OPINION:
The jazzy 1960 song “Walk, Don’t Run” could have served as the athletic fight song for a group of girls who took a courageous stand in Washington state last week.
The team willingly forfeited participation in a track meet rather than compete against a junior transgender “girl” teammate who just weeks earlier had been competing — unsuccessfully — as the boy that he is.
“Walk, Don’t Run” could also serve as an anthem for a political advertising campaign to persuade Washington voters to approve, on Nov. 3, a referendum measure to prohibit transgender “females” (biological males) from participating in girls’ and women’s interscholastic athletics in the state.
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On Oct. 13, the Camas High School girls’ cross-country squad queued up at the starting line, but then, 12 of the female athletes did something as unexpected as it was unprecedented.
In an act of principled defiance, they walked away from the starting line when the gun sounded, while others took off running, to dramatize their disgust with the unfairness of having to run against someone who, by dint of biology, is inherently faster than most of them.
The runners’ dramatic “walk, don’t run” protest — a boycott of sorts (pun intended) — was captured on video and posted on social media by @KnownHeretic.
Not surprisingly, however, the walk-off was not reported by any of the liberal legacy media. According to a report on the conservative site ThePostMillennial.com, the protest followed growing objections to Logan Mihailoff’s participation in girls’ races, noting that “the runner began the season with a 76th-place finish in a boys’ JV race [and after] switching divisions, finished second among 195 girls at the September 26 Nike Portland XC Invitational, then won the September 29 girls’ varsity race against Union High School.”
The walk-off was hailed by those who have called on Washington state lawmakers, to no avail, to change the state’s gender identity policies that allow and enable faux “females” to invade girls’ and women’s sports and locker rooms.
The Camas girls should not have had to forfeit to make that point.
A better solution to the patent unfairness of permitting transgender interlopers to steal real girls’ and women’s athletic titles and trophies may come in two weeks on Nov. 3, when Washington state voters cast ballots in a referendum calling for a state law banning their participation.
Proponents of a “yes” vote on Initiative 638 — which Ballotpedia.org explains would “require school and voluntary nonprofit athletics to prohibit biologically male students from competing with and against biologically female students” — should make use of the video footage of the walkout in their campaign ads, if they have not already.
As it turns out, Washington is one of four states voting Nov. 3 on ballot initiatives aimed at reserving girls’ and women’s sports for real females only. The others are Arizona (Proposition 318), Colorado (Proposition 134) and Nebraska (Initiative Measure 442).
The LGBTQ lobby’s insistence that such “drastic” measures are not necessary because transgender athletes are so few and far between is belied by statistics meticulously documented by the website SheWon.org.
As of this writing, SheWon.org says that over the past 25 years, 3,604 female athletes have been cheated out of a total of 5,172 “medals, or records, scholarships, or other opportunities” in 2,153 competitions across 53 sports and games by make-believe “girls” and “women.”
A like-minded site, HeCheated.org, which also tracks the issue, puts the numbers at “1,572 male athletes” having stolen “6,899 first places; 1,362+ stolen awards; [and] 700+ broken records.”
The two groups’ tallies may not match, likely a result of different methodologies, but the bottom line remains: Boys and men do not belong in girls’ and women’s sports.
Why Democrats and liberals — supposed champions of women’s rights — consistently side with the minuscule but disproportionately powerful transgender lobby on this issue is mystifying, especially when polling consistently shows this to be an 85% to 15% issue in favor of the bans.
Even more inexplicable is the deafening silence of so-called feminist groups, who championed Title IX in 1972 to expand females’ opportunities in athletics. It is almost as if they are being held hostage by the LGBTQ lobby and suffering from some bizarre form of psychosexual Stockholm syndrome.
Voters in Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska and Washington state should now run — not walk — to the polls and vote decisively to add their states to the 27 that already sensibly reserve female sports for athletes with XX chromosomes.
• Peter Parisi is a former editor for The Washington Times.
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