CNN Opinion: Anti-Trans Republicans Don't Give a Damn About Women's Sports

[erpowers]

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The proclamation builds on a nationwide campaign against trans women competing in sports. That campaign has required a number of conservatives to do a 180 on women’s sports. Long a subject of derision and defunding by many on the right, now these sports have become sacrosanct.

That about-face comes not because conservatives have discovered the value of women’s athletics, but because they have discovered its value in the broader field of anti-trans politics and the culture wars fueled by those politics. Though the new legislation comes with names like the “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act” DeSantis signed, the goal has nothing to do with securing equal resources, opportunity or pay for women athletes – issues the right has objected to for decades.

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In the years that followed in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s (before DeSantis, now in his early 40s, was on the scene), Title IX became a focal point for conservatives who felt that equal opportunity protections for women athletes, rather than being a cause of celebration, was in fact robbing men of their opportunities. The pages of conservative magazines like National Review were full of articles attacking the law as an affirmative action program that harmed male athletes. As Kathryn Jean Lopez wrote for National Review in 2002, in a review of the anti-Title IX book “Tilting the Playing Field,” “Title IX…leads to a clearly unjust result. Women today have the upper hand in just about every area of education – except sports, so feminists are now demanding special privileges in that area as well.”

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Yet these arguments have not led to calls for, say, more protections from predatory male coaches and doctors, or more funding for women’s athletics programs. Rather, it has offered only one solution: purging trans women from athletic competitions. Once they’ve done that, there will be nothing to stop them from returning to long-standing attacks on Title IX, leaving women athletes – both cisgender and trans – behind.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/25/opinions/ron-desantis-lia-thomas-title-ix-women-sports-hemmer/index.html?msclkid=bac761b3acaa11ecb0193b4f0fc00d3b

I am so happy Nicole Hemmer wrote this opinion piece. This piece touches on many of the points I have been thinking about since Republicans started making a big deal about Lia Thomas winning the 500 yard freestyle race at an NCAA Championship. Since the Republican reaction to Lia Thomas, I have been thinking about what Republicans were saying about women's sports in the 90s. I remember Republicans attacking Title IX and women's sports by claiming they took opportunities from male athletes. I also agree with Hemmer's last sentence which states, "Once they've done that, there will be nothing to stop them from returning to long-standing attacks on Title IX, leaving women athletes - both cisgender and trans - behind".