Florida’s state athletic board fined a high school and put it on probation Tuesday after a transgender student played on the girls volleyball team, a violation of a controversial law enacted by Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Legislature.

The Florida High School Athletic Association fined Monarch High $16,500, ordered the principal and athletic director to attend rules seminars and placed the suburban Fort Lauderdale school on probation for 11 months, meaning further violations could lead to increased punishments. The association also barred the girl from participating in boys sports for 11 months.

The 2021 law, which supporters named “The Fairness in Women’s Sports Act,” bars transgender girls and women from playing on public school teams intended for student athletes identified as girls at birth.

The student, a 10th grader who played in 33 matches over the last two seasons, was removed from the team last month after the Broward County School District was notified by an anonymous tipster about her participation. Her removal led hundreds of Monarch students to walk out of class two weeks ago in protest.

        • TheActualDevil@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          So we’re protecting the system against the outliers? So we’re blocking naturally muscular or otherwise more athletic cis girls from playing? Really tall basketball players? Runners who are just naturally faster? How do you judge they fall too far outside the median range?

          Or have you given this no thought and you just think boy things are for boys and girl things for girls and you stopped learning at age 3?

          • prole@sh.itjust.works
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            11 months ago

            Not to mention that these are already outliers within outliers. Trans people make up like 0.01% of the population, and how many of those are not only still in middle/high school, but also play competitive sports? We’re probably talking a couple dozen people total.

    • andros_rex@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      What are we protecting women’s sports from? It’s weird, I hear more about how transgender women are a threat to women’s sports than I do about actual women’s sports. It seems like drama over a trans women being on a sports team is more important than the actual sports. I very rarely see headlines about women’s sports. I’m not into sports at all, but I can name Kyrie Irving, Draemond Green and a fuckton of other men’s basketball players. I can’t think of any women.

      It’s just very difficult to take these arguments about “protecting” women’s sports seriously when they only seem to matter when it’s time to use them as a cudgel. I wish the energy would be redirected - advocating for equal pay, more coverage, showing up to local games. Title 9 be damned, the girls volleyball team doesn’t have half the budget of the boys football. A handful of trans kids playing is such a non-issue compared with all of the other shit going on in the failing education system. The Olympics have allowed trans women to play for ages, and no one really gave a crap until trans people became the new target.

      Why do children play sports in school? My understanding was that it was for character building - developing discipline, communication skills, etc etc. The competitive aspect is important yes, but at the end of the day the purpose is to help develop the child. There is harm done in denying a child the opportunity to participate in sports - there are lots of kids who only come to school because of sports. Trans kids need a coach they can talk with and a team they can feel a part of too.

    • SkyeStarfall
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      11 months ago

      What about cis women with heightened testosterone levels then? They won’t exactly be beholden to strict requirements like a trans woman with regulated testosterone will.

      There’s biological variance at play in all of sports, if you start going there, you have to start asking yourself what your actual goal is? Is it protecting minorities and disadvantaged people? Or is it something akin to weight classes? Or… what?

      Either way you put it, either you allow trans women in women’s sports, or you rework the system to be based on your biology in some way, separated into classes like testosterone level, body weight, how tal you are… etc. Otherwise you will either be inconsistent in your ruling, or exclude some cis women which is what you specifically tried to avoid in the first place.

    • Serdan@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      Why? What do you imagine is the harm caused by allowing all women to participate?