Controversy heated up on Friday in Anchorage, Alaska, when a boy who self-identifies as a girl competed in the state’s female track and field finals and won all-state honors.
Nattaphon Wangyot, a senior at Haines High School, competed in the 100-meter and 200-meter track events, taking fifth and third place, respectively. The male athlete competed against girls as young as ninth grade, notes The Daily Caller.
According to a local CBS station, Alaska does not have a statewide policy concerning the transgender athletes: instead, individual schools are left to make decisions on whether biology or self-declared “gender identity” determines if a trans individual competes with boys or girls.
“We didn’t want to necessarily create a situation where we were going to bring in a committee and those types of things just because it’s just not practical here,” said The Alaska Schools Activities Association Executive Director Billy Strickland concerning the policy.
Many voiced objections to the faux act of equality, arguing that allowing males in female sports puts girl athletes at a disadvantage.
Competitor and Hutchinson runner Emma Daniels, who was just shy of advancing to states, said, “I’m glad that this person is comfortable with who they are and they’re able to be happy in who they are, but I don’t think it’s competitively completely 100-percent fair.”
“…I don’t think it’s competitively completely 100-percent fair.”
-Emma Daniels, runner who did not qualify for the state finals
President of Alaska Family Action Jim Minnery organized a protest outside the stadium on Friday; about a dozen people were in attendance.
“We are here today as a voice from the community to ensure that female athletes are not denied the playing opportunities and scholarships otherwise available to them and to make the playing field even again,” said Minnery.
The president added that “[a]llowing students to play on teams of the opposite sex disproportionately impacts female students, who will lose spots on a track, soccer and volleyball teams to male students who identify as female.”
According to Trans Athlete, 30 other states, in some capacity, allow for trans individuals to compete in male or female sports based on their self-identity.
Many opponents of the Left’s aggressive trans-agenda saw this coming, cautioning that opening up the definition of “female” would unavoidably hurt biological females.
In March, Daily Wire Editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro warned that the Obama Administration’s reinterpretation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would ruin Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, subsequently destroying women’s sports:
So, if “sex” now means subjective sexual self-definition, there’s no rationale for separate men’s and women’s teams anymore. Men could take advantage of this rule to play on women’s teams, thereby destroying the rationale for Title IX as applied to sports funding. If men are sick of watching as their baseball teams get cut in order to sponsor women’s volleyball teams, they could simply apply to the women’s softball teams and out compete all the women. If men and women are supposedly the same in all respects, and if the Justice Department feels that you need not even legally change your sex or surgically alter yourself to imitate members of the opposite sex, why can’t men simply walk on for Geno Auriemma at University of Connecticut? That would spell the end of women’s sports, given that the best boys’ high school basketball teams could easily defeat a typical WNBA squad.
Of course, such warnings are written off by as alarmist, or worse, as something girls and women would just have to get used to in the name of Leftist-deemed equality.
Any feminists out there care to weigh in…?