We count on Democracy Now for critical and accurate reporting, but they have failed miserably in their coverage of women’s sport and the movement to save it. Today DN allowed ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio to assert, unchallenged, that bills in state legislatures to protect female sport are “a backlash to the very notion” of trans humanity, “ban trans young people from sports,” and “take aim at the bodies of trans young people."

DN host Amy Goodman neither asked for specifics to back up these general, and often hyperbolic, statements nor challenged them in any way. Nor was equal time given to the growing movement to protect female sport, though there are women who can speak ably to these issues, in particular, Beth Stelzer, founder of https://savewomenssports.com/

DN failed to address in any way the biological realities of male-bodied people competing in women’s sport, nor did they report on the dubious legal justification in President Biden’s executive order on nondiscrimination regarding Title IX.

The biological reality is that males and females are built differently. Duke law professor, early Title IX beneficiary, and US National Collegiate and Swiss National 800 meter champion Doriane Lambelet Coleman writes:

Compared to females, males have greater lean body mass (more skeletal muscle and less fat), larger hearts (both in absolute terms and scaled to lean body mass), higher cardiac outputs, larger hemoglobin mass, larger VO2 max (i.e. a person’s ability to take in oxygen), greater glycogen utilization, and higher anaerobic capacity…

Without an eligibility rule based in sex-linked traits, we wouldn’t see female bodies on any podium.[i]

Coleman and development biologist Emma Hilton note that the performance gap between males and females is about 10-12%, but much higher in sports such as weight lifting. Hilton documents the performance gap in a number of Olympic events and notes that in 2017 alone, 744 high school boys bested the 100 meter record of the fastest female athlete of all time – Florence Griffith Joyner.[ii]

Coleman writes powerfully of her own experience and the effect on women of color of allowing male-bodied people to compete in women’s sport:

This is the truth about race and athletics: Because our sport is mostly populated at the elite levels by athletes of color, it is this group that will be most impacted however the women’s category is defined…

My own story is a testament to the power of mandatory set-asides for female sport... I was the first female recipient of a full track scholarship to Villanova University in 1978, six years after Title IX passed into law. I was recruited because I was one of the best under-18 (U18) female half-milers coming out of U.S. high schools that year. Because even mediocre boys could and did run faster, had Title IX not forced colleges to create programs and set-aside funds for girls, I wouldn’t have gotten that scholarship. And because my family was poor, I might never have gone to college.

Given Strangio is a civil rights lawyer, one might expect DN to ask Strangio to address or defend President Biden’s recent Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation. That EO claims the US Supreme Court decision Bostock v Clayton County (2020) also applies to Title IX (education amendments to the 1964 Civil Rights Act).

The Bostock ruling re-interpreted sex discrimination prohibited by Title VII as including discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the majority opinion, made clear it was a narrow employment ruling, applying only to Title VII. Yet in the EO, the Biden administration asserts that the ruling DOES apply to Title IX.

Such biased and incomplete reporting is unworthy of Democracy Now. We urge them to remedy this deficiency ASAP.

[i] Coleman, Doriane Lambelet. 2019. “A Victory for Female Athletes Everywhere.” https://quillette.com/2019/05/03/a-victory-for-female-athletes-everywhere/

[ii] Hilton, Emma. 2018. “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger: Why We Must Protect Female Sports.” https://tinyurl.com/y2klacuh