Members of the PWHS Track and Field team at Suburban One League Championships (Credit: Plymouth Whitemarsh High School).
Despite President Donald Trump signing a Presidential executive order in February to keep biological males from girls’ and women’s sports, Pennsylvania is one state that has continued to defy those orders.
President Trump's Presidential executive order was supposed to ban transgender athletes from competing in girls’ and women’s sports, but some states, including California and Maine, have held out from removing male-to-female and female-to-male student athletes from competitions.
Transgender athletes participating in girls’ and women’s sports has been a hot-button issue for many years now, and supporters of the decision claim that keeping transgender athletes out of women’s sports supports fairness and safety, does not give competitive advantages, and say that it protects opportunities for cisgender girls, among other reasons.
"We will not allow men to beat up, injure, and cheat our women and our girls," Trump said at the signing ceremony. "From now on, women's sports will be only for women. With this executive order, the war on women's sports is over."
At the Suburban One League (SOL) American Conference Championships, the track and field meet for high schools that took place at Hatboro-Horsham High School on May 9 and 10, many student-athletes from local schools participated in the competition, and the Girls' 200M Liberty Finals featured three top runners from area schools.
Plymouth Whitemarsh’s Luce Allen (a trans male-to-female student athlete), defeated second-place Tytiana Nelson of Upper Dublin, and Hatboro-Horsham’s Ryleigh White captured third place in the championship race. Allen won the race by less than two-hundredths of a second.
Allen has been participating on the girls' track and field team for the last two years.
Allen's parents had previously said that it would be "cruel" to "force" the student-athlete to compete against boys, and that Allen should be allowed to race against girls because that is how the athlete "identifies,” according to an article.
"My child is a female in her heart and soul, and according to her medical labs. Having her play sports with males would be cruel," Allen's mother, Sarah Hansen said, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
In a released statement, Hansen said, "If you remove the ability of trans people to compete with a team that corresponds with their gender, then you’ll strip them of their opportunity to develop as people."
Republicans in Pennsylvania have advanced legislation to prohibit males (assigned at birth) from participating in girls’ and women’s sports. The bill recently passed the GOP-led state Senate, but it is likely to be blocked by the Democrat-controlled House.
"We are putting every school receiving taxpayer dollars on notice that if you let men take over women's sports teams or invade your locker rooms, you will be investigated for violations of Title IX and risk your federal funding. There will be no federal funding," Trump said.
