A ‘SHOT’ ACROSS THE BOW
Girls protest track win of trans, 13
A transgender middle-school student in West Virginia won her shot put competition by more than three feet last week, as a slew of girls staged a protest by refusing to compete against her.
Becky Pepper-Jackson, 13, took first place at the Harrison County Championships track-and-field meet Thursday with a 32-foot throw, records show.
Footage posted online from the meet shows at least five girls from a rival school stepping up to the plate and then refusing to take their throw in a show of protest.
Their results were marked down as “no distance.”
The protest unfolded just days after a federal appeals court ruled Pepper-Jackson couldn’t be banned from participating in crosscountry running and track and field with other girls.
The eighth-grader, who takes puberty-blocking medication and estrogen hormone therapy, has identified as a girl since elementary school.
Former collegiate swimmer-turned-activist Riley Gaines, who has been an outspoken critic of trans athletes participating in girls’ sporting events, was among those to lead the outrage over Pepper-Jackson’s most recent win.
“Five middle school female athletes in West Virginia refuse to throw shot put against male, Becky Pepper-Jackson. This comes just 2 days after the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the WV law that says you must compete in the category that matches your sex,” Gaines tweeted.
“It’s a sad day when 13-14yr old girls have to be the adults in the room, but I couldn’t be more inspired by and proud of these girls. Enough is enough. The tide is turning!”
‘No choice at all’
The court ruled the ban couldn’t lawfully be applied to Pepper-Jackson.
Judge Toby Heytens wrote that offering her a “choice” between participating only on boys teams or not participating in sports “is no real choice at all.”
“The defendants cannot expect that B.P.J. will countermand her social transition, her medical treatment, and all the work she has done with her schools, teachers, and coaches for nearly half her life by introducing herself to teammates, coaches, and even opponents as a boy,” Heytens wrote.
In finding that the law violated Title IX prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools, the court pointed to the fact she had been publicly living as a girl for more than five years and changed her name.
The state of West Virginia, too,
had issued her a new birth certificate listing her as female, the judge noted.
In the wake of last week’s ruling, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, a Republican, said he was “deeply disappointed” in the decision.
“I will keep fighting to safeguard Title IX. We must keep working to
protect women’s sports so that women’s safety is secured and girls have a truly fair playing field,” Morrisey said.
“We know the law is correct and will use every available tool to defend it.”
LAST week, as the country was swept up in Caitlin Clark mania, Joe Biden — or whoever was holding his phone — sent out a pandering tweet, asking for compensation parity in women’s sports.
It was a request meant to celebrate the sisterhood, but had little regard for the financial realities of professional sports.
But days later, the Biden administration announced plans to kneecap lady athletes: introducing sweeping, radical changes to Title IX that would trample on fairness for females in locker rooms, sports and other singlesex spaces.
All with absolutely no regard for biological reality.
How has the president been so wrong on so much in such a short period of time when it comes to women? Because he and his hyper-progressive handlers keep subverting the truth by using the language of activists. Smuggling in pernicious ideas under the banner of this ever-expanding idea of inclusion and gender ideology.
Mockery of the law
The Title IX changes introduced on Friday make a mockery of the original law passed in 1972, by rewriting discrimination on the basis of sex to now include the very amorphous concept of “gender identity” — something that is ruled by selfidentification.
Essentially: If you say you are a girl yet you have a penis, you are a girl.
“This is a regulation that attacks the definition of sex, dueprocess rights and free-speech rights,” Inez Feltscher Stepman, a senior policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum, told me.
The new document is a dense 1,577 pages long, which Feltscher Stepman warns is packed with “fire alarm fires that affect millions of students.”
“This touches every educational institution that receives federal money — not just universities but every public school in America, and a not insubstantial percentage of private schools, too,” she said. “It forces them all to be blind to the reality of sex difference [in order] to not separate boys and girls in areas we’ve come to expect.”
Biden’s overhaul punts on the specific issue of transgender athletes, but Feltscher Stepman called the changes a “political fig leaf. The plain reading of the regulation basically applies to sports as well.”
That means males identifying as women will be protected under federal law to use locker rooms and other single-sex spaces, play girls sports, or take advantage of opportunities like scholarships earmarked for females. Ladies, once again, have to suck it up. The landmark law written to give us equal opportunities and protections is now being weaponized against us. Feltscher Stepman said the additions also have the potential to curtail parental rights in regard to a child’s gender transition, as well as to enable schools to punish students for not using a classmate’s preferred pronouns. And if a student has been accused of sexual misconduct, they won’t get a fair shake. The revisions usher in a return to Obama-era kangaroo courts on college campuses and reverses the Trump administration’s return to sanity.
“We’re talking about the most basic due-process rights: the right to know exactly what you’re being accused of, the right to an impartial adjudicator,” Feltscher Stepman said. “A lot of these universities, they want to use a ‘single-investigator model,’ where you have one biased Title IX investigator instead of an impartial judge to figure out what happened between two students.”
Action of bureaucrats
She added that anyone accused of sexual misconduct won’t be entitled to have a representative cross-examine their accuser.
“All of those protections are stripped of anyone who is accused.”
No one voted for these changes, not Congress nor the American people — a majority of whom don’t believe trans women athletes should be able to participate in girls’ sports. This was the action of bureaucrats and gleefully introduced by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona.
Feltscher Stepman said the Independent Women’s Law Center and other organizations have already mounted legal challenges and notes the issue will play out in this year’s presidential election.
And this desperate, leftist power grab must be fought every time — or the overreach will have a chilling effect on all aspects of student life.
We have to return to a place of truth and fairness.