The 'Failure' of Progress in Women's Athletics

The busy beavers at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank whose vision of “a more perfect union” differs from that of a sizeable portion of the citizenry, recently demonstrated that its noxious ideas aren’t limited to government overhaul. The Foundation released a paper on transforming women’s sports to become, shall we say, more feminine and less male, all with a heavy dose of Title IX diminution. 

Lest you wonder about mis-interpretation or hyperbole, it’s right there in the title – Title IX’s Failed Experiment: Why Accommodating Sex Differences Beats Engineered Parity. The paper’s summary begins: “Title IX has evolved from a seemingly modest anti-discrimination statute into a powerful engine of feminist social engineering, complete with proportionality mandates. The result has been two systemic distortions that rest on a false premise — that differences in competitiveness and interest between the sexes are stereotypes to be engineered away through state action and cultural revolution.” 

It's giving smarmy prick

The paper’s author, Scott Yenor, is a Boise State political science professor and chair of something called the American Citizenship Initiative at the Heritage Foundation. He’s open about his thoughts on the roles of men and women in society, once delivering a speech at a conservative conference several years ago in which he said that career-seeking women are “more medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome than women need to be, without connections to eternity delivered through their family.” 

The promotion of women’s sports in the past several decades, Yenor argues, is part of a project to remake female character and to create women who are more aggressive and assertive and “less deferential, less graceful, and less oriented toward motherhood and traditional feminine graces.” He cites the writings of French mid-20th century feminist Simone de Beauvoir and her successors as proponents of social engineering that attempt to strip away the natural, biological differences between men and women. Imposing a male-oriented competitive model of athletics, he says, actually deprives women of sporting pursuits that are more suited to their desires and makeup and has depleted opportunities for male athletes. 

Quite the take in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Six, but it speaks to where we are politically and socially. The Heritage Foundation, you might recall, was the clearinghouse for Project 2025, Russell Vought’s wet dream to shrink Federal government about which the President knew nothing until he installed Vought as budget director and began implementing its measures the minute his keister again landed in the Oval Office. Since then, various government agencies have been stripped and re-made to reflect the Oaf-in-Chief’s and his lackeys’ ideas of governance. He hasn’t been bashful about threatening colleges and universities with funding cuts, so it’s not surprising that Title IX would become a target. 

Some background might be helpful. Title IX is the landmark civil rights legislation passed in 1972 that forbids sex-based discrimination in schools or any education program that receives Federal funds. Athletics weren’t a part of the original equation but became so in 1979 and later through a series of amendments and court rulings. With government backing, scholarships, budgets and opportunities for women increased in the decades to come, fueling the ascent of U.S. women’s athletics on the national and international stage. 

The Office of Civil Rights came up with a three-prong test for compliance: 

 Are sports opportunities at a school for men and women substantially proportionate to enrollment? 

 Is the school working to expand sports opportunities for women? 

 Has the school fully accommodated interest for girls and women? 

Proportionality has been the primary benchmark for compliance, a so-called “safe harbor” for schools. That’s become tricky as many colleges have greater female enrollment than male but a larger proportion of male athletes. Football and its disproportionate roster sizes and budget outlays skew the numbers, and athletic departments have basically deemed football untouchable. Fearful of potential lawsuits, however, many schools cut men’s non-revenue programs – wrestling, swimming, cross country, tennis – rather than increase the number of women’s teams and opportunities because they couldn’t bear the accompanying costs. 

Hence, Yenor’s argument that the current model for women has in turn limited opportunities for men. Yenor doesn’t want to do away with high-level women’s athletics, recognizing that a subset of women want and thrive in that environment. But he recommends substantial reforms, chief among them essentially de-fanging Title IX. He would eliminate the proportionality requirement. He would permit less competitive pursuits such as exercise classes or intramurals to count toward compliance. He says that Congress should exempt major men’s revenue-producing programs from counting toward overall participation numbers. And while they’re at it, deregulate all but strictly academic portions of educational systems from Title IX oversight. 

One might dismiss the Foundation paper as another right-wing rant that yearns for the supposed good old days, if it weren’t for the present administration’s embrace of Vought and other Heritage positions and its actions over the past eighteen months. The current regime has gutted the Department of Education and all but abandoned oversight in civil rights enforcement and environmental protections. It attacks academia over the scourge of DEI and what it defines as “woke” culture. It downgrades women and minorities in the military amid macho posturing about a warrior mentality and appearance and soldier testosterone levels. 

It doesn't take a political savant to imagine that Yenor and his allies will take a cue from recent Supreme Court rulings about the 1965 Voting Rights Act in their fight against Title IX. For instance, in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, the court struck down a section of the VRA as unconstitutional, in part, because it relied on old data and practices. The conservative majority ruled, in effect, that because Black people had made so much progress in the areas of voting and representation through the years that Federal oversight was no longer necessary. 

Tee up Title IX arguments and we might hear: Women’s athletics have made so much progress in recent decades that Federal oversight is no longer necessary. Add a side of the idea of “protecting women’s sports” from an inflated fear of a transgender overrun, which is actually Yenor’s launch point in the paper – an inaccurate description of a Tunisian “man” pummeling a Chinese woman in the 2024 Olympics women’s boxing competition for the gold medal and the ensuing shock and outrage it caused. 

Problem is, it didn’t exactly occur that way. An Algerian and a Taiwanese boxer in the women’s competition came under immense scrutiny because some thought that they “appeared” to be transgender or men, but both are women and were cleared to compete by the IOC. Algerian Imane Khelif did indeed win gold in the women’s welterweight division, in a unanimous decision over a Chinese boxer, and much of the controversy was a product of misinformation and internet trolling. 

That a college professor did not, or chose not to, convey facts accurately about something so easily verifiable as Olympic boxing in what’s supposed to be a persuasive paper kind of gives away the game, don’t you think? Any number of right-wing chew toys are about control in the guise of protection. Book bans "protect" impressionable children. Abortion bans “protect” unborn babies. Stripping the Voting Rights Act “protects” the Constitution. Banning gun restrictions “protects” individual rights and the Second Amendment. Rolling back environmental regulations “protects” jobs and “protects” against government overreach. Transgender bans "protect" women's sports. Title IX repeal would “protect” against radical feminism. Too often, the only thing it protects against is progress.