Full written testimony submitted by Natasha Chart, WoLF Executive Director, in support of the Women’s Sports Protection Act:

STATE OF NEW MEXICO, HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
FIFTY-FIFTH LEGISLATURE, FIRST SESSION, 2021
HOUSE CONSUMER AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS COMMITTEE
Thursday, February 25th, 2021

Hello, and thank you, Madam Chair Thomson, and Rep. Cook, for inviting me to act as your expert in favor of HB 304, the Women’s Sports Protection Act. I’m the Executive Director of the Women’s Liberation Front, a radical feminist organization with 890 members across the country, including New Mexico.

Since the passage of Title IX, the ability to participate in competitive athletics has had a huge positive impact on women and girls in the United States. In addition to the physical health benefits of an active lifestyle, participation in sports among girls has been shown to increase academic success, boost self-esteem and confidence, lead to lower rates of teen pregnancy, and help women achieve long-term in their careers. Roughly 9 in 10 female corporate executives are former athletes, and about half of them competed at the college level. 

The fashion of allowing male students to compete in female athletics based on “gender identity” claims puts this progress at risk by costing hard-working women and girls the opportunity to compete in fair and safe sporting competitions. National polling of 3500 likely voters that we conducted before the 2020 election indicated that 66% of the public shares this view.

The differences in physical strength between the sexes starts before puberty, and is so great that, every year, teen boys break the women’s world record times in track. The best 9-year-old boys can outrun the best 17-year-old girls. In 2017, a team of boys under-15 beat the US Women’s National Team in a soccer scrimmage. The reverse is almost unimaginable. 

Everyone knew what a girl was when she was the child who wasn’t allowed to run, play, or compete for titles and scholarships, like the boys at her school. Likewise, human beings cannot change sex nor can we change over 6,500 sex differences in gene expression at the cellular level.

These sex differences are facts, but we don’t arm wrestle or hold sprints, to determine who sits in elected office, or who gets to manage the accounting department. We no longer decide questions of criminal culpability in trials by combat, holding a person’s moral worth hostage to physical prowess. Sex differences are facts that need imply no judgement of women’s intellectual or ethical fitness for public life. Still, when they do matter, they matter a lot.

Earlier this week, I was asked to speak to Kansas legislators considering a similar bill. I, and the other proponents, including some accomplished female athletes, spoke about the benefits to girls, and the women they will become, of athletic opportunities that were denied to our grandmothers.

The opponents of the Kansas women’s sports protection bill largely talked about the effects of depression, dysphoria, and bullying, on young boys, and several issued oblique suicide threats over the lives of children if the committee would not offer up girls’ sports as a sacrifice to the mental health of boys. This is a common tactic, and the committee should expect to hear such suicide threats today.

It’s not even clear that destroying the hopes and dreams of girls will help the mental health of boys, and the government of New Mexico is no more medically qualified to offer it to them as an experimental prescription, than are their teen girl peers. 

We all know who a girl is. When a teen girl is dangerously depressed, perhaps because she has been grievously abused, or bullied, or has body dysphoria, she is the sex of person that we do not stop the world to grieve for. The deadliest type of body dysphoric disorder is anorexia nervosa. It’s the likeliest to prove fatal, and may be triggered by depression or bullying. It almost exclusively affects girls.

It would be inappropriate to threaten teen boys with the guilt of these girls’ lives to ask them to give up their own rights and futures.

I, and many other domestic abuse survivors, have vivid memories of a male partner using suicide threats against me, to back up his inappropriate demands. Eventually I found it in me to say no, and I hope that more of our elected officials can find their own courage to resist these improper pleadings.

If the government insists that there must now be only mixed sex sports, we’ll end up with two categories of boys’ sports. There will be sports for the elite, male athletes, and there will be sports for the less talented male athletes allowed to compete against the girls.

It’s unfair to make girls and women compete physically with boys and men who have an undeniable physical advantage. I ask the committee to think about the futures of the New Mexico girls and women who will continue to benefit from female-only sports. Please vote yes on HB 304.

More on the New Mexico Women’s Sports Protection Act:

WoLF is joined by Save Women’s Sports, Women’s Human Rights Campaign USA, and LGB Alliance USA in support of the NM state bill. Read the joint statement here:

https://www.womensliberationfront.org/news/joint-statement-on-the-womens-sports-protection-act