Earlier this year, a private Christian school in Vermont forfeited a girls’ basketball game against a team with a biological male “transgender” player. Consequently, the team was banned from participating in upcoming sporting events.
Townhall covered how a school official said that the game “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,” they added.
This week, a snowboarding coach from Vermont filed a federal lawsuit claiming that his free speech rights were violated after he was fired for stating that male-bodied athletes have an advantage over female athletes.
According to the New York Post, the coach, David Bloch, founded the Woodstock Union High School snowboarding team. He served as its head coach for over a decade.
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In February, Bloch lost his job after he had a short discussion with some of his athletes where he said that males have physical advantages over females. Reportedly, his remarks came after he overheard two athletes discussing a biological male athlete at a different school who "transitioned" and was competing against girls. Bloch’s team was set to compete against the team with the "transgender" individual.
The following day, Windsor Central Supervisory Union Superintendent Sherry Sousa gave Bloch a pink slip informing him that he was terminated and said an investigation into his remarks was underway. Reportedly, the slip accused Bloch of violating the school board’s harassment policy and of using “disparaging names” that created “an objectively offensive environment and constituted harassment based on gender identity.”
Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal advocacy group representing Bloch, said that he “joined the conversation to comment that people express themselves differently and that there can be masculine women and feminine men. He also affirmed that as a matter of biology, males and females have different DNA, which causes males to develop differently from females and have different physical characteristics, and that those biological differences give males an advantage in athletic competitions.”
ADF pointed out that under Bloch’s leadership, his athletes won state championships.
“Bloch is a practicing Roman Catholic who believes that God created males and females with immutable sex, and that, based on scientific evidence, there are only two sexes, male and female and that sex is determined by a person’s chromosomes,” the organization added.
One example that pushed this issue to the forefront was Will “Lia” Thomas, the male-bodied swimmer who competed against females and won. Townhall covered how his school, the University of Pennsylvania, told his female teammates to keep quiet about their concerns with the situation.
“There was something going on in that athletic department that wanted to keep us quiet. And I was like, ‘this is getting scary,’” Paula Scanlan, one of Thomas’ teammates, explained. She said that girls were told in a meeting, without Thomas present, “do not talk to the media, you will regret it.”
