We informed the parent that documentation such as a chromosome analysis could be considered to help support or verify eligibility in accordance with policy.
I cannot imagine being the dumbass who said that with a straight face.
We informed the parent that documentation such as a chromosome analysis could be considered to help support or verify eligibility in accordance with policy.
I cannot imagine being the dumbass who said that with a straight face.
The principal really needs to read the law. This school is so fucked.
https://codes.findlaw.com/az/title-15-education/az-rev-st-sect-15-120-02/
The law in question only prohibits biological males from participating in female sports. It does not prohibit females from joining boys teams. Compare and contrast sections "B" and "C":
B. Athletic teams or sports designated for “females”, “women” or “girls” may not be open to students of the male sex.
C. This section does not restrict the eligibility of any student to participate in any interscholastic or intramural athletic team or sport designated as being for “males”, “men” or “boys” or designated as “coed” or “mixed”.
I also thought this was pretty interesting:
E. Any student who is deprived of an athletic opportunity or suffers any direct or indirect harm as a result of a school knowingly violating this section has a private cause of action for injunctive relief, damages and any other relief available under law against the school.
This is literally one of these first things they teach in a (at least NY public high schools) coaching course.
AFAIK, when a law says something like "This section does not [do something]" It's usually because some other law explicitly prohibits [something]. Without such language, the two laws could be seen as conflicting.
I think excluding girls from boys teams violates Title IX.
Title IX requires gender equity in access and spending. It doesn't strictly require women to access men's sports, but it does require the school fully fund/admit women to equivalent in the abstract.
So, for instance, if you spend $100k/year on the boys-only football program, you need $100k dedicated to a girl accessible sport (typically volleyball or softball or soccer).
This is not at all accurate. If a girl wants to play a sport for which there is a boys team but not girls team, she must be allowed to try out and participate on the same basis as the boys (a boys team is really an "everyone" team - this actually applies beyond schools and Title IX as no professional sports league in the US actually bars women from competing). Only girls/women's teams get to set restrictions with respect to sex/gender. For Title IX, this is a wildly discriminatory interpretation of a low that bans discrimination, but it's the one that has been in use for years.
And Title IX doesn't require equal funding, but something much more nebulous about impact and opportunity that makes the whole thing kind of intentionally wishy washy so anyone they need to be can not be in compliance. To make it even more impossible to actually comply, questions of funding and opportunity are not limited to what the school itself supplies, so for example anything donated by parents or volunteers (such as the work of a booster club) also counts. So for example, if you cut funding to a boys team and parents more than make up the shortfall in donations and fundraising, it's entirely possible based on that you might have to cut it further. Related, this kind of thing is why less popular boys sports are prone to being cut at the drop of a hat - football and sometimes boys basketball make money, most other sports teams lose money so the school is incentivized not to make cuts from King Football or Prince Basketball, but they have to target equal opportunity and impact between boys and girls athletic spending which means they spend what they're willing to have as a cost on girls teams and cut whatever boys teams they need to cut to avoid cutting into the football budget, because the football budget has an ROI.
Per NFHS website (https://nfhs.org/stories/title-ix-compliance-part-iv-frequently-asked-questions):
FAQ: Does Title IX require that 50 percent of our athletic budget be spent on girls programs and 50 percent be spent on our boys programs? Answer: No. The key to allocating financial resources under Title IX is the overall impact of expenditures – does your school’s allocation of financial resources provide equivalence of athletics opportunities and benefits to boys and girls. Although this will result, in most cases, in an approximate 50-50 budgetary allocation, Title IX does not require a strictly proportional division of dollars.
FAQ: Our school offers soccer for boys, but not for girls. Does Title IX require that we allow girls to play on the boys team? Answer: Title IX requires that in sports where a girls team is not offered, girls must be allowed to try out for the boys team and participate on the same basis as boys. This does not mean that a girl automatically gets to be on the team. She has to try out and make the team on the same basis as any boy would have to try out and make the team. She can also be cut from the team, but only on the same basis as a boy could be cut from the team – for an objectively verifiable lack of ability or a lack of size, strength, skill and experience making participation unsafe.
FAQ: Our school offers volleyball for girls, but not for boys. Does Title IX require that we allow boys to play on the girls team? Answer: No. Although there have been a few, isolated lawsuits where boys have obtained injunctions to allow them to participate on a girls team for which their schools offered no same-sport equivalent for boys, the courts generally rule that the purpose of Title IX is to remedy past inequities of athletics opportunity for the historically under-represented gender – females – and that if boys are allowed to participate on girls teams, they will because of height, weight and strength advantages come to dominate the membership of those teams, and thereby decrease the competitive opportunities for women. Therefore, in the vast majority of cases, the courts have not permitted boys to play on girls teams, even if there is not a same-sport boys team.
If a girl wants to play a sport for which there is a boys team but not girls team, she must be allowed to try out and participate on the same basis as the boys
Sure. And occasionally you get a girl to qualify. Sarah Fuller as the place kicker for Vanderbilt Commodores, for instance.
But the disparity in builds - particularly in a high contact sport like football - makes women qualifying virtually impossible.
So for example, if you cut funding to a boys team and parents more than make up the shortfall in donations and fundraising, it’s entirely possible based on that you might have to cut it further.
This was in response to early efforts to effectively privatize student athletics and freeze women's sports out.
I'm sure it's a matter of time before our current patriarchy fetish SCOTUS to reverse this out. But for the time being, you can't just find a few mega-donors to create a "Private Men's Club" on a public campus. What is ultimately being measured is access, which does get nebulous, but is necessarily the case when so many misogynists are intent on digging out loopholes to render Title XI toothless.
The law in question only prohibits biological males from participating in female sports. It does not prohibit females from joining boys teams.
There's a simple reason for that - the second sentence is required under current interpretations of Title IX, while the first is not. The argument for that is about girl's sports being a sort of protected space for girls, so it's OK to bar non-girls (however your jurisdiction chooses to define that) from girls sports, but "boys" sports are actually for everyone who can compete.
The problem is the Trump administration is pushing for this. They're saying schools can only allow students to play on teams based on their assigned gender at birth. The federal government is using coercion to force states to comply
There is no specific law to follow, since it's just based on the whims of the federal government. The punishment is withholding funding. There is to judge, jury, or courts of any kind involved. Simply the federal government refusing to release funding if they dislike what states are doing. The AZ law is comparatively toothless
The effect of this is the same as it always is with these types of capricious authoritarian governments: A chilling effect. Actors are overly cautious to avoid drawing the wrath of the powerful central government -- Trump in this case
What a shithole country.
That’s beginning to feel like an understatement. We need a new type of hole to describe just how shit things are. A shit-Mariana Trench country, perhaps.
Uranus's moon Miranda has features called coronae, at least one of which has a depth probably exceeding the Challenger Deep low point of the Mariana Trench - estimated at 10 to 20 kilometers, vs. Challenger Deep's 10.4 kilometers.
Alternatively, the Kola Superdeep Borehole SG-3 has a depth of over 12.2 kilometers, also deeper than Challenger Deep.
That's... Pretty deep.
But I think we also need total volume.
When they did a scan of my colon, they found I had pollips. Thats how we discovered I have cancer.
Then they cut the pollips off. I imagine that left a hole in the pollip area.
How about colon pollip hole?
It’s not the size of the whole that makes it bad, it’s the contents of the whole. So maybe a bloody diarrhea whole?
Arizona, too. Not even one of the true asshole-of-the-country states.
You can't possibly think the US is anything but terrible
It's terrible, but when it comes to trans issues, there's an awful lot of people in glass houses. The center of transphobia is arguably the UK.
Mainer that chose to join our more sensible brothers to the North. Nothing but glad they would have me. America fucking sucks and living here is starting to suck even as a working class white guy, which is frankly most of my state. Why anyone would think a patriotic thought besides burn it all down at this point is beyond me.
Glad you made it! Happy you're here, and I hope you're settled and can help rescue others.
I'm still South of the border, I only meant in a digital sense that .ca allowed me to join, partly because they are the closest server to me physically afaik, but mostly that they seem the most level headed of the bunch. Just my opinion. But I would go to quite some lengths to emigrate if I thought it was actually feasible. I'm just a blue collar guy, hardly any savings, and crazy lucky to have convinced the bank and my landlord to sell me the house. I'm pretty stuck here as I see it, but there's a lot of opportunities to help here too. Off the Internet I really try to moderate the acidity of my opinions, more flies to honey type of shit. /ramble
Some Canucks are angry at the aggression showed toward us by your national spokesman.
I'm sorry they're representing us so poorly, as they should be better reflecting the lasting hurt from perceived treachery by a friendly nation in a way that's more informative and less pithy. But this is where we are.
Remember, too, that our global representative isn't perfect, but we narrowly missed getting our own absolutely incapable and inappropriate provincialist caricature of leadership, ourselves. I think there's something in there, too.
Thanks for understanding. I think this is gonna get more stressful before it gets better, so I'm doubly worried if you're near a border in a town normally enriched by tourism proceeds.
So glad kids can experience political influence in their personal lives. They will learn what needs to burn down.
The district pointed to a state law enacted in 2022, which mandates that school sports teams must be designated “based on the biological sex of the students who participate” in the sport. A federal judge blocked enforcement of that law in 2023, but only against two trans student-athletes who filed suit against it. (An appeals court upheld that injunction last year, and the Supreme Court declined to take up the case this summer.)
Any chance this is some malicious compliance?
It's really a no win situation though if the boy complies. Newsmax will show footage of a game he plays in as evidence that boys are playing in girls sports, and the idiots who watch will believe it and support even worse politicians and laws.
Could be! I was just commenting that the kid could engage in malicious compliance. Let's see what happens when he exits the girls locker room with wet hair and a towel around his neck.
I don't see what part of that even requires them to use the birth certificate
It's the stupid conservative part. If they make an exception for him, then they need to make exceptions for trans girls
The law in question doesn't actually mandate that school sports teams must be designated “based on the biological sex of the students who participate” in the sport. If you read the law, it only prohibits biological males from participating in female sports. It does not prohibit biological females from participating in male sports. Quite the contrary, it specifically acknowledges that all students, regardless of sex or gender, are allowed to participate in "boys" sports.
https://codes.findlaw.com/az/title-15-education/az-rev-st-sect-15-120-02/
Any chance this is some malicious compliance?
It could be fear. No one wants a bunch of Karen’s screaming in their face. No one wants to be sued or fired. Maybe this is just someone who thinks they need to protect themselves over the kids they’re responsible for
So after all the hysteria about “biological males” in women’s sports/changing rooms/bathrooms, they have succeeded in forcing a biological male into women’s sports/changing rooms/bathrooms.
Just to go full circle on their dumbfuckery, I'd bet that they'll start advocating for the school to pay to have him transition against his will so his outward appearance will match his birth cert.
They'll be grooming him into a femboy soon enough, y'know, because masculine men should dominate inferior males. Not because they're gay, or anything.
What a USA thing to do. Holy shit.
Because trans issues are completely solved in other parts of the world.
This isn't a trans issue. It's an absurd bureaucracy failing to function because of political incontinence
It's a trans issue. It only became a bureaucratic issue because of a rule rooted in transphobia.
Even a rule rooted in transphobia could be well written. This one is not.
I would say it's trans adjacent.
The kid is, was, and always has been a boy, in every sense of the word. Both as their "biological" gender and their actual gender.
Some doctor fucked up and put "female" on the birth certificate. It was noted, corrected and now the birth certificate has been amended.
The USA part of all of this is that bureaucratic bullshit is prohibiting the school from recognising the fact that a mistake happened and allow the poor kid to participate like everyone else. He's stuck in limbo because some dickhead on a power trip who has a hard on for making life difficult for people who are different from them, made a short sighted decision to put such a policy in place, without comprehending that doctors are people who can make mistakes, exactly like the one in the OP. It's the bullshit bureaucracy that's very USA. It's the inflexible rules that are very USA.
The rules were made to punish trans people for daring to try to like who they are, instead of being miserable in the cast they were born into, and it bit them in the ass, inadvertently punishing one of "their own".
So yeah, trans rights, or lack thereof is the reason behind the problem, but the problem is affecting someone who is distinctly not trans.
Your gender is what you declare
Your gender is what's in your pants
Your gender is what I declare
Finally something all of us can get behind, am I right fellow "DROP TABLE"s?
Say the 5 middle-aged men on the school board that are probably thrilled at being able to do genital inspections of children. "Sorry, those are the rules that I wrote!"
i have changed your gender, pray i do not alter it further
Can we just separate kids by skill level rather than gender? My middle school cis son loves playing sports, but he's not very good. He gets discouraged when the better kids bully him because of it.
Skill based matchmaking. Most competitive video games use it. Why not IRL?
Now I'm imagining a kid scoring multiple points and the other parents calling him a smurf
A little blue animated creature? Is that MMO lingo for pretending to be worse than you are like a "pool shark" or what not?
Not necessarily MMOs but yes, you create an alternative account with the purpose of being matched with lesser skilled players.
Smurfs happen more in shooters, or competitive games like Rocket League, Smash Bros etc. much less in MMO. It's easier to be a smurf when the game is skill based, and less or no dependency on what gear you own as it takes much longer to earn top tier gear that helps keep you at top.
I don't see why bottom tier teams shouldn't be co-ed. PE we did co ed sports days all the time and its more about getting exercise than winning.
Maybe, for "rec league" or whatever, but school teams are usually meant to be competitive, and non-gendered sports would mean girls wouldn't have equitable access to athletics.
But even for non-competitive teams, girls are unlikely to be able to access shared sports to the same level as boys. At a party high school I worked at, there was a major challenge with girls being willing to access open gym time, feeling uncomfortable advocating for access to basketball nets for practice—even girls who were on the competitive team felt they couldn't use open gym time.
TL;DR: Sexism runs deep. We need policies that recognize that and build equity, not just offer "equality" that perpetuates, or even magnifies, the problem.
I think I smell a sequel:

Yeah sometimes dogs get forced to play on the boys' team. Where is the outrage about the golden retrievers?
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