The LGBT blog Outsports and transgender athletes are ridiculing high school girls in Connecticut and their Christian lawyers who filed a Title IX complaint with the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights over the state's transgender policy. Dawn Ennis calls their legal counsel, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a "hate" group.
Selina Soule, who appeared on Fox News with Tucker Carlson Monday, and two unidentified minor girls are asking for an investigation of illegal discrimination against them and for the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference to change its policy recognizing gender identity. ADF says the state policy allowing biological males identifying as females to compete in girls’ athletic events is depriving girls of opportunities to compete at elite levels.
Throughout the past two high school track and field seasons, biological boys have consistently out-performed girls. The most notable are Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood, boys mentioned in the ADF complaint who have broken a combined 10 girls' state records in Connecticut girls' track and field.
Outsports referred to the three "cisgender" girls' legal counsel as one of the organizations labeled a "hate" group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Ennis published a quote by trans women's beach handball player Athena Del Rosario, who said, “It’s laughable to think that a couple of trans girls cost these three plaintiffs anything." Del Rosario also said:
“Prospective colleges are going to be looking at their finish times and not what place they came in. They should have trained in such a way that would of been conducive to achieving their goals of making better times that would attract college recruiters. There are literally hundreds of colleges. The only thing that may have cost them opportunities is their poor attitudes towards other athletes and their focus on others instead of themselves.
“If anything those numbers in the finish times prove that they don’t have an advantage.”
Chloe Psyche Anderson, a biological male who'll play for the California-Santa Cruz women's volleyball team this fall, also scoffed at the legal complaint:
“It sounds like they’re trying to use this incident as proof that they’re being disenfranchised despite the fact cis women outnumber trans people, let alone trans high school track and field runners (a super small margin of the trans community) by a lot. It almost sounds like they’re trying to target only a few players, which in itself is straight up discrimination. This sounds like horse shit.”
CNN's report by Julia Jones, Taylor Romine and Evan Simko-Bednarski ran a quote by Holcomb stating Title IX was instituted to protect women in education and athletics from discrimination. CNN also ran a harsh rebuke of the complaint by GLSEN executive director Eliza Byard:
"This is a spurious lawsuit brought about by a parent and the Alliance Defending Freedom as part of a broader effort to bar trans students from equal access in sports. Trans girls are girls, and they should have access to all parts of school."
