STATEN ISLAND (LifeSiteNews) — New York’s Wagner College will begin limiting sex-specific athletic programs to actual members of the designated sex and apologize to all female athletes impacted by its previous policy, under a new agreement with the federal government.
As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, at the end of March, 31-year-old Stephanie Turner, who previously made a point of trying to evade tournaments in which she would have to face “transgender” fencers, found herself up against gender-confused male Redmond Sullivan, who was from Wagner, at the Cherry Blossom Open in Maryland. She learned about the matchup the night before and made her decision how to handle it then.
After four matches against other women, she says, when the match came, “I took a knee immediately at that point. Redmond was under the impression that I was going to start fencing. So when I took the knee, I looked at the ref and I said, ‘I’m sorry, I cannot do this. I am a woman, and this is a man, and this is a women’s tournament. And I will not fence this individual.’”
Turner received a black card (the most serious penalty in fencing), was brought before the bout committee, and escorted out of the tournament, though women’s sporting fairness group XX-XY Athletics gave her its Courage Wins Champion award for her actions.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) subsequently launched a Title IX sex discrimination investigation, and on August 1 announced that it has reached a resolution agreement with Wagner, under which the school has agreed to “adopt biology-based definitions for the words ‘male’ and ‘female’”; publicly state it will cease “allowing male students to compete in female athletic programs and from occupying female intimate facilities”; “rescind any guidance that authorized males to compete in women’s athletics”; and “issue a personalized letter of apology to any Wagner College female fencer and issue a public statement of apology to all female athletes who were required to compete against a male in a Wagner athletics program designated for women.”
“On the heels of our agreement with the University of Pennsylvania, the Trump Administration secured another historic Title IX agreement with Wagner College. After Stephanie Turner, a female athlete, bravely took a knee and forfeited a fencing match against a male competing in a female category, our Office for Civil Rights launched its investigation into Wagner College and the University of Maryland, where the event was hosted. Wagner has agreed to apologize for putting a male on their female fencing team and will revise its policies to comply with Title IX,” said Secretary of Education Linda McMahon.
“Because of President Trump’s leadership, the tide is turning on our nation’s campuses. We commend Wagner College for working with the Department to repair its harm to female athletes and ensuring future generations of women and girls have equal opportunities,” she continued.
Allowing gender-confused individuals to compete in opposite-sex sports is promoted by leftists as a matter of “inclusivity,” but critics note that indulging “transgender” athletes undermines the original rational basis for having sex-specific athletics in the first place, thereby depriving female athletes of recognition and professional or academic opportunities.
There have been numerous high-profile examples in recent years of men winning women’s competitions, and research affirms that physiology gives males distinct athletic advantages that cannot be negated by hormone suppression.
In a 2019 paper published by the Journal of Medical Ethics, New Zealand researchers found that “healthy young men [do] not lose significant muscle mass (or power) when their circulating testosterone levels were reduced to (below International Olympic Committee guidelines) for 20 weeks,” and “indirect effects of testosterone” on factors such as bone structure, lung volume, and heart size “will not be altered” by cross-sex hormones; therefore, “the advantage to [gender-confused men] afforded by the [International Olympic Committee] guidelines is an intolerable unfairness.”
Critics also warn that forcing girls to share intimate facilities such as bathrooms, showers, or changing areas with members of the opposite sex violates their privacy rights, subjects them to needless emotional stress, and gives male predators a viable pretext to enter female bathrooms or lockers by simply claiming transgender status.
Even the left-wing United Nations has acknowledged as much, via an October 2024 report by Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem, which found that more than 600 female athletes around the world have lost more than 890 medals to men in 29 sports as of March 2024. “To avoid the loss of a fair opportunity, males must not compete in the female categories of sport,” the report concluded.
In America since the 1980s, more than 1,941 gold medals in female events that would have gone to female athletes have instead been claimed by men identifying as “transgender women,” and along with them, more than $493,173 in prize money across more than 10,067 amateur and professional events, according to data compiled by He Cheated and reviewed by Concerned Women for America.
