We are failing our female athletes in Paris and here at home

And why I'm Lovin' my view (and holding on tight to it)

I had the good fortune last Friday of being asked by an editor at the New York Post to write a column about the controversy swirling around women’s boxing at the Paris Olympics and how it relates to the Biden-Harris administration’s recent rewrite of Title IX.

The new Title IV rules that expand the definition of sex to include gender identity had just taken effect the day before—on August 1st. On that day, while waiting for my youngest son to get out of basketball practice, I shared my thoughts —well, outrage really—in a short video. While twenty-six states have successfully sued and won preliminary injunctions that block the new law from being implemented, the other twenty-four took no action. In those states, any student in K-12 or higher education can simply self-identity into whatever spaces and sports they so choose. If a male says, “I’m a girl” or “I’m a woman” or “I identify as female,” they must be allowed access to the changing rooms, bathrooms and sports teams that are supposed to be reserved for women and girls.

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Below is an excerpt of my column. To read it in full, click here.

Forty-six seconds was all it took for Italian boxer Angela Carini to throw in the towel on her own fight during the Paris Olympics — and those 46 seconds have thrown gasoline on the firestorm over gender and fairness in women’s athletics.

“I’ve never been hit with such a powerful punch,” Carini said in a tearful post-bout interview, about facing Imane Khelif from Algeria, who was disqualified from another event the year before for failing a gender-identity test.

This situation is a complicated one: Unlike the majority of male athletes competing against females in interscholastic and collegiate competitions here in the United States, who generally self-identify as transgender, Khelif is believed to suffer a disorder of sexual development.

DSD is an umbrella term for rare conditions involving genes, hormones and the reproductive organs. A person with DSD can appear female on the outside, but have the biology and XY chromosomes of a male.

In much of the world, this condition is often discovered soon after birth. But if it goes undetected, a family would have no reason to doubt the appearance of a child’s external anatomy — that is, until puberty, when massive amounts of testosterone turn that seemingly prepubescent girl into a post-pubescent male.

We don’t know Khelif’s medical condition, but we do know that the Algerian boxer failed a test at the World Boxing Championships in 2023.

So did another boxer, Lin Yu-Ting of Taiwan, who on Friday won an Olympics bout against Uzbekistan’s Sitora Turdibekova, beating her in all three rounds.

The International Olympic Committee “won’t reveal the exact DSD due to privacy,” evolutionary biologist Colin Wright posted on X — but according to reports, both boxers’ 2023 disqualifications were not based on testosterone tests.

“It means they failed a genetic test,” Wright explained, “and the only way to do that is by having a Y chromosome” — that is, by being a biological male.

It’s virtually impossible to imagine the pain and psychological trauma of growing up as a girl, only to find that your chromosomes actually make you male. How much harder to discover that truth only because you have excelled in women’s athletics.

But our compassion cannot negate the unfairness and the very real danger of allowing athletes with these conditions to participate in the women’s division.

After two blows to the head, Carini knew she couldn’t safely go on. If the IOC doesn’t right this ship, someone will likely be killed.

To continue reading the full piece, click here.

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LOVIN’ my view

With my oldest son gearing up to play in the American Legion New England Regionals this week, I am holding on tight to these final weeks of watching him and his teammates play. He’s 19 and this is his last year of eligibility. I’ve watched some of these boys play together for well over a decade and am keenly aware that we are getting close to the end of this most wonderful baseball chapter. The picture below is after last week’s state championship win—they let me hold the trophy!

The gratitude and yes, sadness, I feel knowing this chapter is in its final week if we lose at regionals and weeks if we make it to the Legion world series is precisely what drove me to start LOVE my view LLC. It’s the joy of watching them play coupled with the realization of how fast it all goes by. Plus, it’s no secret that we could use a little more gratitude on the sidelines and in the stands of youth sports.

We recently added golf, hockey and car racing to our collections. Winter hats for football season are now available here.

Talk soon,

Erika