Women's sports aren't your concern
Stop talking out of both sides of your mouth
Since the inception of this newsletter, I’ve tried to keep it as non-political as possible. And that’s hard, especially with Supreme Court rulings, Congressional hearings and the looming decisions on the state of the Department of Education.
But this. This is the line.
Right before the presidential transition, the Biden Administration’s Department of Education released guidance on how the pending House v. NCAA settlement would relate to Title IX. I wrote a whole story about that which you can read if you want the details, but in essence, the guidance told schools that in order to be compliant with Title IX, all revenue sharing would have to be equal and equitable.
More on Title IX and the House settlement:
That changed on Wednesday, when the Trump Administration’s Department of Education rescinded the previous guidance, opening up all House and NIL-related payments to be a complete free-for-all instead of equitable across men and women athletes.
The memo from Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor, states that “Title IX says nothing about how revenue-generating athletics programs should allocate compensation among student athletes.”
Good eye, Craig. There’s a lot that Title IX doesn’t say, especially since it’s a 50 year old law that was made when we couldn’t envision direct revenue sharing. That’s why you release guidance on it. You know, so schools can know how the law will impact things before they put their plans into affect.
But that’s not my main concern. It’s just a pet peeve, I guess.
My main concerns come for a group that claims to be so dead-set on defending women’s sports, but just signed women’s sports’ death sentence.
Before this, way back in January, the House Education and Workforce Committee Chairman Tim Walberg (R-MI) and Representative Greg Steube (R-FL) reintroduced the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act. Walberg stated that “Title IX was created to give women and girls equal access to education and sports.” He goes on to proclaim that the act “will help stop attempts to include biological males in girls’ and women’s sports, ensuring fairness and a level playing field.” Steube claims that “Republicans have promised to protect women’s sports, and under President Trump’s leadership, we will fulfill this promise”
Republican President Donald Trump just signed an executive order last Wednesday to “protect safety, fairness, and dignity in women’s sports.” In that executive order, President Trump claims to “uphold the promise of Title IX” by banning transgender participation in women’s sports. He “calls for the convening of private sporting bodies in the White House to hear, in person, the stories of female athletes who suffer life-long injuries, who have been silenced and forced to shower with men, and whose hard work has been cast aside due to the biological advantage of males.”
I’m curious - have you ever heard of any of these stories? Can you find any examples? Huh, that’s weird. Me neither.
Trump’s executive order fact sheet continues to take a stance against “The Biden Administration’s War on Women.” Huh, didn’t his Department of Education release guidance to give women athletes their fair share of revenues?
Republican Idaho Governor Brad Little declared February the “War on Women’s Sports is Over Month.” Why? Because “Idaho was the first state to stand up to prohibit biological males from participating in women’s sports,” and “President Trump brought back common sense and sanity to the American way of life” when signing the earlier executive order. Wow, I didn’t see Little or representative and attendee Barbara Ehardt fighting for women’s equal pay.
The right-leaning American First Agenda lists their third pillar as “Defend Female Athletes and Preserve Fairness in Women’s Sports.” Of course, that revolves around locker rooms and transgender participation. Notably, nothing about equal pay or opportunities.
Republican Ohio state Senartor Kristina D. Roegner championed the Save Women’s Sports Act and House Bill 68, both of which took aim at transgender athletes’ participation. Roegner would state in her defense of the bills, “The Biden administration is pushing hard to take away the rights of girls and women - and return them to second-class status in sports, both in school and on campus,” as well as “Women have fought for so long to secure equal rights - and now the radical left is trying to throw so much of that away in the blink of an eye.”
A blink of an eye, huh? Well, congratulations. You just threw women’s sports into the gutter with the stroke of one Presidential pen.
The rescinding of the previous guidance puts women’s athletics in a perilous point. Already, universities have been planning to earmark a majority of their revenue sharing funds to male athletes. Let’s step back to my previous piece on the Biden administration’s guidance:
The Athletic reported that Texas Tech officials have already divvied up their $20.5 million of revenue sharing - 74 percent, or $15.17 million, is earmarked for football. $3.5 million for men’s basketball. Women’s basketball gets $410,000 and the remaining $1.4 million goes to the other 12 sports sponsored by Texas Tech.
For those counting at home, the Biden administration’s guidance would make $10.25 million go to male athletes and $10.25 to women athletes. Just like scholarships and athletic benefits and coaching opportunities and equipment and everything else that is dictated by Title IX.
Using those numbers, women’s athletics would only receive $1.1 million of the $20.5 million. Almost half of that - $410,000 would go to Texas Tech’s women’s basketball team. That means $600,000 of revenue sharing would be split between the women’s cross country, golf, soccer, softball, tennis, track and field, and volleyball rosters.
The 2024 Texas Tech EADA Report states that Texas Tech has 266 male athletes and 171 female athletes. For the men, that would break out as follows:
Football: $124,344 per athlete
Men’s Basketball: $250,000 per athlete
Other sports: $4,545 per athlete
On the women’s side, though, the proposed revenue sharing would break down as:
Women’s Basketball: $2,733 per athlete
Other sports: $2,469 per athlete
You want to protect women’s sports? Fix that. Every single male athlete is going to be bringing home almost $2,000 more than the top women’s athlete.
And that’s not an indictment of Texas Tech and how they run their athletic department. They’re looking at costs, revenues and financial statements to determine how to divide their revenue sharing.
No, I’m focusing on the Republican elected officials that are championing their “defense of women’s sports” and that they’re committed to “keeping women’s sports fair.”
Stop. You’re not fooling anyone.
Stop using women’s sports as the medium for putting down transgender athletes. Athletics cannot be confined to sex at birth because sex is a sliding scale. Just look at all the right-wing folks on X or Truth Social crying out at the Olympics because gold medal winning Algerian boxer Imane Khelif looked like a man and won. News flash: Khelif is and has always been the female sex. And identified as a female.
Women’s sports are not a vehicle to spread hate. Once again, stop using women’s sports to spread hate.
Instead, focus on actually defending these athletes. Rescinding the previous guidance will pull, based on reported numbers, over $9 million away from women student-athletes. You claim to be the party that’s defending those athletes and having their best interests in mind? Explain that.
You want to host a White House event that goes over how women are wronged by having transgender athletes being able to participate in their sports in special, specific circumstances? How about having a round table to explain to all the nation’s Division I women athletes why they’re losing out on $9 million per school? That money is potentially life changing for athletes. Being a Division I athlete is a full-time job, then with school on top. There is no earning potential like other students have for working at a campus restaurant or as a tutor or as an RA. And you’re denying women athletes those potential earnings.
So stop saying you’re defending women’s sports. Stop talking out of both sides of your mouth. Your actions make it clear that you don’t care about women’s sports. You only want to go after groups of people you don’t like. Be better.
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You're the man my friend. I see you're good at more than just arguing about Arizona State.
This was a fascinating read, breaking down things a lot of people don't care to see when they read something that some political figure said. You are absolutely correct that the people that are looking to 'save women's sports' seem to want to do so without providing any equality at all. I'm not really interested in treating each sex equally, but I am interested in treating each human equally, which in the case you brought up of a school with approximately 260 males, 170 females, and $20.5M available to spend, this would be $47674 each. The issue of that being $12.4M to the males and $8.1M to the females doesn't bother me at all in a situation like this, where there are more males, and therefore more money is needed to cover them. If the distribution of athletes changes, the distribution of money will change.
The real issue here is that of lying politicians. I don't know why they feel the need to do this. They could probably just tell the truth about what they're doing, and they wouldn't lose very much, given the political climate of the moment. Nevertheless, they insist on pretending that they're doing something good. I'm not even American. I don't know the names of anybody you said there, but it's not exactly a glowing representation of political culture in America that they will just lie so brazenly about something that's not even that important in the grand scheme of things.
If they will so lie so transparently about womens' sports, what else will they lie about that's more important than sports are? It's an intimidating question to ask.
Well said!