LYNN, Massachusetts (LifeSiteNews) — The girls basketball team at a public charter high school in Massachusetts forfeited a recent game at halftime because a gender-confused male player on the opposing team had allegedly injured three of its players, causing the remaining female teammates to fear for their safety.
The Daily Item reported that Collegiate Charter School of Lowell ended its February 8 game against the KIPP Academy girls basketball team after just 16 minutes due to the KIPP team’s inclusion of a male player reportedly six feet tall with facial hair.
Collegiate Charter athletic director Kyle Pelczar said the school was aware of the player “going into the game, already, because we had them at home the first game of the year and nothing happened then,” but coach Kevin Ortins ultimately chose to call off this one because “he felt that his girls were getting injured, basically, all game. He has a playoff game on Monday, so he didn’t want to have any more of his girls go down.”
Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association rules state that a “student shall not be excluded from participation on a gender-specific sports team that is consistent with the student’s bona fide gender identity” but cannot be “included on the roster solely for the purpose of gaining an unfair advantage in competitive athletics.” KIPP currently has a 10-7 record after finishing 1-19 last season.
Former University of Kentucky All-American swimmer Riley Gaines, a national advocate for restoring biological distinctions in athletics, shared a video that appears to show the male player throwing a female opponent to the ground, where she remains as she clutches her back in pain and teammates and staff rush to assist and console her.
Gaines also shared a statement from Collegiate Charter expressing the school’s support for Ortins’ decision to forfeit in the interest of “safety for his team,” explaining that the “bench was already depleted going into the game with the 12-player roster having four players unable to play” and that “(o)nce the third was injured, the remaining five expressed concern to him about continuing to play. The players feared getting injured and not being able to compete in the playoffs.”
At the same time, the press release stressed Collegiate Charter’s “values of both inclusivity and safety for all students,” without delving into the issue of transgender-identifying athletes more specifically.
Meanwhile, 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.
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 therapy;” therefore, “the advantage to transwomen [biological men] afforded by the [International Olympic Committee] guidelines is an intolerable unfairness.”
As demonstrated by this latest case, their inclusion also poses risks to girls’ basic safety, as well as their privacy.
The various aspects of the issue have been perhaps most famously highlighted by University of Pennsylvania swimmer William “Lia” Thomas, who reportedly retains male genitalia and is still attracted to women yet “identifies” as female and “lesbian.” Thomas quickly started dominating women’s swimming after switching from the men’s team and caused his female teammates unrest due to sharing lockers with them. Yet the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has reportedly pressured swimmers and their parents against speaking out.