One Missouri legislator has introduced a bill that would ban transgender high schoolers from competing on teams that don’t match their biological sex. Speaking at a state education hearing on Tuesday, GOP State Sen. Cindy O’Laughlin stated, “It is a known biological fact that males are born with categorically superior strength, speed and endurance. It has nothing to do with any other issue than trying to create a fair playing field,” as KY3 reported.
Fox News noted, “Under current Missouri law, transgender athletes who want to play on teams that don’t match their assigned birth must apply to the Missouri State High School Activities Association (MSHSAA), submitting medical records and other relevant documentation. Transgender women must prove they’ve been on testosterone blockers for a year and stick with them.”
A similar bill has been presented in Missouri’s House of Representatives. If the state’s general Assembly approves either of the bills, they will be listed on the state ballot and put to a vote.
One girl who identifies as a boy protested, “Putting me on the girls activities won’t make me a girl. This bill will force me on the girls teams where I end up beating every single girl on my high school cross country team in every race, and I’d have placed 28th in the state as a freshman.”
The increasing number of cases in which transgender high school athletes have competed on teams opposite from their biological sex has triggered at least one recent lawsuit in which three female high school athletes in Connecticut sued the state’s Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC), which has permitted boys to compete in events and win awards that would otherwise have gone to girls.
Chelsea Mitchell, a senior at Canton High School, Selina Soule, a senior at Glastonbury High School, and Alanna Smith, a sophomore at Danbury High School, filed a federal lawsuit with their families after CIAC’s policy allowed two males to compete in girls’ athletic competitionsbeginning in the 2017 track season. Those biological males, Miller and Andraya Yearwood, had taken 15 women’s state championship titles (titles held in 2016 by nine different Connecticut girls) and had taken more than 85 opportunities to participate in higher level competitions from female track athletes in the 2017, 2018, and 2019 seasons alone.
On February 14, Mitchell defeated one of the biological males who has won numerous titles in girls’ events, winning the Class S 55-meter dash title with her time of 7.18 seconds. She beat Bloomfield High School student Terry Miller, who is a biological boy and ran the event in 7.20 seconds.
Mitchell, who is currently ranked the fastest biological girl in Connecticut in the 55m, lost four girls’ state championships and two all-New England awards. She recalled, “I knew that I was the fastest girl here, one of the fastest in the state. 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.”
The complaint filed in Soule v. Connecticut Association of Schools states that policies that permit boys to compete in girls sports threaten Title IX gains because “inescapable biological facts of the human species [are] not stereotypes, ‘social constructs,’ or relicts of past discrimination. As a result of these many inherent physiological differences between men and women after puberty, male athletes consistently achieve records 10-20% higher than comparably fit and trained women across almost all athletic events, with even wider consistent disparities in long-term endurance events and contests of sheer strength such as weight-lifting.”
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