Transgender athletes should be allowed to compete in ladies’s sports, South Carolina ladies’s basketball trainer Dawn Staley mentioned forward of her staff’s NCAA Tournament championship recreation.
Staley made the feedback all the way through a news convention Saturday when requested through OutKick reporter Dan Zaksheske whether or not she believes “biological males” should be “included” in ladies’s sports.
“I’m on the opinion of if you’re a woman you should play,” Staley mentioned. “If you consider yourself a woman and you want to play sports, or vice versa, you should be able to play. That’s my opinion.”
Staley used to be talking to journalists forward of South Carolina’s championship matchup towards Iowa on Sunday.
Iowa trainer Lisa Bluder declined to solution the similar query afterward.
“I understand it’s a topic that people are interested in, but today my focus is on the game tomorrow, my players,” Bluder mentioned. “It’s an important game we have tomorrow and that’s what I want to be here to talk about, but I know it’s an important issue for another time.”
The matter of transgender athletes in sports has change into a hot-button wedge factor in recent times, even though as of 2023, only 34 trans athletes had brazenly competed in school sports, in accordance to the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio. The accommodates in infinitesimal quantity of the more than 500,000 members in NCAA athletics.
Opponents argue that transgender athletes who have been assigned male at beginning hang a bonus over cisgender ladies. Last month, school swimmers and volleyball gamers sued the NCAA, accusing it of violating their Title IX rights through permitting transgender lady Lia Thomas to compete within the 2022 nationwide swimming championships. Thomas used to be the primary brazenly transgender athlete to win an NCAA swimming championship.
At least 20 states have licensed a model of a blanket ban on trans athletes enjoying on Okay-12 and collegiate sports groups. A Biden management proposal would forbid such outright bans.
South Carolina’s Republican-controlled General Assembly remaining yr licensed regulations barring instruction about gender identification and sexuality in kindergarten thru fourth grade, in addition to banning transgender ladies from enjoying on ladies’ sports groups from heart and highschool thru school. In 2022, Iowa licensed its personal identical legislation.
Staley signaled that she used to be able for any attainable blowback brought about through her feedback.
“So now the barnstorm of people are going to flood my timeline and be a distraction to me on one of the biggest days of our game,” she said, “and I’m OK with that. I really am.”