Discrimination and Exclusion

When asked about the possibility of including trans-identifying males in girls’ and women’s sports, Indiana Fever player Sophie Cunningham recently said, “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men. … I think that I am here to extend love. But I also think with that love is truth, being honest.” After receiving an onslaught of criticism on social media for that answer, she asked if she still stood by her statements, Cunningham replied, “I said what I said.”

When her Indiana Fever head coach Stephanie White was asked a similar question, she evaded the question by responding, “I don’t know that I would say that I am not educated enough from a scientific standpoint. I don’t ever believe that exclusion is the answer.”

In the Fever’s next game against the Minnesota Lynx, the Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeves wore a "Trans Kids Belong" t-shirt during their game. Afterwards, Reeves said, “exclusion is never the answer. Separate isn’t equal.” If exclusion is never the answer, then why are biological males excluded from women’s sports in the first place? If separate isn’t equal, then why are women’s sports separate from men’s sports?

Reeves went onto say that she wants to “educate” Sophie Cunningham which is the height of arrogance. What she means by “educate” is, ‘I am smarter than Sophie Cunningham, so it is my job to indoctrinate her into thinking like me, and adopting my opinions.’ At the same time that Reeves wants males competing in female sports, taking gold medals and roster spots from women, she is complaining that there are too many men coaching in women’s sports. I guess exclusion is an answer if it means preserving your job.

WNBA Golden State Valkyries head coach Natalie Nakase chimed in on the controversy by stating that “sports is about belonging. Its about inclusivity… that includes transwomen.” She went onto say that she is “all about” transwomen playing in the WNBA. “Sports is about belonging... I’m big on that just because I have been criticized for my height, for my ethnicity."

It is ironic that these two professional basketball coaches speak about the importance of “belonging” in sports as they coach in one of the most exclusive leagues in the world, where hundreds of women are cut each year. Those women are handed their walking papers and told that they do not belong. They are excluded from participating. And these coaches are the ones who are doing the excluding. Professional sports is not about inclusion and belonging. It is highly competitive. It is cut throat. It is about exclusion. Success and inclusion is based solely on merit, and not by rigging the system to your advantage. When they begin including transwomen in the WNBA, then more biological women will suddenly be unfairly excluded.

Trans-identifying people should be allowed to compete in sports, but they should only compete with those who share their same biological sex at birth. No one is saying that transwomen should be excluded from competing all together, they should just compete in the men’s division because they were born with a male body and they should not compete in the women’s division. So, theses coaches are wrong by making this issue about inclusion when it is really an issue of proper placement. The transwomen will not want to compete in the men’s division because they will argue that it would be unfair because due to their transition, the men have a physical advantage over them which ironically is the same argument that women are using against transwomen.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson could not help but to jump in the fray when she claimed that banning trans-athletes from women sports is “discrimination”. She is right. Banning trans people from women’s sports is discrimination. It absolutely is. That’s the point of having women’s sports. It’s to discriminate – separate male bodies from female bodies. Not everyone is or should be included in female sports, just as Little League baseball discriminates against anyone over the age of 12. It’s discrimination, but it is discrimination that makes sense and keeps the competition fair. We do not want 18-year-olds playing against 12-year-olds, even if the 18-year-old identifies as a 12-year-old.

In 2001, Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defined the word discriminate as; to see special features or note a difference between things (to differentiate); To mark or distinguish by discerning differences, especially to separate an object from another; and to distinguish and select what is true or appropriate or excellent. Its synonym was discernment.

25 years later, the definition has magically morphed into; to unfairly treat a person or group differently from other people or groups on a class or categorical basis (such as race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation). So, now if you discriminate at all, you are lumped in with racists, sexists and homophobes. The woke leftists are rewriting dictionaries, now. As proof, the sentence the dictionary used the word in was: “the court ruled the ID law was intended to discriminate against voters of color.” Actually, voter ID laws are intended to discriminate, but only between those who can vote legally and those who were trying to vote illegally. But because they have baked a negative connotation into the word discriminate, anytime that we discriminate, we are accused of being bigoted or prejudicial. 

It is okay and even necessary to discriminate. We can discriminate between good people and bad people, law abiding citizens and criminals, those who love America and those who don’t, citizens and non-citizens, legal voters and those trying to commit voter fraud. Simply because we discriminate does not mean we are racist or bigoted or prejudiced. For example, a disproportionate percentage of the prison population is black, and the leftists claim that’s discrimination. It is. We discriminate between who we throw into jail, based solely on who commits crime. The police are not arresting random innocent black people; they are arresting people based on who breaks the law, and it just so happens that a disproportionate number of black people break the law.

Theres a disproportionate number of black people in the NBA, is that also a sign of racial discrimination? It is a sign of discrimination but not racial discrimination. The NBA teams discriminate based on who can play basketball on an NBA level and who can’t, and after they discriminate on that basis, they look up and they see that there’s a disproportion number of players who are black in the NBA just as the cops discriminate based on who commits crimes and who doesn’t, and in the end, they see there’s a disproportion number of black people in prison.

It is wrong to discriminate based on sex, except when it comes to sports. The purpose of having women sports is specifically to discriminate between men and women. Men have a distinct physical advantage over women when it comes to athletics. According to the CDC Body Measurements, in the United States, adult men are on average about 5.4 inches taller and 28 pounds heavier than adult women. On average, adult men are physically stronger than adult women, with female muscle strength typically between 40% to 70% of male strength. Males have larger skeletal size, higher bone density, greater total lean body mass, and a greater proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibers. Males have larger lung capacity which produces larger oxygen and blood flow through their bodies. The results of these physical advantages are evident. Up until now, transwomen have “won” 1,941 gold metals over biological women. The most ironic part of this whole issue is that these trans athletes hate their male bodies so much that they want to radically change them, yet they have no problem, using their male bodies to unfairly take medals away people who were born with female bodies.

So, it is right to discriminate between males and females in sports. If we didn’t, if women were forced to compete with men athletically, we would never have heard of female icons such as Serena Williams, Simone Biles, Alex Morgan, Naomi Osaka, Katie Ledecky, Billie Jean King, Florence Griffith Joyner, Mia Hamm, Caitlin Clark, and thousands of other elite female athletes. Those names would mean nothing to us if we did not discriminate between men and women when it came to sports. Serena Williams even admitted that “ a woman should not compete with a man… men’s tennis and women’s tennis are completely almost two separate sports. If I [Serena Williams] were to play Andy Murray, I would lose 6-0, 6-0… the men are a lot faster, and they serve harder.” That’s why trans-identifying males like A.B. Hernandez is dominating women high school sports in California and shattering state records in track and field.

In 2017, an Academy team of 15-year-old boys from Dallas played the US Women’s Soccer National Team, and beat them handily. They could all claim that they are in fact girls, and replace every single member of the US Women’s National Team. So, the entire purpose of having women’s sports is to discriminate between the male body and the female body. The more society allows male bodies to compete in female sports, the less female, female sports becomes, until one day female sports will not be distinguishable from male sports.

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Mr. Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.