The Tucker Center and Nike roll out an initiative to re-educate girls' coaches

It starts out by defining girl as anyone who identifies as a girl

In the farthest recesses of the Coaching HER training module called Recognizing Girls’ Identities, I came across a link in the helpful Gender Unicorn Guide to this extremist screed from the LGBTQ+ zine AutoStraddle:

“While it is true that gender and sex are different things, and that gender is indeed a social construct, sex isn’t the Ultimate Biological Reality that transphobes make it out to be. There’s nothing intrinsically male about XY chromosomes, testosterone, body hair, muscle mass or penises.”

That 2014 article, with no scientific references, was written by Mey Rude, a self-described “fat, trans, Latina lesbian living in LA. She's a writer, journalist, and a trans consultant and sensitivity reader.”

You may be wondering how Rude’s article would help coaches retain girls in sports. I know I did.

Coaching HER is a collaboration between the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sports and Nike purportedly aimed at keeping girls in sports. Coaching HER director Alicia Pelton said of the global training initiative,

“What we put out there is all research based. Nike would not put their material out there if it was not thoroughly researched. We stand by our product. We believe in it and so do many others.”

I’m going to guess that Pelton was not standing behind Mey Rude’s contribution to the training resource. But maybe she was. I had taken the nine online training modules—read everything, took every quiz, followed every link, watched every video. And I had a lot of questions stemming from the fact that the entire lavishly funded effort which is being rolled out worldwide is based on ideologically biased pseudoscience rather than actual science. For example, Coaching HER’s definition of girl:

“When we use the term ‘girl’, we refer to any athlete who is younger than 18 years and identifies as female. When we use the term ‘woman’, we refer to any athlete who is 18 years or older and identifies as female, regardless of the sex they were assigned at birth.”

This, despite the Tucker Center’s own research that says: “Girls-only matters: Research clearly indicates girls tend to prefer single-sex PA [physical activity] for many reasons…” They know girls prefer single-sex physical activity, but this entire training initiative is built around including boys who identify as girls. Right up front, Coaching HER is not about retaining girls.

Asked about this foundational contradiction, Pelton was defensive: “I’m not going to get into the weeds about the gender identity of a young human. I’m not going to get into a discussion about sex versus gender.”

I apologized for getting granular, but asked Pelton about a specific exercise in the module on Stereotypes noting a long list of “common stereotypes.” One stood out to me: Boys are stronger and faster than girls. That’s not a stereotype; that’s robustly documented fact.

Again, annoyed, Pelton said, “Are you saying boys in general are faster and stronger? We’re saying there may be some girls that are stronger and faster than boys.”

All research, including their own, uses aggregate data to make a conclusion. There are always exceptions but they do not disprove the rule. Yes, some girls are faster and stronger than some boys, but this does not mean that boys are stronger and faster than girls is a stereotype, one that coaches should discount. Throughout, Coaching HER used exceptions to claim that scientific facts were stereotypes, and therefore outdated, something that’s rooted in false assumptions.

Quickly turning my questions into a refusal to accept my biases, Pelton intoned a script straight out of the White Fragility handbook: “It sounds like you’re hurt, like you’re taking this personally. We’re saying here’s an opportunity to be aware of your biases and stereotypes, to get better. We all have biases, but we can all do better.”

The foundational tenets, target audience, and “research” used by Coaching HER do not support a goal of keeping girls in sports. HOWEVER, if the actual purpose of the initiative is to re-educate coaches, reframing coaches’ views that someone who identifies as a girl is actually a boy as unacceptable “bias,” believing there are two sexes is a harmful and outdated “bias,” that it’s a “stereotype” that boys are stronger and faster than girls, and that coaches and girls should accept all identities on their team, then it makes sense. By framing scientific fact as bias and stereotypes or refuting scientific fact with ideological pseudoscience, the Tucker Center and Nike have constructed a Trojan horse that looks like it benefits girls, and have rolled it into the camp of people who have the most contact with female athletes—girls’ coaches. But it’s a trick. Inside, the horse is filled with soldiers of gender ideology, combating what most coaches know to be true—that boys who identify as girls do not belong in girls’ sports, and allowing boys to identify into girls’ sports is just one more reason girls drop out.

Coaching HER is not about keeping girls in sports. It’s gender ideology indoctrination for coaches. It’s about getting boys who identify as girls into girls’ sports.

I will support this claim by pointing out the incoherence, inconsistencies, and outright scientific falsehoods throughout, from foundational in this post to nitty gritty in a second post.

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Pelton explained that though the Tucker Center has been aware that girls drop out of sports at twice the rate of boys for decades, they are a research organization and don’t have the staff or budget to disseminate and act on that information. In 2019, Nike approached Dr. Nicole LaVoi, the director of the Tucker Center, with lots of dollars and the desire to “make social impact.” If LaVoi could do anything she wanted, what would it be?

A little background: A decade ago, I contacted Nicole LaVoi to see what research the Tucker Center was doing on male advantage in women’s sports. This was amid the Caster Semenya (an athlete with 46 XY 5-ARD DSD) controversy and the growing storm of trans-identified male athletes. LaVoi referred me to Athlete Ally. I went to Athlete Ally’s website but found no research, only LGBTQ advocacy. Thinking she’d misunderstood my request, I got back to LaVoi and clarified I was looking for scientific research on sex differences between males and females, you know, the underpinning of the female category. Nope, she replied, Athlete Ally was my source.

Girls in the critical period between ages 11 and 17 drop out of sports at twice the rate of boys. If girls disengage from sports in high school, they miss out on lifelong social, physical, academic, leadership, and mental health benefits afforded by participation in sports. This seemed a worthy problem for the Tucker Center and Nike to address, and one anyone associated with girls’ sports would get behind.

But to fix a problem, you have to identify why it’s happening. Why are teen girls dropping out of sports? Pelton said Nike and the Tucker Center kicked it into high gear, integrating the 100+ papers LaVoi and Anna Goorevich had written, doing original research, accessing other research institutes, going to countries around the world to talk to girls and coaches.

Puzzlingly, at the end of it all, the Tucker Center laid the reason at coaches’ feet:

“The most central, yet unaddressed, issue which negatively impacts girls’ performance, self-perceptions, sport choices and experiences: coaches’ unconscious gender biases and stereotypes,” said LaVoi. Coaches' unconscious gender biases and stereotypes are often a reason girls drop out of sport.

Blaming coaches’ unconscious gender bias and stereotypes for girls dropping out of sports is puzzling because the studies that Coaching HER links to on its front page do not support that conclusion. One, a 2020 Canadian study, listed 11 reasons girls drop out of sports, including access, interest in alternatives, cost, lack of confidence, lack of skill, body image, school work, injury, religion. The other, a 2022 review compiled by Women in Sport and Sport England, found that the top five reasons girls disengaged from sports were: no longer able to take part just for fun, too busy with schoolwork, no longer important to me, sport got too competitive, and not as many opportunities to take part. Body image concerns, discomfort doing sports while on their period, and being judged by peers were also mentioned. Coaches’ gender biases and/or stereotypes were never mentioned as reasons girls drop out of sports in this, the data Coaching HER points to.

In fact, Pelton did not corroborate the coaches’ gender bias theory. “Body image is the number one reason girls drop out of sports,” she said. “Coaches are just one aspect. They thought this was the best approach to help retain girls. We’re addressing one segment—speaking to coaches, so coaches have the ability to rethink their own stereotypes. Coaches need to be coachable, to be able to reflect on their own biases.”

Gender stereotypes, body image concerns, lack of female role models, and peer pressure are well known culprits in girls’ disengagement from sport, but these influences come from society at large, specifically social media, not coaches. In fact, someone who is coaching girls is directly countering gender biases and stereotypes propagated by society because they know these biases and stereotypes are harmful and not true. It’s hard to imagine a girls’ rugby coach believing that girls should not play rugby because it’s a boys’ sport (this was an example of a common stereotype from a Coaching HER training module). That just doesn’t make sense.

According to Coaching HER, coaches need to educate (or maybe re-educate) themselves.

“Coaches often lack the education and training needed to address concerns specific to girls and women, including gender identities, stereotypes and bias.”

Coaches are, by nature of their job, well aware of stereotypes affecting girls. They are also more likely than almost any group in the general population to be informed by biology on the real sex differences between girls and boys, and the basis for girls’ sex-based sports. Framing coaches’ knowledge as bias, Coaching HER attempts to re-educate coaches about boys who identify as girls, to indoctrinate them into gender ideology. A girl is anyone who identifies as a girl.

A program designed to keep teen girls in sports, a problem rooted in girls’ unique sex-based experiences, that targets the wrong culprit and ignores girls’ preference for single-sex sports has zero chance of success. It’s incoherent, contradictory, meaningless, even counterproductive. And it’s meant to be. Coaching HER is meant to make coaches question whether scientific facts—there are two sexes, boys are stronger and faster than girls—are actually just stereotypes. It’s meant to make them question if they know anything for sure.

Here’s an example of circular, incoherent logic noted as a key point in the module on Stereotypes:

“All girls are not the same but it’s important to remember that all girls experience the world differently than boys just because they are girls. (Additional things to remember: Some girls are boys who identify as girls, and as Pelton pointed out earlier, generalizations may be stereotypes, so, maybe some girls don’t experience the world differently than boys.)

Huh? I don’t think any coach, no matter how fossilized, thinks all girls are the same, but their expansive definition of girls likely does not include boys. And I’m equally sure they are keenly aware of how differently girls experience the world than boys. Breasts, hips, periods, a one-in-nine chance of being sexually assaulted. Girls’ coaches know those sex-based realities. But none of that makes sense if you’re defining a girl as anyone who identifies as a girl. In what practical way does Coaching HER help a coach coach girls better? I mean biological girls. Most importantly, how does this ideological indoctrination that ignores girls’ preferences for single-sex sports keep girls from dropping out of sports?

I found Coaching HER incredibly sinister and disturbingly impactful. Pelton said it’s being used by clubs and sports associations worldwide. Some are mandating this training.

This is the overview. In the next post, I’ll go line by line, showing how Coaching HER uses pseudoscience, and reframing facts as biases to indoctrinate coaches into gender ideology and gaslight girls into accepting “all body types and identities”—that’s from the training—into girls’ sports.