They used to call Nancy Hogshead-Makar a leftist liberal, a tolerant Democrat and a fierce feminist who dedicated her life to fighting for the rights of female athletes.
Now she has been labeled a transphobe, a bigot and worse.
All because she has had the audacity to question whether transgender women (male-to-female transition) should be competing against biological women in athletic competition. Sadly, in today’s woke world, you get canceled quickly if you don’t parrot the PC crowd.
“I’m about as Democrat as you can get; about as liberal as you can get; about as progressive as you can get,” Hogshead-Makar says from her home in Jacksonville. “I can’t believe that now I’m perceived differently by some people.”
That’s just another indication of today’s polarized, politicized planet. Even if you raise legitimate concerns and have biological, scientific evidence to back up your concerns, you get crushed by the wave of wokeness sweeping the nation.
I’ve known Nancy Hogshead-Makar for years and she is anything but a bigot or an extremist. She is one of the nation’s staunchest advocates for women’s sports. She’s spent her professional life battling for women’s rights. She’s a three-time Olympic gold medalist in swimming who used her Duke law degree to become one of the nation’s foremost Title IX attorneys.
She has butted heads and battled the male-dominated sports establishment for equal opportunities for women in sports and against sexual abuse of female athletes. A rape victim herself, Hogshead-Makar was pushing the U.S. Olympic Committee to protect its athletes from sexual abuse long before Dr. Larry Nassar’s heinous crimes surfaced. Her non-profit organization, Champion Women, provides legal advocacy for girls and women athletes who have been abused, harassed or minimized in any way.
And she’s frustrated because the sports organizations themselves like the NCAA, the International Olympic Committee and state high school athletic associations have dropped the ball on governing transgender women and girls who want to compete in sports. Shamefully, the refusal of sports leagues to address the issue in a logical, scientific way has opened the door for politicians to get involved in sports — and when the politicians get involved, it’s rarely a good thing.
“On one side, you have those on the left, like President Joe Biden, who have swallowed this ideology that trans women are women for all purposes — including sports,” Hogshead-Makar says. “To the trans advocates on the left, it’s offensive to even acknowledge the obvious — that there are physical differences between men and women and there needs to be women’s-only spaces in places like sports.
“Then on the right,” she adds, “there is an element of people who are using sports as a way to express trans-hate. I think that’s what Governor Ron DeSantis has done. He’s playing to his base and doesn’t really care about trying to figure out a way to include transgender athletes and make their lives better.”
And stuck in the middle are Hogshead-Makar and other women’s sports pioneers who form the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group. We’re talking about women such as tennis legend Martina Navratilova. Women such as legendary swimmer and Olympic Hall-of-Famer Donna de Varona, who along with Billie Jean King co-founded the Women’s Sports Foundation (WSF) in 1974 for the purpose of making sure female athletes were treated fairly and equitably. Women such as revolutionary former University of Texas women’s athletics director Donna Lopiano, who was once nearly fired by football-fanatical UT administrators when she testified against an amendment that would have exempted college football from Title IX regulations.
These aren’t right-wing male politicians playing a game of political pandering; these are trendsetting, trailblazing women who are trying to come up with policies that will ensure fairness for biological women in sports while finding a way to allow transgender women to compete as well. Their goal is certainly not to ostracize transgender athletes but to make sure biological women are competing on a level playing field.
“Step 1 is we want to make sure that women’s sports remain fair to biological women,” Hogshead-Makar says. “But there’s also a Step 2. I’m a huge advocate of sports and the benefit they have for kids throughout their lifetimes. We have to figure out a way for this wave of transgender athletes to also be able to compete and benefit from sports.”
Hogshead-Makar and the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group sent out a petition recently calling for Congress and sports governing organizations to prioritize fairness for biological women while also coming up with a structure to welcome transgender athletes to participate in sports. The petition has been signed by nearly 400 Olympians and Paralympians and 1,221 coaches from over 25 sports and 10 countries.
While not really much of an issue a few years ago, this has became a major controversy recently because of the wave of biological men and women and boys and girls who are identifying as transgender. The issue exploded during the NCAA Swimming Championships when Penn’s Lia Thomas, a transgender woman, became the women’s collegiate national champion in the 500-yard freestyle. Thomas also placed 5th in the 200 freestyle and 8th in the 100 freestyle out of more than 13,000 women competitive college swimmers.
Pre-transition, Thomas could not qualify for the NCAA Men’s National Championships, but her right to swim against biological women has been defended by the American Civil Liberties Union.
“NCAA leaders are more concerned with the ACLU than they are about women,” Hogshead-Makar says. “The NCAA says things like, ‘It wouldn’t be fair to Lia if she were not allowed to compete.’ Well, what about being fair to women who have to compete against Lia?”
The NCAA, the International Olympic Committee and other sports organizations need to do some serious soul-searching here instead of just punting and letting DeSantis and other right-wing politicians villainize trans athletes while Biden and the left wing live in their fantasy world and act as if there are no biological differences between men and women.
It’s no secret that biological men, by most athletic measurables (speed, power, strength), are physically superior to biological women. In just about every sport, males are bigger, faster and stronger than their female counterparts.
This is why women’s sports need to be separated from men’s sports in the first place. If there was no separation and we only had unisex teams, then men would get every college scholarship, every professional contract and take every spot on nearly every event in the Olympics. Here’s all you need to know: If you compare times, the top high school boys sprinters in Orlando would sweep the gold, silver and bronze medals if they competed in the Olympics against the best women sprinters in the world.
Why? Testosterone. Men have a bunch of it; women have a little of it. When boys hit puberty, they get a massive natural influx of testosterone while girls don’t. Science tells us that post-puberty males, depending on the sport, have about a 10-to-20 percent advantage on females because of this influx of testosterone. In sports where strength and explosive power (weightlifting, sprinting, etc.) are key factors, the advantage can be up to 50 percent.
The only legislation the NCAA and International Olympic Committee have come up with to address this male testosterone advantage is to arbitrarily mandate that transgender women must undergo hormone-suppressing treatments for one year before competing. Even the NCAA has admitted such a mandate is random and is not really based on any science.
However, according to research, there is pretty clear evidence that “legacy” advantages of male puberty remain long after one year. If you want a drastic theoretical example, just consider what would happen if LeBron James suppressed his testosterone for one year and then played in the WNBA. What do you think the result would be?
“You can’t just randomly roll back the physical gains of male puberty,” Hogshead-Makar says.
Even some transgender athletes are scoffing at the IOC’s recent declaration that sports organizations should not simply assume athletes have any sort of physical advantage based upon their sex variations.
“Anyone with any basic understanding of biology and the difference between men and women knows it’s ridiculous,” Mianne Bagger, a transgender golfer who made history when she qualified for the 2004 Australian Open, told the Aussie publication News.Com.Au. “It’s male puberty that really grants boys and men that physical performance in sport. And I think it’s irrefutable — it’s ridiculous to suggest otherwise.”
Not in today’s world, where wokeness trumps truthfulness; where biologists are turned into bigots; where spineless athletic governing bodies allow feuding factions to turn this sports issue into a hot-button game of political pinball.
Biden has signed an executive order prohibiting discrimination against transgender students in schools, opening the door for anyone who identifies as girl or woman to compete in sports with their biological counterparts. Many conservative state governments, including Florida’s, have countered by passing legislation stating that women and girls must play on the teams represented by the biological sex on their birth certificates.
Meanwhile, fair-minded women such as Nancy Hogshead-Makar are trying to make sense of it all and come up with a real solution that will satisfy both sides.
Sadly, in today’s divisive, dysfunctional political climate, you wonder if that is even possible.
