NO LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN? Trans athletes force women to fight for what they've already won.

Do you ever notice ... how something women spent decades fighting for now requires an election to keep?

A league of their own.

A national organization cannot be the only voice your daughter hears defending her. Moms and dads need to stand up in their own communities.

Not a guaranteed championship. Not a participation trophy.

A fair chance to compete against other females. Apparently, we need to count the ballots on that.

Girls shouldn’t need an election to have their own sports. But here we are.

Tuesday’s victory

On November 3, voters in Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, and Washington considered measures addressing sex-based athletic eligibility.

Different proposals, different provisions, but a common question: Will we preserve female sports categories for females?

Voters in Nebraska, Arizona, and Washington approved ballot measures prohibiting boys from participating in girls’ sports. Proposition 134, a similar measure in Colorado, was also leading as votes continued to be counted.

My wife and I attended an election-night watch party with supporters of Protect Kids Colorado, the grassroots organization behind Proposition 134 and two other ballot measures.

Chaired by XX-XY Athletics founder Jennifer Sey, Protect Kids Colorado helped organize the effort behind Proposition 134 alongside local moms Erin Lee, Lori Gimelshteyn, and other concerned parents.

The room was filled with volunteers and supporters, hopeful and energized as the results trickled in.

These folks had worked hard.

More than 3,300 petition circulators helped qualify the organization's three measures for the ballot, with 170,000 Coloradans signing its petitions.

They knocked on doors, visited churches, and talked with their neighbors.

And catch this: October campaign finance reports showed roughly $4.4 million raised by opponents, compared with about $216,000 supporting the effort.

About 20 to 1.

Apparently, concerned parents didn’t get the memo that they were supposed to be overwhelmed.

And guess what?

As of Wednesday morning, Proposition 134 was leading with roughly 52% of the vote, although the outcome remained uncalled.

Years-long fight

But this story started long before anyone ordered campaign signs.

Women fought for years to get their daughters onto playing fields, into gymnasiums, and onto college rosters.

They fought for equipment, practice time, coaching, and scholarships.

Representatives Patsy Mink and Edith Green and Senator Birch Bayh helped carry that fight into Congress.

President Richard Nixon signed Title IX on June 23, 1972.

Its prohibition against sex discrimination extended across federally funded education, with athletics becoming one of its most consequential applications.

Implementation required years of additional pressure and litigation.

Before Title IX, girls accounted for roughly 294,000 high school sports participation entries. In 2025-2026, that figure exceeded 3.65 million.

Pause on that for a moment.

That is an extraordinary achievement.

Yet, now we’re arguing over whether the category that helped make that progress possible should remain female.

We finally opened the gym doors for girls.

Then some adults apparently forgot why there were separate teams inside.

Biology matters

Biological sex matters in sports.

Boys are male. Girls are female. Period.

Identifying differently does not change that.

Hormones and surgery can alter physical characteristics. But they do not change a male into a biological female.

The American College of Sports Medicine identifies biological sex as a major determinant of athletic performance.

Its consensus statement explains how male puberty produces substantial differences in muscle mass, strength, power, oxygen-carrying capacity, and other physical characteristics relevant to competition.

Before puberty, performance differences are much smaller. That doesn’t mean every boy beats every girl.

It explains why we have girls’ teams.

We understand competitive categories when weight classes are involved.

Nobody tells a lightweight boxer that objecting to a heavyweight opponent demonstrates a disappointing lack of inclusion.

Yet girls are expected to accept a comparable dismissal of the physical differences their category exists to recognize.

Profiles in courage

These are actual girls with actual consequences.

We know Riley Gaines, who became a national advocate after tying Lia Thomas at the NCAA championships.

We remember Italian Olympic boxer Angela Carini abandoning her Paris bout after just 46 seconds, overwhelmed by powerful punches from Imane Khelif.

The fight intensified the controversy over why the IOC permitted him to compete after a previous disqualification over sex eligibility.

We saw fencer Stephanie Turner take a knee rather than compete against an opponent identifying as female, receiving a disqualification for refusing the bout.

In Connecticut, runners Selina Soule, Chelsea Mitchell, Alanna Smith, and Ashley Nicoletti challenged a policy allowing male athletes who identify as female to compete in girls’ track.

Their attorneys report that two such competitors collected 15 girls’ state titles between 2017 and 2020.

Their lawsuit concerns lost honors and competitive opportunities, not an abstract disagreement over terminology.

Then there is Payton McNabb, the North Carolina volleyball player struck in the face by a ball spiked by a transgender opponent in 2022.

McNabb has described sustaining a concussion and lasting problems, including impaired vision and partial paralysis.

Sports involve injuries. Everybody knows that.

The question is why adults should require girls to accept additional concerns about physical mismatches while treating their objections as the real problem.

And girls should not have to sustain a serious injury before somebody decides their concerns deserve a hearing.

Shifting the blame

The issue follows them into the privacy of a locker room.

Former University of Pennsylvania swimmer Paula Scanlan testified that administrators told the women that Lia Thomas’ participation and presence in their locker room were nonnegotiable.

When the women objected, they were offered psychological services to become comfortable undressing in front of a male.

Scanlan summed up the university’s response this way: “We, the women, were the problem, not the victims.”

Let that settle in.

The women raised concerns about their own privacy.

The university decided that it was the women who needed adjusting. Apparently, the boundaries that needed moving were theirs.

In 2025, Penn entered a federal Title IX resolution agreement that included policy changes and personalized apologies to affected female swimmers.

An apology matters.

So would having listened to them in the first place.

But many more girls have names we don’t know.

The girl who missed qualifying for state.

The girl who lost a college scholarship.

The girl changing in a bathroom stall.

The girl wondering whether speaking up will cost her teammates, friends, or a place on the roster. More of them are finding their voices.

A championship race happens once.

And for many, that is once in a lifetime after years of dedicated training. You cannot give a teenager those starting blocks back at age 30.

They shouldn’t need a national following before the adults in their own community listen.

Kids first

Here in Colorado, the dispute is still unfolding.

Parents at Dakota Ridge High School have objected after a male student who identifies as female made the girls’ junior varsity volleyball roster while female students were cut.

Their account raises a straightforward question about whose opportunities a girls’ roster is supposed to provide.

Jefferson County Public Schools says its gender-identity policies comply with Colorado law. The federal government says those policies violate Title IX.

In March, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights found violations involving female sports, bathrooms, locker rooms, and overnight accommodations.

In June, it issued another warning over the district’s refusal to change course.

President Trump’s February 2025 executive order directed federal agencies to protect female athletic opportunities and locker rooms through Title IX enforcement.

Jefferson County Public Schools continues to resist that enforcement position.

The Supreme Court, meanwhile, upheld Idaho’s and West Virginia’s sex-based sports restrictions in June 2026.

To be precise, it ruled that states may maintain those restrictions; it did not order every state to adopt them.

Which helps explain why Coloradans had Proposition 134 on their ballots.

Jeffco Kids First has helped bring local parents’ concerns into public view. Jeffco’s school board opposed Proposition 134.

Parents shouldn’t need a working knowledge of federal litigation to ask who can try out for their daughter’s volleyball team.

IOC on board

Even the International Olympic Committee has changed course.

Its new female-category policy, beginning with the 2028 Los Angeles Games, limits eligibility to biological females, using a one-time SRY gene screening.

Yet defending female sports can still make you a target at a women’s basketball game.

Ask Jennifer Sey.

Her company, XX-XY Athletics, sells shirts with a simple message: “Refuse to Pretend.”

Sey has been outspoken in support of the Camas cross-country girls who walked away from a race rather than accept their male teammate’s participation in the girls’ category.

That runner has since qualified for the girls’ state championships, finishing seventh at the regional qualifier. That is a place in the girls’ state competition that is now occupied by a male.

When somebody says this affects only a small number of athletes, ask them which girls are supposed to consider their opportunity expendable.

Your daughter?

Or is it OK if it’s somebody else’s child?

RELATED: The WNBA has a tolerance problem — and it’s not coming from the women in XX-XY shirts

Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images

Fouling out

Earlier this WNBA season, security told fans to cover their XX-XY shirts.

At the Finals, Sey recorded the harassment directed at her and her friends, including people telling them to kill themselves.

Security escorted them from their seats for a “conversation,” then allowed them to return.

You would think supporting female sports would be an ordinary position at a women’s basketball game.

Apparently, the shirt needed its own league approval review.

Meanwhile, the WNBA’s collective bargaining agreement says “only players who are women are eligible,” without defining “women” or spelling out transgender eligibility rules.

That leaves the boundary of its female category unresolved.

The league can tell you when a foot crosses the three-point line. You would think it can explain who qualifies for the women’s league.

Moms for Liberty has helped bring these concerns into public view.

Alliance Defending Freedom has represented female athletes, including the Connecticut runners, in their fight for fair competition.

Going local

Those efforts make a difference, but a national organization cannot be the only voice your daughter hears defending her. Moms and dads need to stand up in their own communities.

At the school board meeting. In the athletic director’s office.

When policies are written and when their daughters say something is wrong.

A dad can spot a missed holding penalty from the upper deck through somebody’s nachos. Surely he can find his voice when his daughter’s opportunity is on the line.

Show up.

Ask direct questions. Insist on answers.

Support her when she speaks, especially when speaking carries a cost.

We tell our children to stand up for what is right. They ought to see us doing it.

Scott Smith’s daughter was sexually assaulted by a male student in a Loudoun County school bathroom.

The attacker later assaulted another girl after being transferred to a different school. Investigations did not establish that he claimed a female identity to gain entry.

What they did establish was serious institutional failure.

Protecting private spaces also requires acknowledging that access rules can be exploited. Girls should not have to determine whether someone entering their private space is sincere.

And a father demanding accountability should not have to fight an institution more concerned with managing the controversy than answering for what happened.

Nebraska and Arizona have decided.

They are still counting votes in Colorado and Washington. But whatever the final tally, the girls deserve an answer.

Their mothers and grandmothers fought to get them onto the field.

Their daughters should not have to spend their athletic careers in court explaining why that field exists.

Refuse to pretend.

Girls should not have to surrender what women fought so hard to win.

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