By Pamela S. Evette; originally published in the Post & Courier February 6, 2025
On Wednesday we recognized National Girls and Women in Sports Day, a day created to inspire American girls and women to play sports and be active.
While this should be a day when our country celebrates how far we’ve come in creating opportunities for women and girls to build confidence, become stronger and develop character, it has instead become a focal point in our enduring fight to protect women and girls.
In recent years, driven by the increasingly radical left, girls’ and women’s sports have been under attack. In their misguided and warped embrace of diversity, equity and inclusion, liberals have pushed an agenda to allow biological boys and men to compete head-to-head against girls and women. In doing so, not only have women and girls across the nation been robbed of the recognition and titles they deserved, but those participating in more physical sports have been knowingly put in harm’s way.
I was incredibly proud Wednesday to stand with President Donald Trump as he signed an executive order to keep men out of women’s sports. Still, as a mom and participant in women’s sports, I am heartbroken at the immeasurable damage that cannot be undone. Liberal Democrats will stop at nothing to push their agenda, no matter how out of touch with the desires of the American people, because they’ve forgotten a critical aspect of our rights as Americans.
They’ve forgotten that one person’s rights end where another’s begin.
As Americans, we are free to make certain choices: where we shop, who we live with, how we choose to dress, etc. But the choices one person makes should never infringe on the rights of others.
If you identify as a gender other than your biological sex at birth, that choice doesn’t give you the right to infringe on my daughter’s safety, comfort or ability to excel against other biological girls in competitive sports. And it definitely doesn’t give you the right to steal our girls’ and women’s hard-earned and rightful successes.
Democrats want to tout the science on issues that fit their agenda but have intentionally ignored the science when it comes to how unfair, and frankly dangerous, it is for men to compete against women. Pound for pound, men are stronger, more powerful and faster.
According to a Consensus Statement for the American College of Sports Medicine: “Thus for athletic events and sports relying on endurance, muscle strength, speed, and power, males typically outperform females by 10%-30% depending on the requirements of the event. These sex differences in performance emerge with the onset of puberty and coincide with the increase in endogenous sex steroid hormones, in particular testosterone in males, which increases 30-fold by adulthood, but remains low in females.”
I was proud to stand with Gov. Henry McMaster when he signed the Save Women’s Sports Act into law in 2022 to preserve fair competition for all S.C. girls and women. And even though other conservative states have passed similar laws and we now have President Trump’s executive order, we can’t stop there.
We must do more to set the record straight for the women and girls who’ve been robbed of their titles, which are currently held by biological men. We can never fully repair the harm and give back those stolen moments of glory, but we must find a way to provide these female athletes and their families — who dedicated so much time, blood, sweat and tears — the titles they rightfully earned.
I am grateful to President Trump and Gov. McMaster for their leadership in this fight to protect our nation’s women and girls. I hope you’ll join me as I continue to advocate and fight for women and girls of all ages both in South Carolina and throughout our nation.
Pamela S. Evette is the lieutenant governor of South Carolina.