This image came across my Facebook page this morning. It had the following rant attached:
Copy pasta:
Signal boosting.. CN: mentions the actions mandated by Ohio law to be taken by a doctor on the body of a girl suspected of not being “female enough” to play sports on a girl’s team, which plausibly verge on sexual assault.
——–
This is my daughter. She just turned 9. Here is why I would never allow her to play middle or high school sports if we lived in Ohio…
A few days ago, the Ohio Republicans passed a change to state law that was snuck in at the last minute, under the guise of “protecting” girls sports.
Am. Sub. H. B. No. 151 (various versions of it are here)
This law allows ANYONE to dispute the sex of an athlete on a school team. There are no safeguards in place to ensure that this is not used maliciously. Girls who do not look feminine enough, girls of color, girls who are “too good” are likely to be the biggest targets. But any girl could be targeted. Maybe someone doesn’t like her parents or maybe someone wants to make sure the opposing team doesn’t have enough eligible players.
So what does a girl have to do to prove she is a girl? First, the physician has to examine the girl’s external and internal reproductive anatomy. I have to emphasize that this will impact girls as young as 5th or 6th grade, ~10-11 years old. A year or two older than my daughter.
Step one to proving your correct sex is female: A doctor will need to spread open your labia and examine the size of your clitoris. A clitoris that is “too large” could be a sign that you are intersex and not female enough for sports. Step two to proving your correct sex is female: A doctor will then insert one or two gloved fingers inside your vagina, while pressing against your abdomen with their other hand, so they can feel your uterus and ovaries. This will likely be quite painful for these young girls, and extremely traumatic. There is no medical reason to do a pelvic exam on girls this young, absent any signs of a problem. This is sexual assault and will traumatize these girls. That is by design. This part of the exam would probably be covered by insurance, depending on how it is billed. But these next two steps would likely not be covered for most people. Step three to proving your correct sex is female: Your blood will be drawn and your testosterone levels measured. How much testosterone is too much? Unclear.
Does having “high T” give girls an advantage? No, not always. But this bill leaves no room for nuance. Step four to proving your correct sex is female: Your blood will also be tested to see if you are XX or XY. Except not everyone is XX or XY and there are XY women who have no advantage in sports because of the nuances of their genetics, but that won’t matter here 🤷🏻♀️
This bill offers protection from retaliation for people who report an athlete they suspect is not truly female. There is no requirements that they make these reports in good faith. There is no protection for the athletes accused of lying about their sex. Any athlete who suspects they were “harmed” by an athlete who lied about their sex can sue that school district. If that athlete’s parents are unwilling to have their daughter sexually assaulted, or cannot afford the testing, the district will have to pay $$ to the accuser. So from an administrative standpoint, you basically have to require that all female athletes do this testing in order to play interscholastic sports. Otherwise your district is in danger of having to forfeit games and losing litigation if you don’t have this paperwork up front. Interscholastic sports in Ohio will only be accessible to girls whose parents are willing to subject them to sexual assault and very expensive and unnecessary bloodwork.
Congrats to everyone trying to “save” women’s sports from your trans athlete boogeymen. Is winning the most important part of high school sports? Because setting aside the incredible trauma and expense caused by this bill, at the end of the day, the message is that winning is what matters the most. That’s not the lesson I want my daughter to learn from sports.
My response:
So the law they posted in their message is real. However, the description of what’s to be done is absolutely incorrect, and is totally fear mongering. I’d like to add that internal and external examinations by doctors are already required by all children participating in sports, because injuries can happen. When our kids (one boy, one girl, biologically speaking) went into swim, they were required to have an exam every single year. All their bits were checked to make sure there were no hernias, physical or other problems, etc. This is ABSOLUTELY NOT sexual assault. I hate this level of bullshit.
To be absolutely clear (especially for those who don’t care to slog through the actual bill), this is what the relevant portion of the bill has to say:
(C) If a participant’s sex is disputed, the participant shall establish the participant’s sex by presenting a signed physician’s statement indicating the participant’s sex based upon only the following:
(1) The participant’s internal and external reproductive anatomy;
(2) The participant’s normal endogenously produced levels of testosterone;
(3) An analysis of the participant’s genetic makeup.
Numbers 1 and 2 in this list are done at some (though not all) yearly exams. The third can be done if you want, and I will say that if it’s going to be a requirement for school sports, it SHOULD be covered by insurance, but it’s entirely non-invasive. They keep talking about unnecessary blood tests, which is just silly. They check testosterone and estrogen levels in both boys and girls at the middle school level in many cases, because they want to make sure everything’s going as it should be. Number 3 is a cheek swab.
And those 10 and 11 year old girls are almost certainly already having pelvic exams because they’ll have started their period and guess what happens when you start your period? You get pelvic exams! Are they traumatic? Well, yes, they are. I suppose they aren’t so much more traumatic than having someone telling you to cough while tugging on your balls, or sticking a finger up your behind to check your prostate, but pelvic exams are rated as “very uncomfortable” to “excruciating” depending upon the doctor and the woman being examined. Again, these are important tests done to all children (or they should be… if they aren’t, I’d be asking WTH is going on, frankly).
This is the kind of crap that I’m seeing from the Left right now. I can sympathize with some of the parents who have high performing kids (especially those with biological girls playing with the boys AS boys), who just want to support them but have gotten themselves caught up in the whole gender contagion. But sympathy or not, having biological males on a girl’s team is dangerous. If people want to have mixed teams, Ohio allows for that. You just have to be honest about it. And I know plenty of kids who’d love to do mixed teams, and all power to them. You just have to be HONEST ABOUT IT.
As a parent to a kid who’s currently identifying as “non-binary,” I would not have permitted them to swim as the gender opposite to their biological one. Had they desired to do baseball, soccer, football, basketball, whatever… I would not have permitted them to play as the opposite gender, no matter how they dressed and acted. It would have been wrong, and someone could have gotten hurt.
Leave a Reply