For former Connecticut track star Chelsea Mitchell, competing against transgender athletes — biological males — was “devastating.”
Mitchell opened up about her past experience in an editorial published Sunday in USA Today. She explained why she and three other athletes filed a lawsuit last year against the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference over the state’s decision to allow transgender athletes to compete on the teams that correlate with their determined sex and gender identity.
She expressed how crushing it was to lose “four women’s state championship titles, two all-New England awards, and numerous other spots on the podium to male runners.”
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“That’s a devastating experience,” Mitchell wrote of competing against biological males. “It tells me that I’m not good enough; that my body isn’t good enough; and that no matter how hard I work, I am unlikely to succeed, because I’m a woman.”
The CIAC permitted two biological males to begin racing on the female team in 2017. From 2017 to 2019, they won 15 women’s state track championship titles and, according to the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is representing the girls, have taken more than 85 “opportunities to participate in higher levels of competition” from their biologically female counterparts.
In late April, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Chatigny dismissed the girls’ lawsuit against the CIAC, deciding that, since the two transgender athletes at the center of the complaint had graduated, the case was moot.
The plaintiffs — Mitchell, Selina Soule, and Alanna Smith — plan to appeal the decision by Chatigny, whom they have argued is biased against their cause.
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Mitchell argued the policy in place at the CIAC “robs girls of the chance to race in front of college scouts who show up for elite meets, and to compete for the scholarships and opportunities that come with college recruitment.”
“I’ll never know how my own college recruitment was impacted by losing those four state championship titles to a male,” she lamented. “When colleges looked at my record, they didn’t see the fastest girl in Connecticut. They saw a second- or third-place runner.”
Journalist Abigail Shrier, who wrote “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,” condemned President Joe Biden in January, when he signed an executive order mandating all educational institutions receiving federal funding permit biological males to compete on female sports teams.
She said at the time that his action will “unilaterally eviscerate women’s sports” by placing “a new glass ceiling” over girls.
“Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling has faced blowback, too, for defending biological females against the push to fully embrace transgenderism. She argued last summer that, “if sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased.”
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