INDIANA (LifeSiteNews) – Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita is appealing a district court ruling forcing a public school girls softball team to accept a biological male, decrying an “absolute assault” on equal opportunity.
The Daily Caller reported that U.S. District Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson ruled this summer that a 10-year-old boy at Indianapolis Public Schools had to be allowed to join the all-girls softball team, in violation of a state law enacted in May that requires public and private schools to “expressly designate” sports as either for boys or girls and prohibits biological males from joining female teams.
Rokita filed an appeal on September 6 challenging the ruling.
“Self-identifying as a girl, as no gender, or as a blend of genders does not negate the advantages that come from being born male,” the filing contends. “That means transgender athletes born male will outperform athletes born female who have equivalent levels of dedication, training, and skill, displacing those female athletes from rosters and podiums. It would turn Title IX on its head to construe the statute to privilege gender identity, an unprotected characteristic, at the expense of sex, the protected characteristic.”
“Forcing female student-athletes to compete against males in women’s sports is an absolute assault on girls’ equality of opportunity and even their physical safety,” Rokita declared in a press release. “Males possess certain physiological advantages that make them faster and stronger, and it’s unconscionable to ignore these scientific realities. The Left must stop sacrificing women’s well-being on the altar of transgender woke-ism.”
Mandatory inclusion of gender-confused individuals in opposite-sex sports is billed as a matter of sensitivity and respect for perceived “gender identity.” But critics argue that indulging transgender athletes in this way undermines the original rational basis for having sex-specific athletics in the first place, thereby depriving female athletes of recognition and professional or academic opportunities.
Scientific research affirms that physiology gives males distinct athletic advantages that cannot be fully negated by hormone suppression.
In a 2019 paper published by the Journal of Medical Ethics, New Zealand researchers found that “healthy young men [do] not lose significant muscle mass (or power) when their circulating testosterone levels were reduced to (below International Olympic Committee guidelines) for 20 weeks,” and “indirect effects of testosterone” on factors such as bone structure, lung volume, and heart size “will not be altered by hormone therapy”; therefore, “the advantage to transwomen [biological men] afforded by the [International Olympic Committee] guidelines is an intolerable unfairness.”