(LifeSiteNews) — A Michigan father has filed a federal complaint over his daughter’s high school volleyball team being forced to compete against a gender-confused male player without advance warning.
Michigan State University Public Media WKAR reports that Sean Lechner’s Title IX complaint concerns his daughter Briley’s’ team at Monroe High School, which during a recent match was caught off guard by an opposing team with a male player. The plaintiffs say parents were not given advance notice, a proper waiver was not submitted by the opposing school (which is unidentified), and that the teams were made to share locker facilities.
“Nobody would have expected that. That would’ve been the last thought because as I was looking at this person, admiring how amazing they were, admiring how high they could jump, I was kind of getting down on myself. Like, I wonder why I’m not capable of that,” Briley said. Sean added, “It’s not fair, it’s not equal, and it’s not right. It takes every bit of dignity and privacy away from our girls.”
The Michigan High School Athletic Association (MHSAA) has responded by claiming it did receive one waiver for a “transgender” student seeking to compete in school sports but did not elaborate beyond that, citing privacy considerations.
MHSAA spokesperson Geoff Kimmerly did say the body would like more clarity from the Michigan Legislature on how to handle such disputes, but bills to exempt school athletic programs from state “gender identity discrimination” rules have failed to pass the Democrat-controlled state Senate.
The Lechners hope for better results by appealing to the U.S. Department of Education, as the Trump administration has returned to a biology-based working definition of “sex” in discrimination law and moved to defund schools that impose transgender ideology on staff and students.
Inclusion of gender-confused individuals 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.
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.
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 fully 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 hormone” use; therefore, “the advantage to [gender-confused men] afforded by the [International Olympic Committee] guidelines is an intolerable unfairness.”
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.
