Withhold federal education funds to protect girls’ scholastic sports
by Editorial Board · The Washington TimesOPINION:
Perhaps the most confounding aspect of the legal and political battles over gender-confused males being allowed in nearly half of all states to interlope in female athletics is why female Democratic politicians (and the three liberal women on the U.S. Supreme Court) would side with that microscopic sliver of 1% of the population over the 51% of the population with XX chromosomes like their own.
Most likely, it is because they have no sisters, daughters or female friends who have ever lost athletic competitions unfairly to these make-believe “girls” and “women.”
Maryland Delegate Kathy Szeliga is not one of them. The Republican state lawmaker has fought repeatedly to get the Democratic-supermajority Maryland General Assembly to come to its senses and prohibit transgender “girls” and “women” from participating in and, when they do, dominating female sports.
After the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on June 30 in a pair of conjoined cases, West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox — a unanimous decision on the Title IX question and 6-3 on the equal protection clause — upholding the right of states to bar faux females from participating in girls’ and women’s sports, Ms. Szeliga renewed her push for Maryland to follow the lead of next-door West Virginia and Idaho, the two states from which the cases arose.
Ms. Szeliga, who has fought for such a ban five years running, vowed July 6 to reintroduce the Fairness in Girls’ Sports Act during the 2027 legislative session. It would bar transgender “girls” and “women” from participating in females’ intramural, junior varsity and varsity teams, she told MarylandMatters.org.
Although the 29 states that have secured girls’ and women’s sports solely for actual females now have the high court’s imprimatur, Maryland and 20 other states, along with the District of Columbia — most of them Democratic-run — have obstinately refused to do likewise.
The high court majority held that the state bans violated neither the equal protection clause of the Constitution nor Title IX, the 1972 federal law that bars discrimination based on sex in federally funded educational programs.
The Supreme Court decision, however, does not require the holdout states to protect girls’ and women’s athletics. That unfairness and wrongheadedness are permitted under federalism and states’ rights, in a rare instance where the left has given a whit about those principles.
Advertisement Advertisement
The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights said in late June that it was launching a Title IX investigation into the Maryland state Department of Education and three local school districts — Montgomery, Frederick and Prince George’s counties — for policies allowing transgender students to use restrooms and play on sports teams that align with their gender identities, rather than their biological sex.
However, President Trump and the Education Department under Linda McMahon have made clear they have a trump card (pun intended) to play to protect girls and women from unfair competition and losing athletic titles, trophies and scholarships to make-believe females.
That is not as rare as chromosome-science-denying Democrats would have you believe. According to SheWon.org, a site that tracks this issue, 3,547 female athletes have been robbed of 5,095 titles, medals, records and/or scholarships across 2,126 competitions in 53 various sports by these intersex interlopers worldwide over the past 25 years.
Mr. Trump, who won reelection in 2024 in no small part by vowing to protect girls’ and women’s sports, can and should leverage the carrot and stick of federal education funding to prod blue states to do the right thing.
Ample precedent dates back 40 years to October 1986, when the National Minimum Drinking Age Act — signed into law by President Reagan on July 17, 1984 — set its compliance deadline for states, which risked losing up to 10% of their federal highway funds if they had not raised the drinking age to 21. By mid-1988, all 50 states and the District of Columbia had done so.
Advertisement Advertisement
It would be interesting to see how quickly Maryland and the other holdout states would fall in line and act to protect female interscholastic athletics if federal education dollars were similarly sequestered.
Follow the author
Editorial Board
Follow author updates Follow Click to follow. Manage followed authors