GIRLS' camp is also for "female-identifying individuals," aka boys

It's okay, I was told, because everyone else is violating girls' right too

Posters have been plastered all over the rec center where I work out about a three-session girls’ basketball camp. Learn basketball skills and techniques from experts! It’s FREE! The headline shouts that this camp is for GIRLS’. But if you scan the QR code for more information, the very first sentence says the camp is for “girls and female-identifying individuals ages 7-18.” The parks department offers basketball camps that are either specifically or tacitly for boys but they obviously thought a girls camp was needed. This was aimed at girls. Why then did they quietly invite boys who identify as girls?

I contacted the parks department, and the public information specialist, with the pronouns she/her in her signature line, got back to me promptly, stoked that I was interested in this inaugural camp. Her chirpy response audibly deflated when I noted that my interest was in why and how the decision was made to open the event to boys who identified as female, and who was consulted in this decision. I realize now I would have gotten more information if I’d let her prattle on about other aspects of their girl-washed initiative—for some reason, justifying boys in a girls’ event is the third rail for anyone whose job it is to inform the public. It’s almost as if they know it’s wrong but are hoping no one will notice.

She cut and pasted a stock response to the inclusion of boys in a girls’ camp: “Participants may register on the sports team which aligns with their gender identity. Participants who do not identify as male or female may register on the sports team of their choice. These guidelines also extend to other sports activities, such as camps and clinics, and were created in alignment with other local and statewide policies,” she wrote in an email.

Though almost all parks department sports are nominally sex segregated, according to this policy, they are all mixed sex, so it was false advertising to call this a girls’ basketball camp.

Too late I tried to backtrack and find out why the parks department decided to offer a girls’ basketball camp in the first place. I got an anodyne response: “This is the first year of the Basketball Camp. The camp is an opportunity for youth to improve their basketball and team building skills, learn about wellness and nutrition, and be inspired by local leaders, athletes, and artists.”

And just like that, the girls’ camp became a youth camp. Girls, a specific population that does not include boys, became youth. Girls erased before my eyes.

Starting at age 14, girls drop out of sports at a rate twice that of boys. Sex-segregated sports have been shown to allow girls to build skills, gain confidence, and adjust to all the changes that puberty brings—hips, breasts, periods—that are specific to their sex.

At all ages, boys have physiological differences that afford them an advantage in sports over girls. Those advantages exist in boys as young as 8 years old and increase dramatically by puberty. And for the love of god let me stop anyone who says their boy is so small/thin/unathletic, he would have no advantage over the many girls who are bigger/stronger/more athletic. We don’t compare an unathletic male to the very best females and say he has no advantage. As small/thin/unathletic as a boy is, he will be stronger than his small/thin/unathletic female counterpart. Girls’ events, like this basketball camp, are all about empowering that small/thin/unathletic GIRL. Not to assuage the feelings of a boy.

Title IX provided opportunities for girls on the basis of sex, not gender identity, although such is the entrenchment of gender ideology that the present administration is considering changing “sex” to “gender identity.” UN expert Reem Alsalem warned that such a move violates the rights of women and girls. From the public information specialist’s pronouns in her signature line to the other “local and statewide” policies that allow boys to self-identify into girls’ sports, we live in a theocracy of gender identity ideology in which the law (Title IX) is regularly flouted and women’s and girls’ rights violated with impunity. This, in the name of progress. The public information specialist seemed to think it was okay to violate girls’ rights because every other organization is doing it too.

Girls are harmed by including boys in their sports. Fair Play For Women compiled an extensive report detailing six areas in which women and girls are harmed by including boys who identify as female. Broadly, those areas are:

- Unfair competition and demoralisation

– Losing out on records, rankings or on opportunities to participate

– No consent or being coerced into a mixed-sex environment (very relevant to the basketball camp)

– The chilling climate of intimidation, fear and silencing

– Loss of privacy and dignity

– Risking women’s and girls’ physical safety

Finally, this is a girls’ basketball camp. A boy who identifies as a girl is still a boy, so the claim of a girls’ event is false. The parks department is lying to girls and to the public. They’re telling girls they do not matter enough to have their own event. Which does not seem a good way to go about inspiring girls and building their confidence.

This is just one event that came to my attention because it was so loudly advertised as a girls’ camp. I have no doubt that what the public information specialist said is true—including “female-identifying individuals,” aka boys, is a statewide policy followed by schools, public, and private sports organizations. Which means, in the entire state there is likely not a single camp, clinic, or team that is actually girls only.

I asked the information specialist if there was a reason the parks department chose to violate the rights of girls, other than the fact that others were doing it too, but have heard nothing in response.

P.S. I know what you’re thinking. Won’t someone please think of the “female-identifying individuals?!” Simple solution. Boys’ sports should be tasked with inclusion of all boys however they identify—gay, trans, nonbinary. Women who identify as male and wish to have a competitive sports career opt to remain in the female category. Women’s sports have embraced gay women, trans-identifying women, nonbinary women because they’re all female. Men’s and boys sports can do that too. Oddly, men’s and boys’ sports have never been shamed for their notoriously homophobic and transphobic attitudes. That vitriol is reserved for women’s and girls’ sports that rightly push back on including males.