Last week, U.S. women’s soccer team star Megan Rapinoe added her name to a letter that was written in opposition to the recently introduced “Protection of Girls and Women in Sports Act.”
If passed and signed into law, it would be added to Title IX and would keep boys and men who identify as a girl or a woman from being allowed to participate in girls’ and women’s sports.
The letter, which was also signed by 40 or so other professional female athletes, suggested that the priorities of Republican politicians who supported such legislation were skewed, and should be focused on things other than allegedly “forcing” children who now supposedly identify as the opposite sex “to sit on the sidelines, away from their peers and their communities.”
The letter was careful to use emotionally-loaded terms related to children throughout, like “girls,” “kids,” etc., and completely overlooked the larger point of how the bigger issues in this debate are the teenage, college, and pro athletes who were born men but who now identify as women and seek to participate in women’s sports.
Science has repeatedly confirmed that there are inherent physical differences between men and women that cannot be changed by a doctor and medications. It’s the main reason why there is something called “men’s sports” and something called “women’s sports.”
Men typically run faster than women, can swim faster than women, can bench press more weight than women, etc.
We’re seeing transgender “female” athletes like Lia Thomas crush their female competition on the women’s sports side, and the same holds true in other women’s sporting events like cycling and weightlifting.
And yet activist athletes like Rapinoe, who never once had to go up against a man in competition nor compete against one for her position on the women’s soccer team, assert that it should be okay for transgender women to take part in women’s sports, knowing well and good that the advantages the transgender women have over actual women are innate.
For years now, Rapinoe has appointed herself as a spokeswoman of sorts for women on issues like sexual harassment, equal pay in the workplace, and “equity in sports.” But every time the rubber has met the road, Rapinoe has picked her lane — the LGBTQ lane, of which she is also a member — and has chosen to stand with people who, if they had their way, would cause women’s sports as we know them now to cease to exist.
Astonishingly, she once even claimed that as far as sports were concerned that it was “just not that important” to make the distinction between men and women.
When you think about it, Rapinoe has been a pretty lousy spokeswoman for the women who she claims to represent when you consider the fact that she’s also an advocate for men who identify as women to be allowed to play on women’s teams, a position which completely undermines women’s sports.
But Rapinoe rarely plays soccer anymore, and as such she effectively has no skin in the game.
You can rest assured, though, that if a man had come for her position on the soccer team when she was an active player, she’d have pitched a very public fit and would have garnered sympathy from all the usual corners despite the fact that her predicament would be the very road women are headed down should lawmakers listen to “woke” sports figures like Rapinoe instead of relying on simple common sense and what science has shown us for centuries.
North Carolina native Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym Sister Toldjah and is a media analyst and regular contributor to RedState and Legal Insurrection.
