The Daily Signal - Future of Women’s Sports Threatened by Biden’s Executive Order on Gender Identity

Episode Date: January 28, 2021

On his first day in office, President Joe Biden signed a divisive executive order that could ultimately lead to the end of women’s sports as we know them.  The “Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation” says, “Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports.” The order gives biological males who identify as women a pathway to compete in female sports and enter women’s-only spaces, such as bathrooms.  Natasha Chart, the executive director of Women’s Liberation Front, explains the implications of Biden’s executive action and why we now face an emergency in the battle to protect women’s athletic opportunities from men.  We also cover these stories: President Joe Biden takes major action on climate change. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky says he will listen to the evidence presented during Trump’s impeachment trial. The CDC predicts that America may reach as many as 514,000 COVID-19 related deaths by Feb. 20, 2021. Enjoy the show. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, January 28th. I'm Kate Trinco. And I'm Virginia Allen. America is now facing an emergency when it comes to the future of women's sports. According to Natasha Chart, the executive director of Women's Liberation Front. On his first day in office, President Biden signed an executive order, which provides a direct path for biological men who identify as women to compete in women's sports. Natasha Chart recently joined Lauren Evans and I for an interview on the Daily Signal's

Problematic Women podcast to discuss the implications of Biden's action. We are excited to share that conversation with you all here today. And don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, and please encourage others to subscribe. Now onto our top news. President Biden took major action on climate change Wednesday, Here's what he had to say via the hill. It's about coming to the moment to deal with this maximum threat that we exit with

that's now facing us, climate change, with a greater sense of urgency. In my view, we've already waited too long to deal with this climate crisis. We can't wait any longer. We see it with our own eyes. We feel it. We know it in our bones. And it's time to act. And I might note parenthetically, if you notice the attitude of the,

American people toward greater impetus on focusing on climate change and doing something about it has increased across the board, Democrat, Republican, Independent. That's why I'm signing today an executive order to supercharge our administration ambitious plan to confront the existential threat of climate change. It is an existential threat. According to the White House, Biden's executive order states that climate change should be a key consideration in U.S. foreign policy and that the White House will now have a national climate advisor who will head an office on climate policy. Additionally, the White House says the order directs the Secretary of the Interior to pause on entering into new oil and natural gas leases on public lands or offshore waters to the

extent possible. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky says he will listen to the evidence presented during Trump's impeachment trial. The trial hasn't started yet, and I intend to participate in that and listen to the evidence, McConnell told reporters at the Capitol Wednesday. On Tuesday, McConnell voted with 44 other GOP senators that the impeachment trial was unconstitutional, but plans are underway for Trump's impeachment trial to begin on February 9th. House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy is planning to talk to newly elected Representative Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia. CNN reported earlier this week, looking at the Republican Congresswoman's Facebook page. In one post from January 2019, Green liked a comment that said

a bullet to the head would be quicker to remove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In other posts, Green liked comments about executing FBI agents who, in her eyes, were part of the deep state working against Trump. Green said in a statement, per the Washington Examiner, over the years I've had teams of people manage my pages. Many posts have been liked. Many posts have been shared. Some did not represent my views, especially the ones that CNN is about to spread across the internet. A McCarthy spokesman, Mark Bedner, told Axios, these comments are deeply disturbing, and Leader McCarthy plans to have a conversation with the Congresswoman about them. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are predicting that America may reach as many as

514,000 COVID-19-related deaths by February 20th. The current total is nearly 420,000, according to the CDC. During a White House coronavirus press briefing Wednesday, CDC director Rochelle Walensky said, while it is encouraging to see that COVID-19 deaths have been slowly declining over the past week, our case rates remain extraordinarily high, and now is the time to remain vigilant. She added that if case rates continue on the current trajectory, the CDC predicts that 479,000 to 514,000 COVID deaths will be reported by February 20, 2021. Willinsky said that while she knows this is not encouraging news, She's also hopeful that if Americans remain united in action, we can turn things around.

Now stay tuned for Lauren Evans and my conversation with Natasha Chart of the Women's Liberation Front as we discuss Biden's executive order on gender identity and what it may mean for women's sports and the protection of female-only spaces. I'm Zach Smith. And I'm John Carlo Canaparo. And if you want to understand what's happening at the Supreme Court, be sure to check out SCOTUS 101 a Heritage Foundation podcast. We take a look at the cases, the personalities, and the gossip at the highest court in the land.

Be sure to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you find your podcasts. It's SCOTUS 101. We are excited to welcome Natasha Chart, the executive director of the Women's Liberation Front, also referred to as Wolf. Natasha, welcome back to the show. Hi there. Thanks for having me back. So you're last with us on October of 2019. The world is very different now.

But one thing is the same, and it's great to have you back. Can you begin about sharing a little bit about your organization and your mission? Sure. Women's Liberation Front is a radical feminist organization, and we are dedicated to supporting the basic rights of all women and girls. and we formed largely in order to fight against the legal erasure of women in policy and statute. One of our first actions was to oppose the Obama administration's dear colleague letter that would have imposed a gender identity standard on all federally funded Title IX institutions. So you all have really doven kind of head first into these issues.

you're tackling a lot of these bills and laws that come up that do, you know, remove sort of these women's only spaces from society. So let's talk about Biden's executive order that he just signed. It's called executive order on preventing and combating discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation. So I want to point out that this order, it sounds really nice. I mean, the first sentence begins, every person should be treated with respect and dignity and should be able to live without fear no matter who they are or whom they love. Great. Okay, we can all get behind that.

The second sentence is where... It's a great statement. Yeah, right? It sounds nice. Like, yeah, okay, good. But for me, the second sentence is where the bells start going off. Because that reads, children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access. to restrooms, the locker room, or school sports.

So that's a little troublesome. Natasha, can you go ahead and just kind of break down what exactly is actually being said in this executive order? Right. And as you say, that first statement sounds great. We want everybody to be treated with respect and dignity. And then, you know, when you get onto this second sentence, of course we want all young people to be able to use appropriate facilities at school. We want young people with aptitude to be able to develop their athletic talents. The problem is that the way that gender identity is interpreted in these laws, and the Biden

executive order makes that very clear with their invocation of the Bostock decision. They ruled essentially that they recognized that Amy Stevens, and it was consolidated under, it's now called the Bostock decision because of one of the other plaintiffs, but Amy Stevens was a trans-identified male, who wanted to show up at work at the funeral home where he worked at, he wanted to identify as a woman. And that meant that he wanted to follow the women's policies for dress code and facilities access. And his employer was not comfortable with that and fired him, and he sued. And the Supreme Court decided that this was discrimination because Stevens was male but wanted to identify as a female. And so he should have been treated like other female

employees. So they weren't saying that it was wrong not to let him dress like a woman because it was wrong to have different dress codes for men and women. But on the basis of some undefined transgender status was the term that they used, Stevens had the right to say that everybody else, even though they knew he was male, even though the Supreme Court and all the court documents, every filing at every level of what became that Supreme Court case, recognized that Stevens was male, but said that he had the right to be treated like a woman on his say-so. So if you claim this special transgender status, if you say you have a gender identity, what they're saying is that you then have the right, not to the rights and spaces for other people of your own sex, but for, for the right of the sex that you claim you are, even though everybody knows that you aren't. So then how does this new order from Biden, this executive order, kind of keeping that Supreme Court case in mind, how does this order kind of take that ruling and now push it in to things like women's sports, girls' locker rooms?

Like what's the implication specifically for schools and young people? Right. Well, so there aren't any schools that we've ever heard of that tell children, well, because you say that you have a gender identity, you can't use the bathroom at school. You can't play sports at school. No one, as far as we know, is being told that. What they're saying is, you know, you say that you have a gender identity as a girl, but you're a boy. You have to use the boys' facilities. If you want to play, you have to play on the boys' team. What this order does is, you know, is it says they have to be allowed to choose based on gender identity. That's how the Bostock reasoning is going to be applied to this. That's how other observers, like at the ACLU, basically everybody expects it to be applied. And they call it a ban, but it's just not a ban. None of these boys who identify as girls were ever banned from competing with other boys.

None of these girls who identify as boys were banned from competing with the other girls. They were not forbidden. They had to follow the same rules as everybody else. And now they're saying, well, you get to where sex matters in terms of facilities access or sports access, you get to pick the sex that everybody else treats you as and that everybody else has to call you and acknowledge. So on top of my role hosting the podcast, I'm also a video producer here at The Daily Signal. And one of the most popular documentaries we've ever put together, it was done by a former colleague and friend, Kelsey Bowler, and it's on Selena Soul Story. And she's a track athlete from Connecticut who was very successful, but then boys who identified as women came into her sport. and knocked her down a couple places.

And, you know, that's huge for her when it comes to finding college scholarships. I mean, is this just one case or is this more widespread throughout the country? Well, this hasn't been going on for very long. So the number of people taking advantage of it is somewhat low at present. But I think these two boys claiming to be girls in Connecticut high school athletic took a collected, I think it was 15 trophies, 15 podium spots from girls in various competitions. Because if you look at the overall statistics, and you don't need to have any kind of fancy math

knowledge for it, there are hundreds of men and boys every year, every year who easily out-compete the women's all-time track stars. The performance difference is that vast. Like even, you know, they don't have to be world-class male athletes to out-compete women in something like track, especially, or to be able to, was it one of the Australian rugby players? I think they were talking about how he folded a woman like a deck chair. that he because being allowed to play rugby which is a very intense contact sport and the world rugby association has ruled just on the basis of safety that it cannot allow trans-identified male athletes to compete with women because it's too much of a risk to the women's safety even just

in terms of like neck injuries like just on that basis alone they're saying we can't even having fairly evaluated the evidence. We can't get past this concern for athlete's safety. One girl with a permanent neck injury, is that enough? One girl who loses a college scholarship. I mean, how many? The question when you talk about how many, it's like how many girls have to get hurt,

have to lose out, have to be alarmed that they're having to say, change for swim team, and there's boys in their locker room. and they can't do anything about it, how many girls and women have to suffer before someone cares? I mean, put a number on that. Like, it sounds like a horrible exercise, and it is. Yeah, that's a sobering question, because I think that that is the question, Natasha,

is at what point are government leaders going to wake up and realize, oh, wait a second, logic was thrown out the window. Let's get that back in here. Well, I mean, all of the staffers, I'm willing to bet, have probably not talked to anyone for about four or five years who was not afraid of having a Twitter mob riled up against them online for questioning any aspect of this. The whole left side of politics in the U.S., such as it is, has just been, they're in an information bubble on this. You cannot talk about it. You will be called the absolute worst names, the most extreme things. You'll be blacklisted. So, Natasha, how far reaching is this executive order?

I mean, now can any student in any high school across the country say, hey, I'm transgender, and now I want to compete on the women's sports teams, or now I want to shower in the women's locker room? I mean, do all schools have to abide by this now? Well, if someone wants to have a fight with the DOJ, I guess I can say whatever they want. But the executive order was written very cleverly in that it only directly impacts the federal workforce, who of course, you know, can't really complain about their boss all that much. But then it directs all the agencies to apply this reasoning to all of their policies and all of their decisions. And so there's dozens of federal agencies. They're going to have to do a policy review on all of this.

And it's possible that they could even come back and say, our policies are fine. We don't have to do anything. But realistically, what's almost certain to happen is that they're going to go through and make policies like this where gender identity can override sex, a condition of federal funding. So all over the country, men are allowed to identify into staying at women's shelters, like what are supposed to be single-sex, homeless shelters,

or domestic violence shelters, or other kind of crisis services for women, where often you have sort of, I mean, you know, these places aren't rolling in the dough. Often it's communal living spaces, shared restroom facilities, you know, rooms that have like racks of bunks in them. The Obama administration got that in place, not with a law. They didn't need to a law. They just had to say that federal funding was conditional on adopting a gender identity inclusion policy, which meant you have to take someone's word about their gender identity. And there's no objective standard for this. It's purely a claim of self-identification. You have to take someone at their word, or you can be liable for a civil rights action. And so any school

district who wants to go against this standard applied to student facilities use or student athletic participation is going to have to think about whether they want to spend the next several years fighting with the Department of Education Civil Rights Office. And that's an expensive proposition that honestly, you know, most school districts, most people, who wants to fight with the DOJ? Nobody wants that. So it does a lot. without like explicitly saying you must do X, Y, Z. So, you know, this was a day one policy for now President Joe Biden. I mean, what is the damage that this could do if it's not rescinded over the next four years?

Most of the brunt of it is going to be born by women. And it's exactly the same kind of harassment and loss of operations. that women have generally faced with very little pushback. So I don't know. There was a young woman who, like I referenced, there was a specific young woman who had to change for swim teams several times a day in the gym. And there was a trans-identified male student who fought the school board and got them to, you know, have a gender identity inclusion policy.

And the ACLU helped, of course, and he was very excited that he was going to be validated in his gender identity. And this girl, you know, was talking on the news in tears talking about how often she has to change and she doesn't want to change in front of a boy. So that's already happened. So we can assume that that is going to happen at a whole bunch of schools all across the country. Who knows how many? And we're never going to know the scope of it because under these policies, If that girl complains, it's not reported as a problem for her. She is reported as the problem.

She is violating somebody else's civil rights to use their lawful facilities. So we are not ever going to know, I think, how many young girls, young women are going to be upset by these policies, are going to feel like they can't change without a boy watching them, are going to feel like they can't change without having to watch a boy get undressed. I mean, what's the cost of that? What's the scope of it? Again, it's exactly the kinds of things that women have always had to put up with that get treated like it's nothing.

How did we get here? I mean, it feels like we arrived here pretty quickly. I mean, I think back to just five years ago, and you didn't really have many people talking about the transgender movement or gender identity. But it also doesn't seem random. Like, you know, we've gotten here quickly, but also it seems like it's been rather like one thing after another that has moved quickly. Can you just explain a little bit about how we have arrived to this place and what has led, you know, leaders in all sorts of positions of government to go to this extreme so quickly? Well, a few years ago, I can't say exactly when, but around the time when I was working in the

progressive nonprofit world, so before 2015, this cause became very popular with donors on the left. and they started making compliance with gender identity ideology a condition of grant funding. And there started to be a lot of money for it. And so it really got its hooks into all of that, you know, grassroots activists, grass tops changemaker policy apparatus, you know, not explicitly the political party. per se, but, you know, all of the nonprofits and think tanks, all of the little groups that sort of support an ideology or a set of ideas. And there was very effective use of social media as it, you know, as these groups coalesce their influence, and as people started

treating this as a standard within progressive organizing circles of you have to agree with this or you're a bad person. And that just gradually became, no one really stood up against it because all the people who'd quietly made a stand about it got fired like me. So it just, you know, like any other idea can take hold when you don't hear it. When you don't hear it opposed, when you don't hear it critically examined, when you understand that your job may be at stake, on some level you understand their serious economic consequences for opposing it. You don't really want to. You don't really want to look. Is this really my business? is this really what I came into politics for?

It's easy to tell yourself that this does not affect you and you're just going to go along. And so a lot of people haven't even looked into the issue. They just see that it is like this fraught emotional train wreck that starts Twitter mobs and costs people their jobs. And so I think they just, by and large, either they really support it or tend not to look too closely, but it's just become a toxic.

mess in our current social media dynamics. And of course, you know, the social media companies are reinforcing this because you can lose your Twitter account. You can get your Facebook account suspended. You know, if you're a journalist, if you're someone who works with public opinion, significantly losing your Twitter account is a huge blow. You know, for most people, like your Facebook account is also how you keep in touch with friends and family, right? So you don't want to lose that. You know, you're not going to see the pictures of the grandkids, your grandparents, or whatever. These are important services to people.

And it's just been this steady pile on of approval without critical thought that people think it's about being nice. People think it's about, oh, you know, here's this new category of person that we have not treated with dignity previously. we're going to all try to do better this time. We didn't do so great on, say, gay rights last time. We'll do better this time. And everybody wants to be the perfect ally, and they really want to be good people. And so what happens is they end up sleepwalking down this path

where they really want to be good people until Jazz Jennings is getting sterilized on air as a 17-year-old boy, and everybody thinks, oh, well, what nice family entertainment that is. Biden puts out a rule saying that, you know, gender identity policies have to apply to the military now. And on the one hand, you know, there's Democrats in the Senate insisting that like the military do something about sexual assault really sincerely, I think. And then with the other hand, they are supporting male service members being able to identify their way into using the women's showers. So I the the conditions have been set in motion for a total lack of critical thought and analysis. Wow.

Yeah. And I mean, we don't even have time in this interview to even get on into the rapid onset gender dysphoria. You know, plague that is just going through young women in our society. But Natasha, I want to talk about solutions. You know, tomorrow. Right. Your president, how can we fix this issue? People have to be willing to speak honestly about this and to use accurate language about it.

You can't call men, women. You just can't do it because that's the whole battle. When you decide that you are going to promote knowing falsehoods like that, you're just negotiating the terms of surrender. It's important to say clearly most people, I think, don't believe that anything this ridiculous could happen. Like, they're not really going to let boys compete on the girls' sports teams, are they? They're not really going to sterilize these children just because they have different interests or they dress a little different from their peers. But yes, they really are. And so people need to wherever they can be.

Boulder, speak out more accurately about this and understand the urgency of the situation, the urgency to act, to organize, to find groups to work with who are organizing against this and to make clear to your senators, to your congressmen, to your local officials, because they're passing these policies in, you know, at the local city council level, as well as state government, make clear to your officials that the law has to accurately recognize sex. We don't want to, like, run people out of town because they have a belief about gender identity. They can believe what they want, and that's fine. But the law and these very important policies have to reflect material reality.

Tell us a little bit about the action that the Women's Liberation Front is taking, as well as what media coverage are you all getting as you kind of move forward to push back against this agenda? Right. Well, you can find our current action, which allows people to write a letter to President Biden in opposition of these executive orders. We have a simple form, made it easy for you. You can find it pinned at the top of our Twitter feed, Women's Lib front. on Twitter and Women's Liberationfront.org on the web. It'll be easy

to find the action and send President Biden a letter and just let him know that you support women's sex-based rights. Well, Natasha, for the last question, I do want to highlight that you are not a conservative, but you work with groups like the Heritage Foundation,

a type of unity that I think is really admirable and not seen very often nowadays. How does this affect your personal life, your organization, and why do you choose and continue to choose to keep these coalitions? Well, I mean, just opposing the idea of gender identity, I think already probably cost me, you know, like 10 years of career networking and a whole lot of friends about as many as it was ever going to. But in our view, this is an emergency. We know parents are losing custody of their children for failing to affirm a gender identity. We know that minors are being sterilized.

We know that girls and young women are losing out on athletic and college scholarship opportunities. We know that women in domestic violence shelters, in homeless shelters, in prisons are being terrorized by men who've been. been allowed to identify as women and by officials who say, hey, it's out of our hands. He says he's a woman. He has to bunk with you. And we think this is an emergency. And we would hope that everyone in politics would support women's side in this. And we thank everybody that has for stepping up and doing the right thing. Well, Natasha, we want to thank you so much for the work that you all are doing, and we encourage all of our listeners to follow that work at Women's Liberation Front on Twitter, and that's at Women's Lib Front is their handle. Natasha, thank you again for your time today.

We just so appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you so much, Virginia and Lawrence. Pleasure talking to you again. Bye-bye. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to the Daily Signal podcast. You can find the Daily Signal podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and IHeartRadio. Please be sure to leave us a review and a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, and please encourage others to subscribe. Thanks again for listening, and we'll be back with you all tomorrow. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. It is executive produced by Kate Trinko and Rachel Del Judas, sound design by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John

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