We Told You It Would Get Worse

Women's and girls' sports are likely to be next on the chopping block.

By Shalise Manza Young

Time and again, people — usually women, often Black — who were sounding the alarm long ago about what would happen during the first Trump administration, and who picked up weapons-grade bullhorns after he was elected a second time were told we were being hyperbolic.

That some things were just settled law.

That no, no, silly ladies, you’re just being ridiculous. That would never happen.

And guess what? It has all happened, and more.

Photo by Valentin Balan on Unsplash

The latest “we told you so” is coming. The Heritage Foundation, the far-right group responsible for Project 2025, isn’t satisfied that its horrifying campaign of demonizing transgender girls and women it took up a few years ago was successful: The Supreme Court decided last month that, for all intents and purposes, the 14th Amendment’s promise of equal protection under the law doesn’t include trans girls and women.

Because, as so many predicted, the cries of “protect women’s sports!” weren’t going to end at banning trans girls and women. Eventually Title IX, the landmark 1972 anti-sex discrimination law that led to significant growth in sporting opportunities for girls and women, would come under attack.

The push has already begun. The Heritage Foundation didn’t even wait a month after SCOTUS’ decision upholding anti-trans sports participation bans in Idaho and West Virginia before it published a paper by research fellow and Boise State professor Scott Yenor titled, “Title IX’s Failed Experiment: Why Accommodating Sex Differences Beats Engineered Parity.”

Given that more than half of Project 2025 has been implemented in just 18 months and the presence of several of its writers in government positions, we must pay attention and take the threat of Title IX being dismantled seriously.

Even by current standards, Yenor’s views are extreme — he’s reportedly a leader in the Society for American Civic Renewal, an all-male, all-Christian (though only certain sects), presumably all-heterosexual (at least publicly), invitation-only group. He has said “independent” women are “more medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome than women need to be,” has encouraged people to be attached to a “fertility cult,” and has expressed anti-LGBTQ opinions.

In his paper, Yenor states that the Title IX mandate that schools provide equal athletic opportunities for boys and girls and men and women should be abolished in favor of a “more reality-based jurisprudence [that] would unwind the proportionality regime and its narrow definition of athletic opportunity,” suggesting that though some varsity sports could be offered, “non-competitive” and “lower intensity” activities like “group fitness classes, dance, yoga, recreational intramural sports, hiking, and the like” would replace many of them.

Elsewhere, he wrote that those activities and cheerleading are “more aligned with average female interests and tendencies.”

Yenor might be dreaming of the days when cheerleading meant developing teen girls wearing tight sweaters and pleated skirts and waving pom-poms, but they are long gone; today, competitive cheerleading requires tremendous athleticism and could lead to significant injuries such as ACL tears, bone breaks, concussions, and even paralysis, and the aesthetic demands can lead to negative self-image and disordered eating.

According to Yenor, “expanding competitive sports for women was never merely about fairness or ‘opportunity.’ Promoting assertive athletics formed a core element of a broader project to remake female character itself — producing a new woman who would be more aggressive, assertive, dominant, and less deferential, less graceful, and less oriented toward motherhood and traditional feminine graces.”

Unsurprisingly, Yenor notes more than once that being mandated to provide an equal number of roster spots for women means men lose out, and that’s just not fair because “competition is much more central to male identity.” He posits exempting football, which has a roster limit of 105 players at the NCAA level, from the equity equation.

One thing to always keep in mind about Yenor, Heritage, and similar extremists and groups: When they talk about “women” and what they should be doing, they generally mean white women. White women should be having more babies. White women should set their non-procreating ambitions aside. White women should be docile and defer to men in any decision of consequence. As nearly every decision made by this regime shows, they seem to long for an all-white nation, one that never has been and never will be.

Numerous studies have shown that, by and large, sports participation is a plus for girls and women. Girls and women who participate in sports have lower rates of depression, higher self-esteem, and better grades and graduation outcomes, and they learn perseverance, how to work within a team, and how to win and lose.

Of course, some participants experience negatives, such as disordered eating or abusive coaching, which is an unfortunate reality for athletes of all genders and backgrounds.

I experienced the tremendous positive impact sports can have on a teenage girl battling occasional thoughts of suicide. And as a track and field coach for over 15 years, I now see it from the other side: The classmates my athletes might not otherwise get to know become best friends as they bond around the difficulty of workouts and the exhilaration of personal bests, learning that putting in consistent effort leads to positive results.

Last year, I changed schools and now lead a co-ed team for the first time. It has affirmed that just as some girls are fiercely competitive and others are happy to be part of the team, the boys are no different. There are girls who run faster or jump farther in the same event as some of their male teammates. If there is animosity, we don’t see it. They all practice together, they encourage and support each other, and every member of the team is celebrated.

None of what Yenor wrote is new; the same argument has been made since the day it was decided that Title IX extended beyond academic opportunities to sports. In the 1995 Aaron Sorkin-Rob Reiner classic “The American President,” a man at a White House Christmas party tells President Andrew Sheperd that “militant women are out to destroy college football” because they wanted parity for sports and Title IX to actually be enforced.

When I read arguments like Yenor’s, what I hear isn’t just whining and misogyny. I hear fear from men who have been socialized for generations to believe that everything is theirs to own and use as they want, including women, and not only are they clueless as to how to navigate a world where that isn’t the case, but they don’t even want to try.

Now, though, unlike in decades past, the Supreme Court is currently run by six hyper-partisan Christian nationalists who bastardize the Constitution, effectively rewriting it to suit their desired outcomes and whose public decisions often signal which and whose civil rights they’d be willing to strip away next.

So if Yenor and the Heritage Foundation are making noise about exempting sports from Title IX, the time to take it seriously is now.

Shalise Manza Young is an award-winning writer focused on the intersections of race, gender, politics, and sports. She is the director of track and field at Phillips Andover Academy. She and her family, including Contrarian Pet of the Week Coco, live in Boston. You can find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung.

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