From high-school track meets to the NCAA swimming championships, women’s sports have caught the public eye in recent years—but for all the wrong reasons.
Increasingly, male athletes have been allowed to compete in women’s categories, taking opportunities away from women and girls and threatening their safety.
But while this troubling trend has spread across the country, a courageous response is beginning to echo across the world.
Most recently, that echo has reached the halls of the United Nations headquarters in New York City, where ADF International appeared on Oct. 16 for a panel discussion about safety and fairness in women’s sports. ADF CEO, President, and General Counsel Kristen Waggoner spoke alongside our client Lainey Armistead as representatives from all over the world looked on.
Thanks to the Permanent Mission of Paraguay and other state sponsors, we had the opportunity to shine a light on this critical issue and encourage others to take a stand. As Kristen highlighted in her remarks, protecting women’s sports is really a matter of two things: preserving fairness and ensuring safety.
Preserving fairness
Any athlete who takes the field deserves a fair chance to compete and succeed. For female athletes, that means not being forced to compete against males. Men and women are physically different, and those differences become all the more obvious in sports.
The fact is that male athletes have significant inherent advantages over their female counterparts. From greater height and weight to stronger bones and larger muscles, male athletic advantages result in considerable discrepancies in performance. To take just one example, in 2017, thousands of men ran 400-meter times that were faster than the personal bests of Olympic gold medalists Sanya Richards-Ross and Allyson Felix.
As Kristen pointed out, creating female-only athletic spaces is about rewarding genuine merit. But the consequences of allowing men to compete in women’s sports are much greater than merely winning a medal or standing on a podium.
Ensuring safety
The differences between the sexes have real implications for women’s safety. When women compete against men, they don’t just lose opportunities; they risk physical harm.
A recent story out of San Jose State University is an apt example. The university’s women’s volleyball team has a male player on the roster, and several teams have canceled their matches against the school. While none of these schools has publicly stated a reason for forfeiting, it’s not difficult to read between the lines.
Exercise science professor Dr. Gregory Brown has written extensively on male advantages in athletics. In a white paper on the subject, he discusses volleyball specifically. Dr. Brown notes that male players have a roughly 15-20 percent jumping advantage over females, and they also spike the ball with greater velocity—giving them a 29-34 percent advantage. And of course, males tend to be taller and more muscular, both obvious advantages on the court.
It’s no wonder that female volleyball players wouldn’t want to compete against male athletes.
But while this story highlights the dangers at play when women are forced to compete against men, it also shows that the movement to protect women’s sports is picking up steam. Three different governors commended the universities in their states for standing with female athletes. “It is essential that we preserve a space for women to compete fairly and safely,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox posted on social media.
An athlete’s perspective
The ongoing conversation regarding women’s sports is a fraught topic. But we should all be able to agree that the voices of athletes deserve a central place in that conversation.
One such athlete is our client Lainey Armistead, who played soccer at West Virginia State University and served as team captain.
Lainey joined a lawsuit to defend a law in West Virginia ensuring that only women compete on women’s sports teams. That lawsuit has made its way through the court system, and we’ve asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case.
During the course of this litigation, I’ve witnessed Lainey become a courageous advocate for women’s sports. Joining Kristen at the U.N., she summed up the issue well:
“I’m here today because we’ve all seen what happens when males are allowed to compete on women’s teams,” Lainey said. “From track to boxing to swimming, it’s demoralizing and unfair—and just plain wrong.”
Lainey is exactly right. When men are allowed to compete in women’s sports, it’s women and girls who lose. That’s a message worth sharing—from the community track field to the halls of the U.N.
