabb Turned Tragedy Into Triumph,” a 15-minute video that may be seen on YouTube and Instagram, includes harrowing footage of the incident that left McNabb permanently injured.
“[M]y life was changed forever because my rights and safety were deemed less important than a man’s feelings and false reality,” McNabb wrote on the social media platform X on Sept. 1, the second anniversary of her injury. “I will always continue to fight the good fight for all the girls and women who deserve better.”
That “good fight” included testifying before a North Carolina General Assembly committee in April 2023 in support of state legislation, the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, to bar male athletes from competing in the female division of school sports in the Tar Heel State. The bill became law in August 2023 despite the gratuitous veto of now-lame duck Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat.
Meanwhile, in Washington, ongoing lawsuits challenging the lame-duck Biden administration’s reinterpretation of Title IX in cases involving gender identity and sports influenced the administration’s Dec. 20 decision to withdraw the rule.
It’s probably safe to say that if Vice President Kamala Harris had won the presidency in November, her administration would have pressed ahead with that extremely divisive proposal. Happily for McNabb and other female athletes, Donald Trump will return to the White House on Jan. 20.
Payton McNabb meets Aug. 15 with once and future President Donald Trump. (Screenshot from McNabb’s Facebook account)
“With a stroke of my pen on Day 1, we’re going to stop the transgender lunacy,” Trump proclaimed in remarks Sunday at Turning Point Action’s AmericaFest conference in Phoenix, adding: “And we will keep men out of women’s sports. … Under the Trump administration, it will be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders—male and female. It doesn’t sound too complicated, does it?”
Only to the likes of Charlie Baker, Sally Jenkins, and Roy Cooper.
