My VIP for this week is Beth Stelzer, a powerlifting athlete that is fighting to protect women’s sports from transgender athletes. She began her quest after her first powerlifting match where she expected to find many individuals supporting strong women. However, the entire competition was filled with protests from a biological male that identifies as female. He was upset because he was not allowed to participate.
Stelzer founded Save Women’s Sports to
protect “the right of every woman and girl to compete on a level playing field.”
She joined “Problematic Women” with Virginia Allen to discuss the recent
executive order from President Joe Biden to allow biological men to compete in
women’s sports. When asked to share her story, Stelzer first praised the female
athletes in Connecticut who are stepped up to fight for level playing fields.
She then told her story.
My story—long story short—is, I’m a mom,
wife. Just an average person who found sports a little later in life and fell
in love with powerlifting, and really carved out time out of family time to
train like two to three hours a day, five to seven days a week, just as much
time in the kitchen, to get ready for this women’s state championships.
And when I got there, instead of this
awesome welcoming into the community I was expecting, this male threw a
disruptive protest during the entire event because he wasn’t allowed to compete
in the women’s championships.
It just kind of threw me down this rabbit
hole of realization of what’s really happening—basically, the erasure of
women’s rights.
Allen summarized Stelzer’s experience:
She shows up at her first powerlifting competition expecting a celebration for
strong women. Instead, she watched a grown man that identifies as female throw
a temper tantrum because he was not invited to participate. She was
disappointed and felt that it was not right. She began online research about
the people getting harassed, and she ended up founding Save Women’s Sports.
Allen asked for more details about her experience.
How the experience [was] basically taken away
from me was heartbreaking. It’s a small community of people, the powerlifting
community, and I expected this welcoming event, and instead, it was just chaos.
But it helped me realize what’s going on to women’s rights.
I got home and started researching how
athletes are basically being silenced by cancel culture in this fear
environment that these activists are creating. And so, I started
savewomenssports.com as a way to compile information for people to see a source
of the truth in this debate, and here we are making laws.
Allen and Stelzer agreed that no one
should be discriminated against. Allen then asked Stelzer what the latest executive
order means for the future of women’s sports. Stelzer emphasized that it is not
women’s sports that are in danger.
For the future of women in general,
basically. What this order did was erase the sex-based protections that women
have fought so hard to have. In sports, that boils down to Title IX, and we
have not even had that for 50 years.
In places, we’re still fighting to enforce
that, and now, with Biden’s order, erased that. And we’re saying that anyone is
allowed to self-identify into the female category, and we all know it is not
fair for males to compete against females.
We just seem to have turned this into some
kind of partisan issue when it’s just basically common sense, and it’s sad to
see that.
Allen asked Stelzer to explain more about the biological advantages that men have over women in athletics.
Sure.
The differences stem from the wide chromosome that males have, and these
differences start in the womb, and they are cemented in puberty. So, there’s a
lot of talk around testosterone and puberty and how that makes such a big
difference.
But
we see, even in the Presidential Physical Fitness Test that most of us in the
United States do if we go to public school, the differences start at age 6
between boys and girls. This is a reality. It goes from bone structure to bone
mass, muscle mass, heart size, lung size. That all contributes to the
oxygen-carrying capabilities.
So
many differences and not just how the bone structure like the Q-angle of hips.
Women’s skulls are different. We are way more prone to concussions. There’s so
many differences besides the realities of pregnancy, menstruation, menopause
that we have to train around.
Stelzer
continued by explaining why the differences between males and females cannot be
mitigated. “We see in studies … a yearlong study, and muscle mass did not
change after hormone replacement.” She called the hormone treatment “a
seriously slippery slope” that young kids should not be on. If they choose to
transition to the opposite sex as adults, that is a completely different thing
from children and teenagers. “If we allow sports organizations to settle on
this middle ground of allowing kids who transitioned, “pre-puberty transitioned”
boys, to compete with girls, it’s a dangerous situation for everyone.”
Seltzer said that that the unfairness
goes beyond the playing field. Expecting girls and women to expect boys and men
in their dressing rooms and restrooms is unfair.
We’re not trying to insinuate that all
people who self-identify as being opposite gender are somehow a threat, but it
opens up, it conditions girls to accept male bodies, and they will not know
which one of those male bodies is the threat. And that’s why we have sex-separated
spaces to begin with.
Stelzer had much more to share, and you can read about it here. Her organization is not trying to keep anyone from competition, but she is fighting for fair competition. “And it goes back to telling the kids the truth. They can compete on the team of their biological sex, and they should understand why that’s necessary.” She added that it is not possible to protect girls’ and women’s sports while including transgender athletes. She mentioned several states that are passing laws that will protect girls and women, such as Mississippi and Idaho. Other states like South Dakota are working on such laws.
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