Pete’s Telling ‘Pivot’

Once again, a Democrat is using slippery language to imply he understands the unfairness of men in women’s sports.

“I think most reasonable people would recognize that there are serious fairness issues if you just treat this as not mattering when a trans athlete wants to compete in women’s sports,” former Biden administration Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told NPR Monday.

So does Buttigieg, a former and likely future Democrat presidential contender, agree with the 75% of Americans who don’t think boys should play on girls sports teams?

Not exactly.

Instead, he stressed that “these decisions should be in the hands of sports leagues and school boards and not politicians, least of all politicians in Washington trying to use this as a political pawn.” While I’d love to see Buttigieg embrace federalism, this is not exactly the place for it.

After all, Title IX is a federal law—the law that prohibits sex discrimination in education where federal dollars are involved and that led to the creation of female sports programs in schools and universities. The government has been involved with women’s and girls sports for a long time, for better or worse.

But Buttigieg, who is among the Democrats who “saw the light” about political correctness excess and quietly removed his pronouns from his X bio, is likely ultimately trying to give the appearance of not being as extreme as other leftists.

He’s not the first to pull this move. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, also a Democrat, said on his podcast in March regarding men in women’s sports, “It is an issue of fairness. It’s deeply unfair.”

Yet since March, Newsom has done nothing to make California a place where boys can’t play in girls sports teams. In fact, earlier this month, the Justice Department announced it was suing California’s education department over the issue.

Talk about empty words.

Last week, Concerned Women for America analyzed how men and boys were affecting women and girls sports participation. Already, over 1,900 males have received gold medals in women’s sports. (In California, Newsom might be interested to learn that 521 women and girls have placed second to a male.) Male athletes have also secured a whopping $493,173 dollars of prize money in women’s sports.

Of course, that’s not fair.

And men in women’s sports also risks women getting serious injuries. Just talk to Payton McNabb, who appeared at the State of the Union and was significantly injured, including partial paralysis, from a volleyball spiked by a male player that hit her in the head while she was still a high school student. And in 2024, a Massachusetts girls high school basketball team forfeited a game after two of its players were injured by a transgender player on the other team.

Buttigieg didn’t always bother to pay lip service to the question of fairness in girls sports, though.

In a 2021 interview with the now-cancelled leftist propagandist Stephen Colbert, Buttigieg took a very different tone, saying, “As we speak, in states around the country, there are politicians who’ve decided it’s good politics to attack transgender kids, which are some of the most vulnerable people in our society.”

“These kids have the courage to be who they are, and they just want to be accepted, go to the bathroom like everybody else, and play sports like everybody else and live,” he added, per U.K. newspaper The Independent.

Unlike Newsom, Buttigieg isn’t currently holding office. But as a prominent and popular Democrat, he has an enormous platform. If he truly thought allowing men to play women’s sports was unfair, he could speak up in favor of initiatives that would restrict women’s sports to just women.

Instead, he’s just another leftist trying to get some moderate street cred by throwing a rhetorical bone to the commonsense position—while doing nothing at all to actually help the women and girls who are losing to men in women’s sports.

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