As a 15-year-old student-athlete in Seattle, Washington, Brooke has been forced to run track against biological boys who identify as transgender girls.
The high school freshman has beaten the biological boys before, she told the Washington Examiner, but she has repeatedly seen the other girls on her team lose to them. She said they are both stronger and faster than the biological girls.
“Our team is being set back because of a guy that says he’s a girl. That is totally wrong and unfair,” said Brooke, whose identity is being protected as a minor. “I thought I was completely and utterly alone, trying to stand up for something that is clearly wrong.”
High school and college athletics have been contending with the question of allowing biological males to compete against females for several years. The controversy has led at least 26 states to enact various restrictions on the practice, noting the clear advantage of biologically male athletes.
President Joe Biden’s Department of Education already finalized rules governing enforcement of the sexual harassment and discrimination portions of Title IX in April, changing the definition of sex to include claimed gender identities. Critics contended this effectively banned sex-specific private spaces such as restrooms, allowing school-age and adult males to use the same facilities as women and girls.
After the presidential election in November, the Biden administration is widely expected to take gender ideology further in separate Title IX rules governing sports, tying federal education dollars to allowing students who were born biologically male but no longer identify as such to compete against girls in female sports.
Critics of these practices say it isn’t even just that biological boys are stronger and faster than girls —they also don’t have the same physical challenges that are inherent to female reproductive anatomy.
“He doesn’t have different [menstrual cycle] hormones. If we feel super tired one day, if our muscles are cramping, he doesn’t have that,” Brooke said of her transgender competitor. “He doesn’t have to carry extra weight on his chest. He’s just built different, and exactly then, it takes away opportunities from us.”
Brooke’s father, Russell, shared similar thoughts with the Washington Examiner, highlighting the blunt biological realities that separate women and men.
“You’re a boy. You are not a girl. You do not have a period,” Russell said. “You’re not running with a tampon, and you didn’t lose sleep because you had cramps that night. You didn’t have to worry about bleeding through your shorts.”
The difficulty as a parent is enormous, Russell said.
“You just feel so helpless, that you can’t do anything,” he said. “And you’ve got this situation where your daughter and all her friends are being taken advantage of and humiliated.”
This is just one of many families that have struggled with the battle over transgender athletes in high school girls sports in the past decade.
Although transgender athletes have not gained notoriety until relatively recently, the International Olympic Committee, for example, has allowed competition since about 2004. At that time, the IOC required transition surgeries and sufficiently low testosterone levels for biological males to compete in female sports, but the organization has since weakened the requirements multiple times to emphasize “inclusion.”
This came up sporadically in the 2010s, likely highlighted by the 2015 announcement that Bruce Jenner, the 1976 Olympic decathlon champion, had undergone transition and adopted the name Caitlyn. Citing personal experience as an elite athlete, however, Jenner has repeatedly spoken against biological males competing in women’s sports.
In 2016, the IOC for the first time got rid of its surgery requirement for eligibility, and the Obama administration issued a directive altering Title IX to allow transgender schoolchildren to use any restroom they chose. Observers noted at the time that the Obama bathroom directive would tee up the question for sports.
States and athletic associations alike have created their own regulations on transgender participation on teams that do not align with their biological sex, some being permissive and others restricting the practice for safety. But the patchwork meant that in some parts of the country, women and girls would start losing podium positions to biological males who decided to compete against them after transitioning.
Christy Mitchell spoke with the Washington Examiner about a seven-year experience that began in 2017 with her daughter Chelsea competing against biological males in track competitions.
“This started for her when she was just 14 years old, you know, stepping up to the line with a boy, male athlete beside her, knowing that the race was unfair,” Christy said. “It’s a hard way to have to grow up in those really pivotal years to have to be caught up in this lie.”
Chelsea ran 24 races in high school against biological male competitors, losing titles at state competitions four times, due in large part to a policy from the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference, which governs school athletics in the state, allowing biological males into female competition based on their gender identity.
The Mitchells filed complaints with the Trump administration’s Department of Education, arguing that Connecticut state policy violated protections under Title IX.
In 2020, just before the Trump administration finalized its own Title IX rulemaking, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights found that the transgender policy the Mitchells were challenging was a violation. Although the department threatened to withhold federal education funding unless the situation was rectified, the finding was not legally binding.
Chelsea, now 21, said in retrospect that sports played such a vital role in her adolescence and personal development despite the drawn-out legal challenge and the emotionally painful losses to biological male competitors.
“I think high school is just such a crucial time in our lives, and I think it was definitely really imperative to my self-growth and my self-confidence back then. Track was a huge confidence booster for me,” Chelsea said. “Repeatedly losing the state championships, repeatedly losing out on these opportunities, it was such an important moment for me, and I definitely think I grew from this overall experience.”
While it had been happening for years, concerns not just about fairness but the safety of female athletes, both in regard to sports injury and being forced to undress in front of biological males in the same locker rooms, reached a fevered pitch when Lia Thomas, a biological male who identifies as female, won the NCAA Division I swimming national championship in 2022, taking the top spot from the women Thomas competed against.
Following the incident, collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines became a poster child for the #SaveWomensSports movement and an advocate for female athletes of all ages.
The same problems highlighted by Gaines and other collegiate athletes were occurring all along at the high school level while receiving much less attention. This is in part because the high school competition is less elite and more localized. But it’s also because school districts, administrators, and coaches silenced the young athletes who have sought to express growing concerns.
Many of the athletes speaking with the Washington Examiner noted the adults in their high schools would privately acknowledge how unfair it was. Some even admitted an increased risk of serious injury in more physical sports but told students and parents not to talk about it.
As the Washington Examiner reported in May, the United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women and girls has been seeking input about transgender violence against women in sports, citing examples of how the practice constitutes “incursions into their privacy, including voyeurism, sexual harassment, and physical and sexual attacks, by effectively removing single-sex spaces.”
Payton McNabb, a former high school volleyball player from North Carolina, told the Washington Examiner that she “never in a million years” thought she would have to compete against transgender athletes who were born as biological males in the politically conservative area where she grew up.
McNabb was knocked unconscious following a blow to the head from a volleyball spike by a biological male player on the opposing team during the first week of her senior year in August 2022. Nearly two years later, she still suffers from impaired vision, partial paralysis on her right side, and anxiety and depression following the incident.
“If it didn’t happen to me, I probably have a lot of opinions on what I should have done and what I would have done in that situation, but you really don’t know what to do until you’re actually in it,” McNabb said.
More girls at the high school level may be put into the situation as the debate over biological males in female sports intensifies later this year.
The Department of Education is set to finalize its rules governing Title IX sports provisions in the fall, and while it is not clear what they will include, the proposed changes follow suit with the other Title IX changes that require schools to prioritize gender identity over biological sex.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has successfully evaded questions on what will be included, but Republican lawmakers have said they can see the writing on the wall given the stance of the Biden administration making it a priority in a day-one executive order to implement the “reasoning” of Bostock v. Clayton County, which redefined sex to include claimed gender identity as it related to employment discrimination, across the entire federal government.
The most recent changes to Title IX are the response to that executive order, but if the sports portion is finalized toward the end of the year, it may very well be within the time frame a new Congress in 2025 could repeal it under the Congressional Review Act.
As politicians and bureaucrats duke it out, the players and competitors will have to grapple with difficult choices and complex emotions when confronted with the real-life experience of playing against males.
McNabb said she, her teammates, and others in her community felt intense guilt following the incident because “we all knew it was unfair.”
“You tell yourself we should have just not played, we should just walk off the court, and none of this would have happened,” McNabb said.
Some students, on the other hand, have done just that.
In mid-April, a group of girls in West Virginia “stepped in” and “stepped out” of shot put and discus competitions at the Harrison County Middle School Championships to protest the inclusion of a biological male being allowed to compete against them, by virtue of a federal appeals court order. The transgender athlete won the shot put event and placed second in discus, and the five girls who protested got banned from future competition, which is being challenged in court.
Brooke dealt with the unfair competition by organizing her team to run in a pack as a collective of girls to show solidarity. She continues to encourage her teammates to call out the unfairness in the competitions, staying strong despite pushback from school administrators.
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Even though it feels isolating, Brooke said no girl should feel alone in this fight.
“I know that it can be super scary going up, but when something’s wrong, I feel like we have to say it and we have to know that this is wrong and this is unfair,” Brooke said. “I just want people to know that they’re not alone in this. There are girls out there that are fighting against this and [know] that this is wrong.”
Gabrielle M. Etzel is the healthcare policy reporter for the Washington Examiner. Breccan F. Thies is an investigative reporter for the Washington Examiner.