As Biden admin ends, parents group calls on Congress to designate ‘American Girls in Sports Day’
After four years of the Biden administration pushing executive policies to allow biological males into female spaces, Parents Defending Education Action (PDE) is pushing for Congress to address violence against women in athletics and calling on the NCAA to revoke its transgender policy and declare Oct. 10 "American Girls in Sports Day."
The measures have been introduced as a bill and two resolutions sponsored by Tennessee Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn.
In an interview with Fox News Digital, Nicole Neily, president of PDE, called the Biden administration’s actions regarding girls’ sports over the previous four years "appalling."
"Let's think about the original intent of Title IX," she said "It was put in place to protect and ensure that women weren't losing out on opportunities as a result of their sex. And now we're watching that happen and we're watching girls’ sex be weaponized against them. It really turns the whole intent of the law upside down."
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Neily said that designating an American Girls in Sports day would "commemorate all the sacrifices and the hard work that has been put in to get to a place of equality only to watch it stripped away by the Biden administration that refuses to even respect the definition of the word ‘woman.’"
Despite President Donald Trump returning to the White House this week, Neily said that it is crucial for Congress to act now.
"We can't keep doing this whiplash back and forth every four years," she said. "It's critical that Congress get involved in these issues because it codifies it and locks it in."
"It turns out all these administrators, all these bureaucrats, any kind of wiggle room they have to reinterpret something they will," she said. "I mean, let’s look at how even Title IX has been weaponized and interpreted by administrative agencies over the past several years. Title IX was part of the education amendments, it was ratified in 1972, and it's 37 words, but we're now watching Democrats interpret one simple word ‘sex.’ They're totally rewriting what that means [to include] sexual orientation, gender identity, and that's not what's in there."
Blackburn introduced the measures in the Senate earlier this month.
The bill – which is titled the "Fair Play for Girls Act" – would require the U.S. attorney general to submit an analysis of violence against women in sports to Congress along with policy recommendations to protect young women competing. The analysis would include impediments to fair and safe competition for biological female athletes, the prevalence of girls losing female sports opportunities to biological males and the prevalence of sexual harassment and abuse of women and girls in athletics.
Another resolution introduced by Blackburn would call on the NCAA – which manages intercollegiate sports for over a thousand universities across the country – to revoke its policy allowing transgender athletes to compete in sports of the opposite sex and to conform to a biological sex-based policy across all sports.
Finally, the "American Girls in Sports Day" resolution would recognize Oct. 10 as a day to celebrate the accomplishments of female athletes.
In addition to PDE, Blackburn’s measures have also been endorsed by celebrity female sports activist Riley Gaines, Caitlyn Jenner, the Independent Women’s Forum and several others.
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Neily believes there should be bipartisan support for these measures, which she said both simply protect vulnerable girls and recognize their achievements.
"Everyone has seen the videos over the past few years of the women in sports who have been physically injured, be it from a volleyball being spiked into their face [or] a field hockey ball being whipped at somebody," she said.
"There are significant biological differences between men and women," she went on. "I mean, even let's think about lacrosse. A male lacrosse player throws a ball an average of 85 to 95 miles an hour. And male lacrosse players wear chest protectors and helmets for that very reason. Female lacrosse players throw a ball an average of 45 to 65 miles an hour, and they do not. And so, if you have a biological male with that muscle mass, with that bone structure, throwing a ball at a girl and it hits her, I mean, there's the real risk of serious severe bodily injury or even death."
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All this, she said, works to limit girls' opportunities to fairly compete.
"Having known many college athletes over the course of my life, the amount of effort that it takes to be a D1, a D2, a D3 athlete, I mean, these are students who have spent thousands of hours over the course of their life going back to a very, very young ages to get to this elite position where they are in colleges and universities," she explained. "And so, to have a spot on a team, to have a scholarship opportunity taken away from them by someone who is deemed to be faster, purely because of their biology is something that I think is a real slap in the face to these girls who have sacrificed so much, who have worked so hard."