On Wednesday, Attorney General William Barr sided with the preservation of single-sex girls sports, filing a statement of interest in a Connecticut lawsuit concerning transgender girls, who are biologically male, competing in girls’ sporting events.
As highlighted by The Daily Wire in February, student-athletes Selina Soule, Alanna Smith, and Chelsea Mitchell, represented by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC), which has permitted boys to compete in events and win awards that would otherwise have gone to girls.
Barr agreed with the girls’ complaint: “Under CIAC’s interpretation of Title IX…schools may not account for the real physiological differences between men and women,” Barr and other Justice Department officials said in the letter, according to ESPN. “Instead, schools must have certain biological males — namely, those who publicly identify as female — compete against biological females. In so doing, CIAC deprives those women of the single-sex athletic competitions that are one of the marquee accomplishments of Title IX.”
“Males will always have inherent physical advantages over comparably talented and trained girls — that’s the reason we have girls sports in the first place,” said ADF lawyer Christiana Holcomb, who is representing the girls and their families. “And a male’s belief about his gender doesn’t eliminate those advantages.”
Soule, Smith, and Mitchell “were denied opportunities to compete at higher levels as boys took home the prizes,” The Daily Wire noted back in February. “CIAC’s policy allowed two males to compete in girls’ athletic competitions beginning in the 2017 track season. Those boys have taken 15 women’s state championship titles (titles held in 2016 by nine different Connecticut girls) and have taken more than 85 opportunities to participate in higher level competitions from female track athletes in the 2017, 2018, and 2019 seasons alone.”
“I knew that I was the fastest girl here, one of the fastest in the state,” Mitchell recalled. “I remembered all my training and everything I had been taught on how to maximize my performance … I thought of all the times that other girls have lost. I could feel the adrenaline in my blood and hope that wafted from me. That just possibly, I could win this. Then, the gun went off. And I lost.”
Soule, who was edged out by a biological male from qualifying for a state championship final, remarked: “It’s very frustrating and heartbreaking when us girls are at the start of the race and we already know that these [male] athletes are going to come out and win no matter how hard you try. They took away the spots of deserving girls, athletes … me being included.”
“Girls deserve to compete on a level playing field,” Holcomb previously stressed. “Forcing them to compete against boys isn’t fair, shatters their dreams, and destroys their athletic opportunities. Having separate boys’ and girls’ sports has always been based on biological differences, not what people believe about their gender, because those differences matter for fair competition. And forcing girls to be spectators in their own sports is completely at odds with Title IX, a federal law designed to create equal opportunities for women in education and athletics. Connecticut’s policy violates that law and reverses nearly 50 years of advances for women.”
