Minnesota is the latest state with a grassroots sex-based sports eligibility initiative

Citizens, tired of being ignored by politicians, are taking matters into their own hands

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The nearly 80% of Americans who think boys’ sports should be for boys, and girls’ sports should be for girls are tired of being ignored. Minnesota recently joined Washington, Colorado, and Arizona in grassroots movements to ensure sex-based eligibility for sports. (I refuse to say sex at birth or biological sex because those phrases imply sex can change and there is some kind of sex that isn’t biological). An initiative in Maine to get sex-based eligibility on the ballot was derailed in May of this year when the Maine secretary of state invalidated enough signatures to have the initiative removed from the ballot. A similar initiative in California two years ago received an amazing, volunteer-led 500,000 signatures but fell short of the 750,000 needed to get it in front of California voters. Nebraska moved to protect single-sex sports in 2025, joining 26 other states that do so, and has an amendment to the state constitution to that effect on the ballot this November.

Whether volunteer-led or backed by some kind of organizational funding, these efforts are Hard Work. Years’-long, day-to-day slogs. In sharp contrast to the one-day, back-room, top-down, emotional shakedowns that got sports-by-gender-identity instituted, officially or unofficially, in almost every state by 2023. I want to make that distinction clear—how shockingly easy it was to replace a virtually uncontested, evidence-based, federally backed policy with an obviously harmful, evidence-free invention, and how very difficult it is to return to reason, even when federal law, reality, science, and public opinion are behind it. These groups are having a bake sale while gender ideology waltzed in with billionaire money. Just a little something to ponder before I get on with Make It Fair Minnesota’s unique approach.

My initial request for more information about this group, their organizational structure, and business model elicited this prompt reply: “Our volunteers are currently prioritizing responses to inquiries from MSHSL Member Schools and district decision makers at this time. We will do what we can to respond to all other inquiries in the coming weeks.” So as of now, I don’t know who is involved nor their source of funding, if any. I do know they target the 509 member schools of the Minnesota State High School League (MSHSL), school board members and school leaders, and specifically, the two voting representatives that each school district sends to the MSHSL. Make It Fair MN launched last year with a letter of support for their sex-based sports initiative, and received 327 school board member signatures from 125 school districts, almost all of them outside Minneapolis/St. Paul. They are not starting from scratch.

Unlike initiatives in Washington and Maine that attempted to get enough public support to put single-sex sports on the general election ballot, Make It Fair MN is focusing on schools that are members of the MSHSL to change MSHSL eligibility policy. According to their website:

Under the Minnesota State High School League (MSHSL) Constitution, Member Schools—not the League Board, the Legislature, or the Governor—have the authority to propose and vote on amendments to League bylaws. That means Minnesota schools can restore biology-based eligibility for high school sports without waiting for another legislative session, another election, or years of additional litigation.

The MSHSL is a nonprofit that runs all Minnesota public school sports. It does not receive state or federal funding, but the member schools do. There is a purposely complicated and arcane relationship between the MSHSL, the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE), and Minnesota Attorney General’s office that’s best described as a circle jerk. The public is not invited to this party. Allowing students to participate according to gender identity has never come to a public vote, nor even a vote of all MSHSL member schools. MSHSL has never polled the Minnesota Coaches’ Association nor Minnesota athletic directors about allowing males to compete in female sports, either before or since adopting that policy.

Again, from Make It Fair MN’s website:

In 2014, however, the MSHSL’s Board adopted a policy allowing biological males who claim a feminine gender identity to compete on girls’ teams. That policy was adopted by the Board itself—it was not approved by a vote of the League’s Member Schools.​

The MSHSL sidestepped its own process in instituting what it knew at the time to be a gross violation of Title IX. That’s where their partners in crime came in: The MDE and Attorney General Keith Ellison all said Yup yup gotta do it because gender identity is a protected characteristic in the Minnesota Human Rights Act. They all conveniently overlooked the exemptions to the MHRA for single-sex sports and locker rooms.

Together, the Minnesota Male-Rights Mafia managed to seamlessly and almost without incident operate state-facilitated, weapons-grade sexual harassment and fraud (they continue to represent sports, locker rooms, and bathrooms as male and female/boys’ and girls’ while they actively enforce mixed sex teams and spaces) for 11 years. They sold it to Minnesotans as a civil right.

That grift hit a snag when the Three Minnesota Stooges poked the U.S. Department of Education in the eyes for the last time earlier in 2026, and the Department of Justice moved forward with a lawsuit against the MDE for Title IX violations. Then, the big one—on June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled that it is not discriminatory to restrict girls’ sports to females only. The majority opinions spent quite a bit of time enumerating the sex differences that underpinned Title IX, reiterating that single-sex sports were essential to providing girls equal opportunity. That decision put a pretty fine point on Minnesota’s choice, even at the risk of losing federal funding, to violate girls’ rights. That whole we-have-to-because-of-state-law whinge is BS. Minnesota doesn’t have to recognize some kids’ beliefs about themselves; they chose to, insisted on it, regardless of how criminal, abusive, and stupid.

Make It Fair MN didn’t say that, I did. But they referenced the Supreme Court decision as clearing the invented legal barriers that have been erected by activists in the MSHSL, the MDE, and the Attorney General that make single-sex sports “discriminatory,” and thus “unlawful” in Minnesota.

Aside from safety, fairness and equal opportunity in sports for girls, Make It Fair MN lists three other reasons for this initiative: To be in compliance with Title IX’s sex-based eligibility requirements, and therefore ensuring continued federal funding (which is now in jeopardy due to noncompliance), to restore MSHSL’s self-inflicted erosion of authority as an arbiter of fair sport, and to correct the state-flogged lie that sex-based eligibility for sports is “discriminatory” and therefore “unlawful.”

The group’s focus is on educating school board members and specifically MSHSL delegates from those 509 schools rather than the general public, but the website does provide ways Minnesotans can help spread the news about the initiative to its target audience. They suggest reading the amendment, asking school board members and MSHSL delegates to support the amendment, and spreading the news through social media and word of mouth.

They’re not getting much help from Minnesota media. None of the state’s major media have reported on this grassroots initiative; only Alpha News covered it. The Minnesota Star Tribune particularly has, for the last 11 years, acted as the propaganda arm of gender ideology, adopting inaccurate ideological language (transgender girl, or worse, transgender female, rather than male with a feminine identity, using female pronouns for males), framing sports participation by gender identity as a lifesaving civil right, endlessly repeating the lie that the Minnesota Human Rights Act makes it “unlawful” to exclude males from female sports, and calling federal attempts to enforce Title IX and hold Minnesota to the Title IX contract an attack on trans rights. Not only has the Star Tribune abandoned journalism, their slavering support of an extreme rights-violating, anti-reality ideology is increasingly out of step with even Democrats in Minnesota, the majority of who support boys’ sports for boys and girls’ sports for girls.

Gender ideology’s stranglehold on sports is breaking, slowly and then all at once. We’re entering the all-at-once phase. Something I find particularly confidence-boosting about this grassroots resurgence of reality is that it is not tied to politics. As far as I know, Make It Fair MN is not associated with a political party or organization. Disaffected Democrats made up a significant portion of the California initiative, of all the initiatives, but that hasn’t been their rallying cry. All of these groups have based their proposals on foundational reality, that women and girls’ rights as the other sex class of humans depends on recognizing the reality of sex. These ideas are not being imposed top-down as gender ideology has been, but have started with average people who see injustice and are motivated to do something about it. It’s self-evident. Women’s rights has its own merit. It’s simply the right thing to do. And that’s what will give it staying power regardless of shifting political winds.

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