Women’s Sports Were Built by Letting Girls In

When the Supreme Court says, as it did earlier this month in West Virginia v. B.P.J., that banning transgender girls from school sports is about protecting the safety and fairness of women's and girls' sports, I hear that claim against everything I actually lived. The loudest voices for "protecting" women from rough sports were never in the scrum with me. They were the ones telling us rugby was no place for women at all. What actually threatened women's sports was never a girl who wanted to run cross-country with her friends. It was the belief—dressed up, then as now, in the language of "protection"—that girls don't belong on the field at all. The post Women’s Sports Were Built by Letting Girls In appeared first on Ms. Magazine.