On Wednesday, Senator Carrie Ruud’s bill to protect girls’ sports here in Minnesota was heard by the Education Finance and Policy Committee. The bill clarifies Title IX and existing Minnesota laws that protect opportunities for girls in sports, stating that a school that allows a male athlete to compete in women’s or girls’ athletic events is in violation of these provisions. Senator Ruud explained that she graduated from high school prior to the passage of Title IX and experienced firsthand the lack of athletic opportunities for young women. “If we continue to allow biological males to play on girls’ sports teams, we will no longer have female athletes and the very thing we fought for… in Title IX will be gone,” she said.

Beth Stelzer, founder of Save Women’s Sports, testified in support of the bill, sharing about her experience competing in USA Powerlifting, which is currently being sued because they did not allow a biological male to compete in the women’s division at the Minnesota State Bench Press Championship in 2019.“Fairness, privacy, and safety for females must be ensured and protected, and like most women, I would never have started my fitness journey if I would have to compete against males. There would have been no point. I’m sure my teenage self would have felt the same way,” Stelzer told the committee.  

Senator Ruud’s bill is crucial for Minnesota’s women and girls. Maintaining separate sports teams for male and female athletes takes the differences between men and women into account in such a way that student athletes can thrive. 

After puberty, male athletes outperform their female peers by a factor of 10-18%. Even among elite athletes, the performance gap between men and women is 10-12%. In a single year, two different female Olympic champions’ personal bests were beaten by male athletes 15,000 times. In Connecticut, two male students who identify as female won 15 high school women’s state championship titles and set 17 new records.

A recent study showed that biological males continue to have a physical advantage over females even after a year of receiving cross-sex hormones. It was noted during Wednesday’s hearing that the Y chromosome continues to program the permanently increased number of muscle myonuclei, causing a male’s muscles to grow faster and stronger than a female’s muscles, regardless of whether a man has begun taking cross-sex hormones or undergone “gender reassignment” surgery.

Allowing male athletes to compete in women’s and girls’ sports functionally removes girls’ sports as a category, leaving male sports and co-ed sports, but not female sports. The need for this bill is made all the more urgent by President Biden’s day one executive order advancing the transgender agenda at the expense of women and girls. Now is the time for states to take decisive action to protect athletic opportunities for women and girls, before they are driven out of their own sports, losing titles, opportunities, and scholarships to male athletes.

It is encouraging to see the legislature take up this important bill that would preserve the opportunities created by Title IX. Minnesota’s young women deserve a chance at fair competition and we hope to see this bill pass for the sake of female athletes across the state.