As a little girl, Selina Soule ran simply for the joy of it, her little legs pumping furiously and her dark hair streaming behind her as she streaked across grassy playgrounds.
Her mother introduced her to track and field at a young age, she told The Epoch Times. When she was 5, she started competing in fun runs in her hometown of Glastonbury, Connecticut. A passion was born.
At 8, Soule began competing in running events in elementary school. With the loud report of the starting pistol, Soule shot down the track in her pink tracksuit. Even now, as a young adult, she recalls the thrill of those childhood races.
And by the time she was a junior in high school, she was a top competitor. But during her four years of high school, transgender athletes won 15 women’s state championship titles in track and field.
Across the country, high school girls have been blindsided by boys identifying as girls in sports. They say they’ve been robbed of the opportunity to excel in their sports, earn college scholarships, and accept honors for their years of hard work.
Over the past five years, the trend of allowing transgender athletes to compete according to their identified gender has exploded to include college and international sports.
Beginning of the End
By the time Soule reached high school, she had excelled at sprinting and the long jump. She loved to run and test herself, and she looked forward to the end of classes each day so she could practice.
Soule was well on her way to becoming one of the state’s best female track-and-field athletes with hopes of competing at the state level.
But that dream was about to be shattered by gender ideology.
Boys identifying as girls began to appear in schools. Then, they began to compete and dominate girls’ sports.
Soule raced against a biological male for the first time in 2017. She was a high school freshman.
That year, the Connecticut Association of Schools-Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC) adopted a policy that allowed males identifying as female to compete in girls’ athletic events. Some have called that move the beginning of the end of women’s sports.
As Soule was putting on her spikes at the starting line with the rest of the runners, she recalled seeing a very muscular competitor with long hair standing in front of her.
She pushed the thought aside as she focused on running the 200-meter race. She lost to the athlete who had caught her attention.
When she returned to the stands, her teammates and parents revealed that she'd raced—and lost to—a boy identifying as a girl.
War Between Left and Right
It only got worse as Soule and other female athletes were routinely forced to compete against males identifying as female in Connecticut track and field, she said.The issue has become the latest battlefield in the culture war between the political right and left.
After being forced to compete against biological males, Soule and her parents tried to address the issue of how it was harming girls in track and field.
They got the runaround, she said.
From the principal of Glastonbury High School to state legislators to CIAC, all referred them elsewhere.
“Everyone essentially shifted the blame around. So nobody wanted to actually do anything to help us,” Soule recalled.
She wasn’t the only female athlete in Connecticut who thought competing against males identifying as female was unfair.
In February 2020, she and high school athletes Alanna Smith, Chelsea Mitchell, and Ashley Nicoletti filed a federal lawsuit in Connecticut district court against CIAC and several school boards.
They are represented by the conservative nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).
The lawsuit contends that because the defendants allowed males who identify as female to compete in girls’ athletic events, boys consistently deprived Soule, Smith, Mitchell, and Nicoletti of honors, opportunities to compete at elite levels, and potential scholarships.
The only requirement for a male to compete as a female in Connecticut is to identify as one, ADF senior attorney Christiana Kiefer told The Epoch Times.
“So I think it’s really important to note that Connecticut’s policy is one of the most extreme in the country,” Kiefer said. “We can see the impact that that has had on girls across the state of Connecticut as a result.”
Leveling the Playing Field
But in a rare move, the 2nd Circuit Court of appeals announced in February that the full court decided to hear the case.Cases are sometimes heard again by a full court if the matter is of exceptional public importance or if there is a conflict with a prior decision of the court.
Kiefer is hopeful the full court will recognize errors in the original decision and reexamine the argument.
The lawsuit asks that all records of male athletes be removed from official records and that credit go to the female athletes who would have received recognition for the accomplishments, Kiefer said.
Soule said she hopes the lawsuit can level the playing field for women once again.
At the 2019 State Open meet, Soule lost out on qualifying for the 2019 New England Indoor Championships in the 55 meter because two spots were taken by biological males. She had finished eighth.
The experience left her heartbroken, she said.
Soule isn’t alone. Young women all across the country have been forced to compete and lose against biological males as the debate rages.
Take Natalie Church, a former Arizona cyclist, who told The Epoch Times she once dreamed of racing for Team USA in the Olympics.
Church won eight state championship titles in Arizona. She raced for Arizona’s top under-23 bike teams, Arizona Devo and Hatch Toyota Racing. She had placed in the Top 10 in national and international races by her senior year of high school in 2019.
As a teen, she frequently had to deal with competing against older women because the female bike-racing community is small, she said.
But what the 17-year-old didn’t count on was having to compete against a 40-year-old man identifying as a woman.
She recalls hearing other female cyclists questioning the biological male at the starting line before a race about why he'd been absent from recent competitions.
“Oh, I just got surgery, and I’m going along with my [transgender] journey,” he told them, Church recalled.
“So I turned around to look, and I’m like, ‘Oh, so a trans person is racing,’” she said.
When the race started, the transgender cyclist proved the strongest on the field and dominated throughout the race.
“So when it came down to the sprint finish within the last half a mile, this dude was just gone, like gone. And then it kind of was just a race for second place, at that point,” Church said.
After the race, Church posted a video on social media of the 40-year-old man crossing the finish line. She tagged USA Cycling but got no response, she said.
USA Cycling is the governing body of national bicycle racing. It also oversees the selection of the sport’s Olympic athletes.
A week later, at another race in which the trans athlete competed, Church decided to attack his lead immediately to see if she could pull ahead. Using all her energy at the start of the race proved too exhausting. She finished 10th.
After the second race facing him in the women’s field, she complained. She was the only one to raise the issue, she said. She said that she believes the choice to speak out has doomed her chances of racing for her country.
Though she was a rising star in women’s cycling, USA Cycling never responded to her concerns, she said.
“I just kind of gave up on that. They’re the ones who choose who’s on an Olympic team,” Church said. “So when I reached out to them, I did know I was taking a risk [expletive] off the wrong people.”
USA Cycling kept to its policy that allowed transgender athletes to compete against women though it offered some conditions in elite categories.
For Church and other female cyclists, competing against a male resulted in lost prize money, slips in rankings—and ultimately lost dreams.
Athletic Advantage of Men
Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) studied the differences between biological sexes from a sports angle and produced a report showing that men have larger hearts and lungs and more bone and muscle mass, according to Kelsey Bolar, a spokeswoman for the women’s think tank.Once they reach puberty, men have a lasting athletic advantage, researchers showed in the report.
That led IWF to take the issue head-on by showcasing stories like Church’s. The organization aims to keep the issue alive on social media under the banner of Save Women’s Sports.
IWF wants to support female athletes who are often intimidated and silenced when they try to speak out, Bolar said.
In some cases, the athletes’ First Amendment right to free speech has been all but taken away, she said.
Some sports’ organizing bodies have threatened to keep female athletes from competing if they vocalize their objections to unfair competition from biological boys and men, she said.
Others have been bullied in other ways, she said.
“A couple of the high school athletes whom I have interviewed—they knew that in speaking out, they would be smeared as bigots, as transphobes,” she said.
Not Free to Speak
A case in point is the recent attack against Riley Gaines, a former Kentucky collegiate swimmer. She objected to being forced to compete with Lia Thomas in 2022, a University of Pennsylvania male swimmer identifying as a woman.While leaving the event, she was surrounded by a mob of trans activists screaming threats and crushing in around her. She was forced to stay barricaded inside a room on campus for three hours.
Republicans are eyeing the issue to galvanize political support as the country heads into another presidential election cycle.
To draw attention to the issue during National Girls and Women in Sports Day, Macy Petty and Chloe Satterfield—female athletes who competed in high school against males identifying as females—were invited to visit House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in Washington on Feb. 1.
Satterfield was a varsity tennis standout in high school and now attends the Georgia Institute of Technology, commonly known as Georgia Tech.
She told The Epoch Times what she remembers most about playing a biological male—the overwhelming power of his serve and stroke.
She'd perfected her stroke by the time she was a senior, she said. But even with superb technique, her 5-foot-2-inch frame was no match for the taller, more muscular male facing her across the net.
He identified as a freshman girl.
“He was so much stronger than me,” Satterfield said. “It’s hard to return a ball when it’s coming at you so fast.”
She recalled feeling confused after losing the match and that she could hardly believe a male was allowed to play against females.
At the time, she kept quiet, afraid of being labeled transphobic.
When Satterfield saw what happened to Gaines when she faced Thomas in the pool, it brought back her own bewildering experience. She now speaks about the issue at campuses across the country, as part of Young Women of America (YWA), a politically conservative Christian organization.
Like Gaines, Satterfield has been threatened for saying it’s unfair for women to be forced to compete against biological men.
At one point, a police officer had to follow 19-year-old Satterfield around her own campus as a precaution, after threats were made against her for speaking against Thomas being allowed to compete as a woman.
Students using the app Yik Yak began posting threats against her, she said. One that stuck with her read, “You should die.”
“People were protesting across the street from me and my friend when we were speaking out against this, and they were so hateful,” she said.
The Worry of Injury
Petty, a YWA member currently playing NCAA volleyball, told The Epoch Times that women must also worry about being injured by biological males during games.In 2018, college recruiters attended a game while she and her teammates faced a girls’ team with a biological male player with an obvious male physique and the power of a strong young man, she said.
Her team lost. Although they were upset, the girls felt it was so absurd that it couldn’t happen again. But during the USA Volleyball Junior qualifiers, Petty and her teammates again faced a male player.
“We got destroyed,” Petty said. “The [transgender] athlete was just slamming the ball in our faces.”
The difference in power between a male and female player hitting a volleyball is overwhelming, she said. In male volleyball matches, the height of the nets is seven inches higher.
“Thank goodness none of us got injured,” Petty said.
Another female high school volleyball player in North Carolina wasn’t so lucky.
Battle for Women’s Rights
Republicans have rallied around female athletes in their battle as the women’s rights issue is played out in court.In January, McCarthy’s office released a press release saying women have been exposed to unfair discrimination in sports.
The bill would bar federally funded school and college athletic programs from allowing biological males to participate in women’s or girls’ sports.
Satterfield said she hopes President Joe Biden will reconsider the issue from a woman’s perspective and restore Title IX to protect women’s sports.
“This new rule that he’s been proposing—it really just opens up the door for girls to be discriminated against on the playing fields,” she said.
“It’s scary that we are approaching a world where women are being discriminated against in the name of equality.”
