I am old enough to remember what girls’ sports looked like before Title IX and old enough to know exactly what we stand to lose if we forget why it mattered.
In 1974, shortly after Title IX became law, my father founded the Southline Athletic Association, a nonprofit youth sports organization in western New York. What he did with Southline seemed ordinary to him but was radical for its time: the organization included girls. To the best of our knowledge, it was the first athletic association in New York State to do so.
Southline launched girls’ tee-ball and softball teams. Three hundred girls signed up. Clearly, there was demand.
No one had told my father to do any of this. He did it because he had three young daughters, because Title IX had cracked open a door, and because he believed that girls deserved the same opportunities as the boys in our community — that girls deserved their own place to compete.
That belief changed my life.
Before Title IX, opportunities for girls were limited. Boys played while girls watched. The law did not instantly change the culture, but it changed what parents could imagine for their daughters.
Because my father acted, I grew up with the seriousness that girls’ sports demanded. But those sports were able to be serious and fair because they were built on the basic truth that boys and girls are different, and sports are sex-segregated for a reason.
That is why, as the Supreme Court concluded oral arguments in two landmark women’s sports cases, I found myself thinking less about legal doctrine and more about dusty diamonds in western New York. I thought about the three hundred girls in 1974 who were told, for the first time, “You belong here.”
Girls’ sports were never inevitable. They were built deliberately, by parents like my father, and lawmakers who understood that sex is real and that fairness in athletics depends on recognizing it. Title IX did not guarantee women the right to compete against just anyone in general. It guaranteed women the right to compete against other women specifically. That distinction is the foundation of women’s sports. When courts are asked to redefine sex in ways that erase that line, they undermine the very protections Title IX was designed to provide.
That tension was on full display during the Supreme Court’s oral arguments this week. Justice Samuel Alito asked an attorney for the ACLU a basic question: What does it mean to be a boy or a girl, a man or a woman? The attorney responded that they did not have a definition for the court. Justice Alito pressed the point: How is the court supposed to determine if there has been sex-based discrimination without knowing what sex means? It is a question that would have been unthinkable when Title IX was passed, and yet it now sits at the center of the debate over women’s sports.
Listening to that exchange, I was reminded that some truths are learned long before they ever reach a courtroom. While I have spent my adult life in the law, I did not learn this principle there. I learned it watching my father make room for girls who had never been invited onto the field before. I learned it by playing in leagues that existed only because adults understood that equality does not mean sameness, and boys and girls are not interchangeable.
Southline still exists today, with separate boys’ and girls’ teams. But whether or not separate girls’ teams will be allowed to exist in the future is now a question before the court. While the Jan. 13 oral arguments have drawn national attention, the court’s final ruling will ultimately determine the future of women’s sports. Long after the justices leave the bench, the consequences will be felt in school gyms and athletic fields across the country, in the places where girls first learn what it means to compete on equal footing.
JUST ASKING QUESTIONS IS WHAT IGNORAMUSES DO
I was there when the door to girls’ sports opened. I know why it was opened. And I can only hope the Supreme Court does too.
Beth Parlato is the senior legal counsel for Independent Women’s Law Center.
