By now you’ve heard about the comments of the University of South Carolina women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley. A day prior to South Carolina’s victory over Iowa in the NCAA women’s championship game last Sunday, Staley was asked whether she thought biological men should be allowed to play women’s basketball. She said yes:
I’m on the opinion of, if you’re a woman, you should play. If you consider yourself a woman and you want to play sports or vice versa, you should be able to play. That’s my opinion.
This is one of the most accomplished figures in women’s sports, certainly in women’s basketball. Dawn Staley has coached the Gamecocks to three national titles. Her team has won eight Southeastern Conference championships and eight regular-season titles. She has captured four Naismith Coach of the Year awards. She won a gold medal as a coach at the 2020 Olympics and has won three of them as a player. Playing at Virginia, she won two national player-of-the-year awards. (READ MORE: The Strange, Growing Demands of the Alphabet People)
She exhibited greatness both running the court and stalking the sidelines. She knows the game and knows what it takes to win. One group that has helped her teams achieve excellence is the Highlighters, against whom her squad practices. Said she:
The Highlighters are really, really, really good. Although a lot of times they beat us in practice, a lot of times they beat us, so it makes it easier when we’re able to just come out and play our competition, because the Highlighters, no matter what the speed of our opponents is, they’re much quicker. They do [everything] at a much faster pace.
The Highlighters, you see, are guys. They aren’t pros; they aren’t Division I players, borrowed from the men’s team to practice against her unit. They’re good, but not good enough to play varsity at a major college. And they dominate the best women’s college team in the land.
It shouldn’t be necessary to say this, but male basketball players, generally speaking, are bigger, stronger, and faster than female basketball players — through no fault of the women — and, all things being equal, they would dominate a women’s team in any fair contest.
In fact, a good boys high school team could dominate. Clay Travis, radio host and media presence, has a standing offer, unanswered, of $1 million to any WNBA champion that beats a high school team of his choosing: “It is 100% true, a good state championship caliber high school boys team would smoke the best team in the WNBA.”
You know this. I know this. Dawn Staley knows this.
The media know this, too. And yet, in the aftermath of Staley’s comment, all sports media outlets except OutKick, which asked Staley the question to begin with, fell right in line with the progressive position. In fact, the media outrage was directed at the OutKick correspondent who asked the question.
It’s possible Staley didn’t believe what she said — she did take her time answering, after all — but regardless, she felt compelled to give the answer she gave, and as dumbfounding and incomprehensible as that answer is, it says something about the culture war.
The fact is that the transgender-in-sports issue has been folded into the broader progressive playbook. It’s become a cardinal tenet of liberalism, along with pro-abortion, pro–gay rights, pro-reparations, school board control of educational content, gun control, etc. It’s now part of the hive of issues one must hold in all their purity or face the specter of denunciation, ridicule, and cancellation.
That’s why so very few have the sand to oppose males-in-female-sports. Reject it and face expulsion from the team; ridicule from sports media, who are as liberal as mainstream media; and, if you’re in Scotland, possible imprisonment (ask J.K. Rowling, who narrowly escaped such). (READ MORE: J.K. Rowling Is on Fire)
Where this goes — where it has to go — is no divisions at all. No dedicated men’s sports and no dedicated women’s sports. Just sports, in which men and women are all on the same teams, playing on the same field. In that case, women would be rendered inconsequential in absolutely every sport in the world, with the possible exception of rhythmic gymnastics.
Women have been working for over 50 years to achieve a level playing field, ever since Title IX passed in 1972. What some would call the pinnacle of that effort was surmounted last Sunday, as more millions tuned in to watch the women’s NCAA championship basketball game than tuned in a day later to watch the men’s NCAA championship.
Put a couple of 6-foot-6 dudes who think they’re women and who know their way around the hoop on a women’s team, put them in Women’s March Madness, and 50 years of striving for equality go away.
As I said, it’s dumbfounding and incomprehensible.
A Bright Light
One sports association, however, has bucked the trend. The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) on Monday approved a policy that prohibits self-identified transgender men from competing in women’s athletics. To participate in an NAIA-sponsored women’s sports, a player’s “biological sex assigned at birth” must be female, and the player cannot have begun hormone therapy.
Said NAIA president and CEO Jim Carr in a press release:
We are unwavering in our support of fair competition for our student-athletes. It is crucial that NAIA member institutions, conferences, and student-athletes participate in an environment that is equitable and respectful. With input from our member institutions and the Transgender Task Force, the NAIA’s Council of Presidents has confirmed our path forward.
The NAIA comprises mostly small colleges — 241 of them — and sponsors 25 sports. About 83,000 athletes compete in NAIA athletics.
The association’s statement is stronger than the NCAA’s, which allows self-identified transgenders to participate in their sports if they comply with guidelines governing the international sport in which they are competing. The Olympics will allow self-identified transgender athletes if they’ve completed their transition before the age of 12.