The Tucker Center launches curriculum to indoctrinate future coaches in male inclusion in girls' sports

I thought nothing could be more disheartening than a Supreme Court Justice using invented transpeak to deny the existence of women, and expressing consternation that “we are now looking at the definition of a girl, and we're saying only people who were girl-assigned-at-birth qualify." (Bang forehead on wall. Repeat)

Then I discovered the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport’s Nike-funded Coaching HER indoctrination campaign is expanding. Not content to try to convince existing coaches that everything they know about sex differences in sport is outdated and bigoted and causing girls to drop out of sports, the Tucker Center is taking a page from the Pritzker/Rothblatt/Arcus playbook—targeting university professors with free curriculum aimed at indoctrinating the next generation of coaches.

This is the press release: “The Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota is proud to announce the launch of the Coaching HER® Educational Champions Program, a new initiative designed to support professors, instructors, coaching directors and institutions in integrating Coaching HER® education into academic coursework…. challenging conventional norms and rethinking what it means to coach and lead girls and women in sport. Coaching HER® provides transformative educational resources that prepare future coaches, educators, and leaders to lead with awareness, intention, and inclusivity. The Coaching HER® Educational Champions Program represents a powerful opportunity for institutions to equip the next generation of inclusive, equity-minded leaders—advancing educational excellence while fostering healthier, more equitable sport environments for girls and women.”

Coaching HER Educational Champions, like Stonewall Diversity Champions, is a fake honor bestowed on those who drink the kool-aid.

As my earlier investigation and analysis of Coaching HER (or Coaching HIM, as certain other coaches I know prefer to call it), a lot of the information is valid and makes perfect sense WHEN APPLIED TO GIRLS, actual females. But when the Tucker Center starts with a definition of girl that includes boys, everything that flows from that is also a lie. Eg., an “inclusive environment for all girls” including boys will exclude girls. Girl-centered becomes male-centered, appearance diversity means accepting “girls” with penises, and I can't even start on the module on menstrual health (people who menstruate).

This “curriculum” is offered for free, which is exactly how the Gender Unicorn and the idea that some people are not the sex their body advertises came to be in K-12 classrooms. In fact, the cartoon Gender Unicorn underpins Coaching Her’s “research- and evidence-based” training modules. The “free” part is just another lie the Tucker Center is telling: The cost of this ideological indoctrination is born by girls, and it’s steep. Coaching HER requires that girls give up their place as one of two distinct sex classes of human.

Again, reading through the Coaching HER courses with a fact-based understanding of the word girl is a completely sensible experience, so common sense that virtually any current coach is already implementing these practices, and any future coach with two firing synapses does not need training to understand that girls come in different shapes and sizes, and that wrestling is not just for boys. Every point made in every assignment, every module is so blindingly obvious WHEN APPLIED TO FEMALES, one has to question why the Tucker Center spent more than a million clams to “educate” future coaches about the benefits of sports for girls (!), and enlighten them that many girls have body image concerns (!!). The answer is that it takes a crap-ton of money and carefully coded words to hide the fact that this about including boys in girls sports, but at the same time, making it seem like it’s about girls. That’s hard. It’s very complex. The mendaciousness that’s required to endlessly refer to a male as a girl without saying so, and to paint the obvious erasure of girls from their own sport as somehow beneficial to them, well, that brand of gaslighting is best left to highly paid activists. Actual researchers, scientists, would certainly muck this up with their facts.

Let’s read through some of this “curriculum” with our reality glasses on to see what the Tucker Center is actually selling.

The definition of girl on which they’re basing this entire initiative is buried in the terms section of the Body Confidence Course:

“When we use the term “Girls”, we refer to someone under the age of 18 who was assigned female at birth, or who identifies as a girl.”

This twisting of one of the foundational truths of our world—that a male can identify into girlhood—a truth on which girls’ and women’s sports, and all girls’ and women’s rights, is based guarantees the entire initiative is actually harmful to girls. If you can’t define girl, you can’t benefit or empower girls. This definition started out on Coaching HER’s front page, but they thought better of being so transparent, and it’s now in the FAQ’s just below What to do if I forget my password, and in the new curriculum, buried in the Body Confidence terms.

Sex is defined under the Challenging Gender Stereotypes module as:

Used to label a person as ‘female’ or ‘male’ at birth. This term refers to a person’s external genitalia and internal reproductive organs. When a person is assigned a particular sex at birth, it is often mistakenly assumed that this will equate with their gender; it might, but it might not.

This is the only time the word sex, or female, appears anywhere in the training. Gender and girl (remember, a girl is anyone who says he’s a girl) are used throughout. Though it claims to be evidence-based and tested, Coaching HER is built on the utterly evidence-free idea that self-declared identity should be prioritized over the reality of sex. Using terms like sex stereotypes and female-centric describe biological reality and differentiate between male and female, so of course, the authors didn’t employ that kind of accurate, scientific language. Use of “gender” allows them to say girls but include boys. Of course, the Tucker Center is not advocating for the elimination of girls’ sports—that would make them look misogynistic, and besides, they’d lose that Nike funding. Girls sports must be preserved as a place for boys to identify into and to be affirmed and celebrated. So the ideological wonderword gender is used throughout. It allows a lot of lying that sex simply would not.

They spend lots of words justifying the need for their training initiative:

…designed to address the harmful gender biases and stereotypes that often go unchallenged in sport settings. Coaches are powerful role models who can impact girls’ self-perceptions, experiences, and development. Yet coaches often lack the education and training needed to address concerns specific to girls and women, including gender identities, stereotypes and bias.

Coaches, both current and future, are pretty well versed in the concerns of female athletes, including, notably, their desire for single-sex sports and locker rooms. That’s one of those “harmful gender biases” Coaching HER seeks to purge. Other dangerous, outdated ideas include the “stereotype” that males are bigger, stronger, and faster than females (not a stereotype—voluminously proven), and the ignorant, biased idea that a be-penised person does not belong in girls’ sports or locker rooms.

FACT: Coaches trained in girl-centered practices strengthen girls’ confidence, well-being, and sense of belonging, all critical for keeping them in sport.

Reading the above Coaching HER fact though our reality glasses, it makes perfect sense. Yes, of course, female-centered practices strengthen girls’ confidence. But read it using Coaching HER’s definition of girl which includes boys. How can any practice be girl-centered if it denies their existence? If the word girl has no meaning? How can it build females’ confidence, well-being and sense of belonging if Coaching HER claims they don’t even qualify as a distinct category of human? Including boys in the definition of girls turns a fact into a lie.

Inclusive is the most used word in the Coaching HER Educational Champions curriculum—our inclusive education teaches inclusion so that graduates of our inclusive training will be highly sought after coaches with expertise in inclusive coaching practices. Got it? It’s about inclusion, stupid. Of ALL girls. HOWEVER, as much as they use the word inclusion, the photos that accompany the curriculum and the website show females—black, brown, small, large, wearing hijabs, all clearly female. But no Lia Thomases. No Sadie Schreiners. Hmmm, why not show ALL girls? In a training module, Coaching HER director Alicia Pelton related a personal story about inclusion—listening to and including girls from poor economic backgrounds, girls of color, girls from cultures that had different expectations for daughters than sons when it came to sports. The girls she sought to include faced barriers that many females face, because of their sex. Yes, of course, economically and culturally challenged girls should be included in girls’ sports because they’re female. BUT Pelton very pointedly did not use male runner Veronica Garcia as an example of inclusion, though Garcia illustrates exactly what Coaching HER preaches—including, accepting, and celebrating anyone who identifies as a girl. Why didn’t she tell an emotional story about including a “transgirl?”

Pelton et al know boys are not girls. If the Tucker Center honestly thought including boys in girls sports was the right thing to do, they’d show photos of boys who identify as girls, and relate anecdotes of boys who identify as girls. Instead they girl wash their male-centric initiative.

Bearing in mind that a girl is anyone who says he’s a girl puts a whole new spin on Coaching HER’s definition of Appearance Diversity and its antecedent, Body Talk Free Zone:

Appearance Diversity: Everybody is different and no two people are the same. Recognizing and respecting appearance diversity includes accepting all appearances and celebrating differences.

and

Body Talk Free Zone: A commitment between teammates and teams to create a space where people avoid engaging in body talk and/or challenge this behavior when it occurs.

Buried deep in the Tucker Center’s 242-page report on girls in sport, the chapter on LGBTQ “individuals” acknowledged the dirty word, once—a person may feel like a girl even though they were born with a body that may appear male. In an earlier iteration of Coaching HER, coaches were admonished to “accept all bodies and celebrate differences” but they realized in hindsight, that “bodies” focused attention on physical bodies—oh lordy, don’t do that. “Appearance” is nice and not penis-inferring at all.

Reading this with our sex-based glasses on, this is about respecting short girls, big girls, brown girls, unathletic girls, girls with para abilities. Duh. I’m going to give undergraduates the benefit of the doubt and say they do not need training to accept and celebrate (tbh, I don’t think anyone needs to be celebrated for their appearance) girls of all colors, shapes and sizes. BUT they might stumble over BOY appearances. In fact, some ignorant future coaches might need to be re-educated (see also: struggle session) to accept boy appearances. Urging trainee coaches to celebrate a be-penised individual on a girls’ team is Coaching HER’s extra Mao mile.

The Body Talk Free Zone, again, makes sense WHEN APPLIED TO A FEMALE TEAM, but is weaponized against them when a team includes a boy. How can a girl describe why changing in front of a boy makes her uncomfortable? Is she just a bigot for not accepting his different appearance? A girl who speaks truthfully—that person with the penis is a boy—should be shamed, challenged, shut down. The Body Talk Free Zone removes a girl’s ability to accurately describe reality.

The Menstrual Health Course is where Coaching HER’s word manipulation peaks because, of course, menstruation is a biological reality that only females experience. Feminine identities do not menstruate. The Tucker Center knows they have to talk about menstruation to keep up the facade that this is actually about girls, but—awkward—doing so is going to expose the SEX differences between a girl and a boy who identifies as a girl that they’ve been working so hard to cover up. Talking about menstruation is the one sure way to confirm that a boy who identifies as a girl is not a girl. And their carefully constructed gender inclusive world would collapse. This course was a minefield for the authors which they navigated in typical activist fashion by erasing the word girl completely, and replacing it with the unsexed athlete or person. The menstrual cycle is defined as:

The monthly hormonal cycle for people who experience menstruation as a part of their reproductive health

Throughout this course, females are bizarrely disconnected from every female-only experience and replaced with the robotic, inane people: RED-S is “when people do not have sufficient energy,” amenorrhea is “when a person stops getting their period,” yet they accurately describe menstruation as “when the uterine lining (endometrium) and unfertilized egg are shed from the uterus, through the cervix and out of the body through the vagina. People with uteri, eggs, cervixes and vaginas—the evidence they’ve presented here is that they’ve lost their minds, and are tyng themselves in knots to deny that females, girls, are a unique sex class of humans. Nowhere in this entire cesspit have the authors made more clear their science-denying, anti-reality, woman-erasing goals. But if there’s any truth gender ideology reveals, it’s that ever greater absurdities are required to support it.

Unable to write a sentence without the word inclusion in it, Module 2 of the Menstrual Health Course instructs learners to create a Menstrual Health Inclusion Plan. This involves talking openly about periods, ensuring access to a variety of period products, uniform options, being aware of differing cultural needs, and providing a comfortable environment in the locker room, during practice, competition, and traveling. Once again, all of these ideas make perfect sense in the context of a female-only team, to the point that one can hardly imagine anyone requiring a training module to make sure girls have access to tampons, cups, pads, etc. The gaping hole in Coaching HER’s Menstrual Health Inclusion Plan is how, exactly, a coach ensures a comfortable, private period-friendly environment for girls who might be experiencing their first period when there is a male in the locker room. All those words, all those modules, beating learners over the head with inclusion, and yet, on this very real and common need of females, Coaching HER is silent. Not a word.

Their giant lie is exposed. Boys who identify as girls are not girls. Girls are not an identity. Girls are a distinct sex class, deserving of single-sex sports and spaces. The Coaching HER Educational Champions initiative is an attempt to indoctrinate the next generation of coaches into gender ideology, to normalize the inclusion of boys in girls’ sports. The goals of Coaching HER’s curriculum are objectively harmful to girls and girls’ sports. That the Tucker Center continues to tout this indoctrination program as beneficial to girls is, like its dehumanizing definition of girl, unspeakably offensive and harmful.