Parent speaks out against "trans" athletes

The Rise of Transgender Athletes in Girls' Sports

One of the things that I wanted to talk about today is this new very new really in the last few years, development in sports where transgender athletes are now competing, at least people who think they're transgender against biological females, people who are biologically they're male.

I mean, that's who they are. But they are now competing against people who are much weaker than them. At least most most females tend to be weaker, not as physically strong, right? Not as able to compete in certain sports.

And it's giving them an unfair advantage. And there are countless headlines now showing champions in various categories who aren't actually qualified, or at least they wouldn't have been 10 years ago to compete in those particular leagues.

Vermont Christian School and the Forfeited Tournament Game

And today I have two individuals who this hits very close to home for who are going to share with you a little bit about their story. I have Aaron Warner with me, who is a regional reporter for the Vermont Daily Chronicle.

And then Joshua, I have, he is one of the fathers of the starting center for mid Vermont Christian school starting center for their basketball team. And the situation that they are undergoing right now up there in Vermont is that particular school is refusing to play against transgender athletes.

They're refusing to let their girls play against boys. That's really what this amounts to. And the implications are, it looks like they're going to be, if this is held up, that they will not be able to compete at all in sports, leaving people like Joshua's daughter without a place that she can actually compete.

And this is just devastating, I know, for a child or a teenager who's trying to make their way through life and has a passion for sports. And so I want to explore this with them. Thank you both Aaron and Joshua for joining me.

Appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks for having us, John. Yeah. I want to start with you, Joshua. Tell us the story a little bit here. Your daughter plays for Midvermont Christian School and she was in good standing playing there and everything was going okay until what happened?

So the girls entered what is called the state tournament, which is the top, I believe, 16 schools play against each other and they found out that their first team would be a school that had a transgender, a biological male playing and the coaching staff and the board of directors for the school decided not to participate.

So they sent in a letter or they just basically put in saying, hey, we're going to forfeit this game. And they didn't even give a reason up front. So it was actually reported later because they had requested to not have to play a transgender team earlier in the year.

So it was just assumed that that was why. And this has gotten some national attention. Am I correct in that? National and international, from what I understand, I saw a report out of the UK that had spoken on it.

Well, Aaron, you were the first one to report on this. Is that correct?

Reporting the Story and Its International Reach

Yeah. Yeah. So assistant coach Helen, she knows she actually comes to Bible study at my house. And so she sent me a text and said, hey, this is a story.

And so I think we're losing Aaron. You're with me, right, Joshua? I am. You are. OK. I hope Aaron can get his connection figured out there. I'm going to see if I'm going to remove him from the stream and then see if we can get him back in.

So, oh, it looks like he's he's already coming back in. Aaron, are you there? Yeah, I'm here. Sorry. Yeah. Where do you lose me? You froze and were pretty early on in what you were saying. And so, Joshua and I were going to continue on.

But why don't you start over and just tell us about the reporting then.

So someone in the Bible study, you said was an assistant coach for the varsity girls team. And she sent me a text and said, hey, this is a story. And so I reported on it. And then it actually got picked up by the Valley News the next day.

They did their own version of the story that got picked up on Twitter by a site called Boys versus Women, which specializes in reporting on the unfair advantage that boys have versus Olympic women, which we can get into.

But anyway, Dr. Jordan Peterson picked it up and tweeted about it to his three point seven million followers. The next thing you know, the story is going around the world.

Gotcha. OK, so the story is getting bigger. I want to know a little bit more about the details and implications of this, though. So the implications would be that the school wouldn't even be able to have any sports program.

Is that right?

No. Go ahead, Josh. It will not be able to be involved with any sports that are sanctioned by the Vermont Principals Association. And I'm not I'm not clear what all sports the VPA is over, but it will essentially remove the all the sports from Vermont Christian Academy or mid Vermont.

What does that do to this school, though? What is that? I mean, do people then take their kids out because they want them to be able to compete? I mean, this could ruin a kid's life if that's their their goal is to to go that direction.

I mean, it could ruin their career path.

The Stakes for a Student-Athlete and the Club-Team Effect

Yeah, it's one of the concerns for my daughter. I mean, she's 14. She's a freshman and she's six foot two and has plans for basketball beyond high school. So she is she is concerned about that. But she does also she plays AAU basketball.

So and they they even went as far as to say, hey, we're going to punish any schools that play you if they decide to play you. It can only be a scrimmage. And if it's anything more than that, we'll actually bring down sanctions on those.

Schools. Oh, my.

So they're going to punish the students if not just the school, they're going to punish the students if the students play where they're not supposed to be.

They the students at mid Vermont can play. But it's only can be counted as a scrimmage against against schools within Vermont that.

Are under the. That's that's pointless, though, right, because that doesn't actually propel them to anything beyond the scrimmage, winning a scrimmage. There's no tournament wins. There's no accolades.

There's no way to platform yourself into going into a professional sports league. OK, a little something here, John.

Yeah, please do, Aaron. Yeah, it essentially makes them a club team. Right. So to make them a club team, they can go and play games against other schools. But yes, it strips them of the ability to compete at the highest level, establish a record, play in tournaments, win championships.

There's not a lot of people coming out of Vermont going and playing sports at the next level, particularly basketball. And this is important because that's the attitude of our local senator. So actually, the senator who took the side of the transgender school, she actually instead of standing up for her constituents, the girls in her county.

So I know this woman because I also have an auto detail shop and I've detailed her car. But she actually when asked, she happily tweeted out on Twitter that, you know, Vermont is on the cutting edge and we're going to stand with transgender.

She had nothing sympathetic to say toward these girls whatsoever. And then she tweeted that out on Twitter and she got ratioed like you wouldn't believe there were 200 comments, 199 of them were telling her how horrible she was as a person.

They couldn't believe that she wasn't standing up for women. So it's shaking things up big time here.

Vermont Politics, Rural Opinion, and Public Reaction

What do you like? What's the sense where you live in Vermont as far as the. Would they be in agreement with these Twitter voices who are standing in opposition to this innovation? Or are they what's the community saying about this?

Do they think it's awful? Do they generally in support of these policies?

Well, so here's the thing about Vermont. It's a tiny state with a tiny population. It's very spread out. It's very rural. But like most blue states that are predominantly red, the blue is all the towns in the I -89 corridor.

So Burlington, Montpelier, Berry, the town I'm in, Hartford, all sit along I -89, which runs from my town, which is next to Dartmouth College, all the way up to Burlington, which is right across the lake from you, Lake Champlain.

And it's a state of six hundred and sixty thousand people. I'm from Portland, Oregon. I'm from a city that's almost three times the size of the entire state. But the same thing happens in Oregon. Oregon is blue because of Portland, Eugene, Salem, Corvallis.

But geographically, the rest of the state is red. So, you know, the feedback that you get, I rub elbows with a lot of right leaning people who all think it's ridiculous. But people up here like largely nonplussed about it.

Like I was just out to dinner at the Weathervane, which is across the river in New Hampshire. It's a little seafood restaurant. And the lady was serving us and I just was like, OK, I'm going to ask this lady what she thinks about men playing women's basketball.

She had two daughters who played in Vermont at Windsor, went on to play college basketball. She knew nothing about this story. Even though it's been all over the place, she knew nothing about it. But when I asked her, she said, oh, absolutely not.

They shouldn't be allowed to. So what about men going into women's restrooms? She's like, absolutely not. So when you go and talk to people, typically it's kind of what you would find around the country, John.

If they're educated and they lean left, they're all in. If they're educated and they lean right, they're pretty traditional like this is ridiculous. But we're seeing more people from the left, particularly women, and we saw it on Twitter, say, no, this is not supporting women.

This is anti-women. So I don't think this is a winning thing up here, but they have the power in the VPA and they have the power. They have a supermajority in the legislature up here. So they're ramming left stuff through.

So I was just at a AAU tournament a couple of weeks ago and spoke to some parents from New York and parents from Vermont. And the parents from Vermont actually played, their daughters played this team with the transgender, did not know about it ahead of time and said it was disgusting and none of them could get with it.

It was interesting because some of what they told me was really interesting because this person postures as a man playing basketball, like he's got very masculine attitude, like he would taunt the girls in their faces, he would flex in front of them after swatting, like after rejecting a layup, he would just sit there and flex and yell and taunt them with his finger in their face.

And so the parents from that school really turned off that they didn't know about it ahead of time. And then I also spoke with some parents from New York at that tournament and they did not like it at all.

Public School Options, Legal Challenges, and the Supreme Court Case

What's the option for your daughter? Is she thinking of, are you thinking of moving? I mean, I don't know.

Well, we don't need to move because, so this is the catch -22, she can go into public school, she can play for a public school team where she's not going to have a choice about facing these people. And I don't even know if that team is in the same league as the, if the local public high school and the Christian school are in the same league.

I don't know if they face the same teams, but when we spoke about what she wanted to do, we talked about the fact that, hey, moving forward, you could go to a public school team, but you're going to end up facing this at the public school team and you're not going to have options.

Well, that just punishes the Christian school too, because if they're going to lose all their athletes and it's going to infect their enrollment and all of that. What about legally speaking? Maybe Aaron, you would know more about this.

What can be done? What is being done to rectify this? I mean, is it just hopeless? The super majority and everything is going to ram this through and there's no way to do anything about it. I think Aaron's gone.

Aaron's internet connection has been a little spotty here. Joshua, do you know the answer to that question?

Well, I can't speak to the school's strategy for how they're dealing with this. I know that currently it's on appeal. So they are appealing to the VPA. I don't think they're going to get anywhere with it.

So the executive director, his statement was, if you don't want to follow VPA rules, that's fine, but then you're just not a VPA member. It's fairly simple. So they've pretty much taken the tactic of, you're going to do what we want or you're not going to be with us.

To me, it seems like they're just taking the position of the bully. It was really interesting to me that it was based on their diversity, equity, and inclusion standards, but they're not being diverse, equitable, or including with their decision.

It was really interesting. But I don't want to speak to the school's position legally. I mean, I know what I'd like to see them do, but that's on them. I mean, are there lawsuits?

That's what I'm wondering. Is there a way to legally challenge this at all? I would think that, especially based upon discrimination against women or something, there's got to be something that can be done.

Well, right now, actually, the Supreme Court is hearing a case about how transgender athletes apply.

Okay. You don't have great internet. Aaron, Aaron, would you just go back? You started going out for a second there.

Yeah, I don't know. It says I got a full signal, but...

Yeah, you definitely don't have a full signal.

Maybe we got some bad weather coming through. So, essentially, this...

We'll see if you're having the same bad weather, Joshua.

Well, I live less than a mile from him, so I don't... It's dark out, but it's... Okay. I think he is on his wireless from a different building from his house. Uh, well, all right. So, let me ask you.

Did you know if there's... About the court case that he was bringing up, the challenge there?

Just what Aaron's talked about. So, and I know that that has a lot to do with collegiate sports. So, there's a lot of female athletes. I believe the swimmers that swam against... Oh, the transgender swimmer that made all the headlines.

I think that... Yeah. Yeah. I think that those swimmers are part of this. There's some schools that are a part of it. So, it could create precedent that would help anybody moving forward. I'm not sure where this isn't a public school and the VPA has membership.

I'm not sure how that would work. Yeah. It is interesting that it's not... That it's like pseudo state-sponsored athletics. Like it's a private organization that handles athletics, certain sports athletics in the state.

And I don't know why they would be able to discriminate at all under any circumstance. So, I would imagine there'd be some grounds for that, but...

Yeah. So, you haven't heard anyone at the school talking about taking legal action then?

So, I intentionally did not want to know that before this because it sounds like they don't necessarily want to have legal strategy out there. So, I remained intentionally ignorant as to their plan. Yeah.

I mean, the thing that I guess drives me kind of crazy about this in a way, not just this story, but you're in Vermont. I'm in New York right now. This kind of stuff, these innovations the left wants to impose, they impose them on us first in more blue states.

And there are people, Christians in particular in the South and in parts of the Midwest who... It's a distant thing for them, right? It seems distant because maybe it hasn't affected their daughter yet.

And I just want everyone to know who's listening to this, like this is real. This actually will affect your kids. This will affect your Christian schools. This will affect your churches if this is left unchecked.

I don't know what the next step is. If it's banning schools who would choose to say our girls are not going to compete against boys, then I mean, what's the next thing, that innovation that they're going to try to impose upon schools and churches and other places?

Because it's barring their access to being able to freely assemble on the basis of the fact that they are... It's not even a religious view. It's a innate... I mean, obviously, as Christians, we believe God made them male and female, but this is something that's so basic.

You don't have to be a Christian at all to see this, that there are two genders. And this has just been the custom since in memoriam that men compete with men, women compete with women. There's an unfair advantage if a man competes with women.

The School’s Statement, Fairness, and Safety

So Aaron, are you...

Oh, go ahead, Joshua. And that was like the school took a very... I'll read you their statement. We withdrew from the tournament because we believe playing an opponent with a biological male jeopardizes the fairness of the game and the safety of our players.

Allowing biological males to participate in women's sports sets a bad precedent for the future of women's sports in general. And that was the school's stance. They weren't even taking a religious stance.

And the interesting part, going back to the VPA, is it says that you have a duty to keep your players safe in all sporting events. So the school actually following up on that rule and saying, no, we're going to keep our girls safe, ended up being punished because of a different rule.

Because somebody pointed out, hey, this is even going against your standard that you're punishing them for keeping your standard.

Aaron, you were saying before the connection went out that I think maybe Joshua covered some of it, but that there's a lawsuit that is going forward or a series of lawsuits that may change this situation.

Strength, Physiology, and the Reality of Male Advantage

Yeah, right. I just know of the case that's before the Supreme Court, and it's women's sports in West Virginia. And whether or not they can lawfully disallow transgenders from playing. And I think it's for the entire state.

I don't remember if it's a college level, but I want to say it's high school. So I think it directly correlates. And however it's adjudicated, I think would directly impact what can be done in Vermont.

But John, there's something else that I think that you should know that I think the listeners should hear. Is I didn't just get into this because I'm a Vermont regional reporter and my kids went to the school.

I'm actually a strength coach. So I've worked with world-class athletes, world champions, Olympic champions, national champions, regional champions, Pan-American champions, a variety of sports. And so I'm actually an expert when it comes to physical performance and the difference between men and women, how you train them, what advantages men have over women.

And so that's partly what got my dander up on this quite a bit is it's absurd to allow high school boys to compete against high school girls, not just on a biblical level, but on a kinesiological, anatomical, physical performance level.

It's, you know, most people don't know this, but high school boys have 20 to 30 times the testosterone, the blood serum testosterone that women do. That's like taking multiple steroid cycles. It's just not even close.

And then when you get into the physiology of the body, women have smaller upper bodies. They have wider hips. This is why they have steeper angles coming into the knee called the Q angle, which is why they have more injuries.

The number one injury in all of sport is the female soccer need decelerating in rotation because of the way their hips are structured. And because of all that stuff. So men have larger muscle mass. They have greater cardiac output.

They have more skeletal advantage. They have thicker tendons. None of this stuff can be changed in adolescence or in puberty or at any point in time that would level the playing field. Not even close.

I mean, I thought we were all just going to laugh this thing off when Bruce Jenner became Caitlyn Jenner. I was like the originally he was the biggest stud in all of sports. And now he's the woman. And I'm like, OK, this won't go far.

But now here we are.

Parental Resistance, Democratic Process, and What Parents Should Do

It just blows my mind. Yeah, it blows mine, too. I mean, it would be a joke if if it weren't actually happening. We would be laughing about the idea of this. I mean, I'm just trying to think like what my listeners, people who are hearing this can do if there's anything I would think if like the parents and the students who are the athletes who are involved in these things, if they all stood up, no matter what team they were on and said, you know, I'm going to pull my kid out if this isn't fixed, that that would get the attention of the league.

But I don't know how many parents are willing to do that or if they are afraid that there's going to be a target on their back, because I can't imagine other parents would want their girls competing against guys.

Well, I don't even think it's you know, the whole cancel culture thing, I think is overdone. People need to not be afraid of that, first of all. Second of all, for the lefties that are running the show up here, they're big into the democracy.

Well, yeah, why don't we have an anonymous vote, send it throughout the entire state to all the high school athletes, all the high school parents and all the high school coaches. Right. And let's vote.

Let's see what they have to say about it. Right. So the people who actually have skin in the game, and there's the people who it actually affects. Let's let them vote on this. I bet it would be 75 to 25 percent in favor of not allowing transgenders to play.

Well, Josh, what are the other parents saying?

So all the parents on the team that I've spoken with, they're pretty uniform in the way that the school decided to go. They supported it 100 percent. I'm a little more aggressive. When it comes like I'm a little more outspoken, so I told them up front, I said, hey, you don't want me at a game when my girl has to play a biological male because it probably won't end well because I wouldn't stay silent.

But there was a few other parents that are the same way. But back to your statement about what your listeners should probably do or how do they prepare? I think one of the things is they need to be having the conversation.

We knew this was coming. I didn't think we were going to be dealing with it this year. Like we could see the writing on the wall around the state, and that we knew it was going to be a possibility while she was in high school.

I didn't think I was going to have to be dealing with it when she was a freshman. So I would start having the conversations, knowing that it's a possibility, and speak with your coaches, speak with your school administration, and let them know this is not all right.

And you may even want to get involved on a higher level and go straight to the state school board. I don't think that the school boards would be as open, but there's got to be an avenue where you can speak up and let them know it's not OK now.

Prayer, Public Pressure, and the National Stakes

Yeah, Joshua, Aaron, I appreciate you weighing in on this, sharing some of your thoughts. And I would say at the very least, those listening, please pray for this situation, pray for Joshua's daughter, that she would be able to have a place to fine-tune her skills, compete, excel in this.

And I saw this morning that I think North Dakota is challenging this kind of thing as well. So I'm hoping that the more and more states get involved, the more that this creates a way that even though you in Vermont at a Christian school can participate in sports and so forth.

So yeah, thank you once again for sticking your necks out a little bit, being willing to go public and talk about this.

Yeah, can I add one other thing? Sure. I don't think people understand the stakes involved nationally. So this is something your listeners need to understand. But do you guys know who Camille Paglia is?

She's a famous feminist. I think she might even be a lesbian, but I don't think so. But anyway, she's a feminist and she's a historian. And she said whenever a society embraces the transgender phenomenon movement, whatever, that's the end of that culture.

It's over. Basically, it's the end of America if we don't stand up to this. This is the kiss of death, which is why people need to fight so hard. Couldn't agree more, Aaron. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Aaron.

Thank you, Joshua. Keep fighting. Keep reporting. Keep exposing. And keep hope. So God bless.