Florida fines high school for allowing transgender student to play girls volleyball

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Florida fines high school for allowing transgender student to play girls volleyball
apnews.com

Florida’s state athletic board fined a high school and put it on probation Tuesday after a transgender student played on the girls volleyball team, a violation of a controversial law enacted by Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Legislature.

The Florida High School Athletic Association fined Monarch High $16,500, ordered the principal and athletic director to attend rules seminars and placed the suburban Fort Lauderdale school on probation for 11 months, meaning further violations could lead to increased punishments. The association also barred the girl from participating in boys sports for 11 months.

The 2021 law, which supporters named “The Fairness in Women’s Sports Act,” bars transgender girls and women from playing on public school teams intended for student athletes identified as girls at birth.

The student, a 10th grader who played in 33 matches over the last two seasons, was removed from the team last month after the Broward County School District was notified by an anonymous tipster about her participation. Her removal led hundreds of Monarch students to walk out of class two weeks ago in protest.

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Florida is such a shithole state

It's intentional.

Make a state shitty enough that everyone with a brain leaves and Republicans get two locked in Senators along with the electoral college votes for president.

-Sent from a shitty red state I refuse to give up on

Yup.

-Sent from the awesome blue state I fled to from Florida

(I'm trans. Florida has never been worth dying for.)

The whammy is when your hell hole state is low cost of living, so you get paid too little to be able to afford to leave. It’s also hard to be competitive when you rank LOL in education. They know if they keep us poor we can’t afford to leave.

It sucks, because I can feel the hostility towards my existence. I can’t safely pursue my career here. I’m done fighting for my state but I can’t get the fuck out.

It's pretty fucked up when we need to start having non-profits take in refugees from a different state.

Interesting how conservatives act like they really care about women's sports if a trans girl is playing on the team, but they were over the moon when the USWNT got knocked out of the World Cup. And don't even suggest they go to a WNBA game.

I remember the conservative shit fest they had over USWNT asking for equal pay to the men's team.

To be fair the USWNT was full of shit on the equal pay thing

I tried researching it after watching the 'LFG' documentary and most sites were MRA bluster. What did you find out?

You uhhhh, didn't read past the first couple paragraphs did you? It was some rather selective accounting.

Cordeiro's letter stipulated that the totals do not include money received by U.S. Soccer from FIFA for World Cup bonuses. With that money included, federation analysis said that the men earned $41 million for the same nine-year period, compared to $39.7 million for the women.

Considering that revenue and profits for the men's world cup ABSOLUTELY DWARF the women's world cup this makes perfect sense. And considering the huge gap in revenue and profit a $1.3 million differences is completely acceptable

And then literally everyone else involved said the numbers they presented were false and selective.

Ok what am I missing? In the article the only ppl who presented actual numbers were the USSF and an independent accounting firm.

In the article only the USMNT, Joe Machin, and the rep for the USNWT disagree but have no proof

As for how their pay struck actually works:

For the women, there are various revenue streams. Contracted players have a base pay of $100,000 per year. There are also at least 22 players who are allocated to National Women's Soccer League teams. Tier 1 players -- of which there must be at least 11 -- make an additional $67,500 per year, while the Tier 2 players make $62,500 per year. These players receive annual salary bumps of $2,500. The USSF, namely the USWNT manager, decides which players will receive Tier 1 or Tier 2 status. The women also have a variety of incentive-based bonuses written into their CBA to cover items such as win bonuses in friendlies, qualifying for the World Cup, winning the World Cup, and so on.

• Pay for non-contract USWNT players is governed by seniority. A player making her eighth or more WNT camp appearance receives $4,000 per call-up. A player called in making less than her eighth appearance receives $3,500 per call-up. These players also participate in the various win bonuses.

• The men are paid in similar fashion to non-contract USWNT players, though their appearance fees and bonuses in most cases are considerably higher. For example, making a World Cup team will net a men's player $68,750. A women's player will make $37,500 for making the World Cup squad. A win by the USMNT against a team outside the top 25 in the FIFA rankings will result in each player getting a bonus of $9,375, and a loss will result in a payment of $5,000. For the women, a victory against a team ranked outside the top eight brings each player $5,250, and they get nothing for a loss.

• How does this shake out in terms of total pay? It varies from year to year, based on each team's respective World Cup cycle. The most recent filing for 2018 saw only USWNT players among the federation's top-paid employees. But keep in mind that 2018 was a year in which the men were expected to play in the World Cup but didn't because they failed to qualify for the first time since 1986. Had the team made the tournament, the pay of several men's players would likely have far exceeded that of their female counterparts

https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/37582214/defining-pay-gaps-stake-sides

In short the men's team only makes more if they actually win. They're essentially contractors while tiered women players are salaried.

Also all of this was a collective bargaining agreement between the men's and women's players unions

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They want to hate trans people more than they care about the sports.

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Her removal led hundreds of Monarch students to walk out of class two weeks ago in protest.

The kids are alright.

Zoomers are vastly more progressive than any previous generation. It's why republicans have such a laser focus on schools and children media. If they don't actively do indoctrination the voter base is just going to naturally shift left.

Whats a Monarch Student? Is there an emperor one?

Just in training to arch Venture, nothing to see here.

Every good trans girl should follow in the footsteps of Dr. Mrs. The Monarch

There could not be a more stark divide in attitudes, in my workplace, than between the boomers who are on the brink retiring, and the new kids fresh out of college. It gives me some hope for the future.

It's not black and white, there are outliers, but by and large the boomers are fucking toxic. Good riddance.

When I was in school, there was only girls volleyball and no boy’s volleyball team so I have a question, say the person in this article wasn’t transgender but it was a boy (born with male genitalia and identifying as a male) who wanted to play volleyball. If there were no boy’s volleyball team at the school, would he be allowed to play on the girl’s team? I only ask because isn’t that how Title 9 has been interpreted?

This is anecdotal but I played hockey in high school and wrestled one year, we had a girl on our hockey team because we had no girl’s hockey team, she was a lot better than me too, I also remember one of our wrestlers wrestling a girl from another school because there was no girl’s wrestling team. There were no issues in either of those cases.

Regardless of all that, if there’s only one volleyball team at the school and it’s an all women sport, if a boy or transgender girl wants to play, it seems to me they should be allowed on that team if there’s no other opportunities for them to play.

I’ll finish this by saying: I am one person and these are my thoughts not a strong opinion that I’m going to live or die by so I don’t want to start an argument , just a discussion.

Yeah, I worked at a school where a cis girl played on a football team where all the other players were boys. It was never a problem.

Way before women's football or soccer if anyone prefers girls would have had to play on boys teams because there were very few girls teams/clubs and honestly ten year olds aren't going to give a shit if a girl wants to kick a ball around with them.

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I've heard some roller derby teams doing this when their attendance numbers are low. They just ask the team and have a vote to see if people are comfortable or not. According to this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_IX

It prohibits sex-based discrimination in any school or any other education program that receives funding from the federal government.

You would be allowed.

I think this has always been the case when there is no other team. Its hard to say though as I cannot imaging a boy trying to play on the girls team when the boys is an option. high school is hard enough as it is.

I'm hopeful these ideals are changing for the better with gen z

yeah I don't think they were ideals really but if gen z has somehow eliminated peer pressure and bullying then I suppose.

If people are interested, it's easy to find a case by case solution, which fits best the given situation - but some people are just asholes or populist so others have to suffer.

Im in Australia, but we had three girls join our under 16 rugby league team years ago because there was no girls teams. Noone had a problem with it as far as i remember.

Nope you're right. We had a girl on our high school hockey team too. High school sports have been put on some kind of pedestal in parts of our country. Like it's the Olympics or something. It's literally just supposed to be another avenue of teaching and socialization. Building confidence and the ability to work in teams effectively

Honestly we should go to the other extreme. Stop even keeping score in high school sports.

Edit - At risk of dating myself I do want to point out, this was 20 years ago. Just to show how made up this issue is now.

  1. Conservatives think that every girl athlete is inferior to every boy athlete.

  2. They think that trans girls aren't girls; they're just boys who have been convinced by some evil liberal plot to pretend to be girls.

So they think a trans girl gives some sort of advantage that the other girl athletes can't possibly overcome.

Of course, more than five years ago or so they didn't give a flying fuck about girl's or women's sports (and they still don't insofar as they can use them for vice-signalling political wedges.)

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So glad we fixed climate change, wealth inequality, bigotry, rising fascism, homelessness, etc so we can work on the real issues.

According to armchair analysts, isn't she supposed to be dominating all high school volleyball in it's entirety like some 'hopped up on E' ubermensch? /s

If not, then why is there separate mens and womens teams at all?

Bimodal distribution, the fact these overlap seems to defeat people. But at the extremes of performance, the overlap is greatly reduced or entirely eliminated. Sexual dimorphism is very pronounced in humans, and we definitely need to separate the sexes in the vast majority of competitive sports. Anyone claiming otherwise is denying reality, which they're free to do, but I am free to disagree with their conclusion. I expect to be called a fascist for my position, which is very silly.

What is the distribution of athletic performance in volleyball between 14 year olds and an 18 year olds? In high school volleyball, it's perfectly possible for a team made of all 18 year olds who are 6 feet tall to play a team that is all 14 year olds that are 5 feet tall. The idea that without the participation of trans girls, high school volleyball is completely equitable is ridiculous. High school sports are for fun, learning teamwork and discipline, and fitness. Who wins a high school volleyball game is not important. Certainly it's not more important than the health and safety of trans girls - and non-gender-conforming cis girls who have been and will continued to be tortured by laws like this.

Is it common for a varsity team to be playing a freshman team? That wasn't the case with football.

Yes. It absolutely happens. Especially if the school can't field two teams.

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In my experience youth sports at all levels are also there in order to put band-aids on the fragile egoes of adults.

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Yes, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading these comments.

Could this be handled with greater jv and varsity leagues?

Like instead of men's and women's, it's just jv and varsity. If you aren't that great, you're in jv. If your stronger/faster/whatever you can try out for varsity.

Changing the name or the perception of the "jv" team maybe?

Sure. In professional sports where they're training intensively. In High School it's a bit ridiculous. Getting a winning record isn't the point of sports at that level. It's just another mode of teaching.

I suppose, although you'd still expect the skill distribution to follow the same pattern in this smaller population, i.e., school or college. So on average you'd be forcing girls out of sports teams.

Sure, but I'm asking about when there isn't. some sports those things make a difference, but others they do not.

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Something else came to mind while reading this article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/09/sports-gender-sex-segregation-coed/671460/

“There are players on teams that we play that are faster than me, that are stronger than me, that can hit the ball harder than me. So I knew that [the league’s] arguments didn’t really have any basis in that regard.”

This is what I've experienced in roller derby. The only thing carrying me is that I was taught how to ice skate and play hockey since I was 4. Again, pointing to a socializing aspect rather than a "gendered" thing.

The funny part is volleyball is a perfect example of how to separate men's and women's sports. The women's net is 8 inches lower than the men's. The men are still faster/stronger and hit harder, and the women's games are still fun to watch. Why not alter the playing field since the sexes aren't physically equal? Make the NBA hoop lower, make the women's soccer field smaller. There is a lot that can be done.

Tradition. Because some people can't handle that little Billy is never going to play at a higher level than the high school team?

All sorts of reasons. None of them are good though.

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Glad to see the school has some common sense. The principal and athletic director pushed to keep her on the team. Great classmates as well, learning to make their voice heard.

Wait if you can't discuss sexuality or gender issues in school how do they know. Codewords? Charades?

Conservatives make it their business to know by any means necessary what you have between your legs.

Don't be silly, that law was never going to be used against conservatives.

From the party that brought you such hits like: “Don’t Tread on Me,” and “Small Govermment!” comes a new this new banger:

"Some of you assholes are begging to be tread on by the government" and " Small government to HELP you, not make your life miserable!" In all good book stores...errr. sorry no, we closed those...on fox News and your favorite right wing talking head near you!

The highly competitive and world famous Monarch girls volleyball team from Coconut Creek, Florida. Nothing should be allowed to besmirch their timeless reputation through the hallowed halls of heteronormative athletic excellence.

Who called it in? It was a horny dad who got the ick after ogling the trans kid at volleyball practice wasn't it?

Oof, I'd your second paragraph wasn't the most likely cause I'd be surprised, but it could also be a Karen who thought a penis being around their chaste daughters would literally summon Satan.

I'm glad the reporting on this is easy to understand and digest.

Usually any transgender reporting makes it very confusing who is doing what because the reporter is stepping on eggshells when referring to gender.

The association also barred the girl from participating in boys sports for 11 months.

Short, sweet, and to the point. Not that I support them doing this, but at least it's clear to me what they're doing.

Oh no! Not high school sports! Whatever will we do?!?

Why fine them instead of disqualifying?

Seems odd

The FL Republicans just want to make a political statement.

There’s no money in disqualifications.

They banned the kid from school sports as well.

Yeah, they were cheating. The kid was already banned

Just seems weird to give a fine to the school, which tax payers would pay for

More typical punishments have banned the whole team

Seems weird to even have the rule in high school sports.

Not really relevant

Its there so you break it under assumption of consequence

That just sounds like another way to say you have to follow the law even when it's immoral and harmful.

How?

Did you think pushing for change was easy?

No but this kind of civil disobedience is the way to do it.

I agree but im not sure what that has to do with me thinking consequences will follow and people who stand up accept that they will endure them

Or you saying that me saying that is just another way of saying to obey

It sounded like that's what you were saying yeah.

I may get down voted for this, but there needs to be a distinction between male and female athletes somewhere. There's biological differences in muscle mass and trans women have a biological advantage. I don't necessarily agree with fine, but I do think that cis female sports should have some protections too.

Trans woman have lower muscle mass and strength then average cis females after being HRT.

Not always the case.

So we're protecting the system against the outliers? So we're blocking naturally muscular or otherwise more athletic cis girls from playing? Really tall basketball players? Runners who are just naturally faster? How do you judge they fall too far outside the median range?

Or have you given this no thought and you just think boy things are for boys and girl things for girls and you stopped learning at age 3?

Not to mention that these are already outliers within outliers. Trans people make up like 0.01% of the population, and how many of those are not only still in middle/high school, but also play competitive sports? We're probably talking a couple dozen people total.

I never said that.

What were you saying then? What was your point of saying "not always the case."?

I'm saying that its not always the case that the doctor will tune it so that it could be considered fair. The doctor coule use less HRT in order to give the athlete an unfair advantage.

Is this scientifically verified? If it is, I'd like to see the study. And what is the study's demographic? Because we're only talking about athletics so the demo should be trans athletes vs cis female athletes.

Reading into this, my main points of concern are that there is only a population of 8 in each group. That's far from clinically significant, but if we pretend for the sake of argument that it is a clinically significant population there's still the fact that TW have more muscle mass and outperformed the CW in their handgrip strength despite lower strength/FFM due to the extra muscle mass. The study authors believe that this is because a difference in oxidative processes in the muscle but don't go on to elaborate their hypothesis so it may allow some TW to take advantage of their extra muscle mass when in competition and other hormones flood the CNS/bloodstream.

My hypothesis would be that adrenaline temporarily helps to overcome the suppression of muscle performance due to hormone therapy. Note that this is my hypothesis and would need to be studied. Maybe I am wrong, but in my clinical experience the observable results run counter to the small scope of this particular study.

I do think more studies need to be done. My opinion is if a cis woman would be barred for PCOS then barring trans women is fine

Look at you, attacking the source before you even see it.

Totally unbiased though.

I what way did I attack it? I asked to see the source and expressed my concern with possible points of scrutiny as it's being presented in the argument at hand. I'm pro-LGBT rights.

What about cis women with heightened testosterone levels then? They won't exactly be beholden to strict requirements like a trans woman with regulated testosterone will.

There's biological variance at play in all of sports, if you start going there, you have to start asking yourself what your actual goal is? Is it protecting minorities and disadvantaged people? Or is it something akin to weight classes? Or.. what?

Either way you put it, either you allow trans women in women's sports, or you rework the system to be based on your biology in some way, separated into classes like testosterone level, body weight, how tal you are.. etc. Otherwise you will either be inconsistent in your ruling, or exclude some cis women which is what you specifically tried to avoid in the first place.

The simple solution is to have 1 division for good players and another division for everyone else.

They have that. It's called high school sports. And then afterwards, intramural sports. For competitive teams there's private clubs and college/professional leagues.

What are we protecting women’s sports from? It’s weird, I hear more about how transgender women are a threat to women’s sports than I do about actual women’s sports. It seems like drama over a trans women being on a sports team is more important than the actual sports. I very rarely see headlines about women’s sports. I’m not into sports at all, but I can name Kyrie Irving, Draemond Green and a fuckton of other men’s basketball players. I can’t think of any women.

It’s just very difficult to take these arguments about “protecting” women’s sports seriously when they only seem to matter when it’s time to use them as a cudgel. I wish the energy would be redirected - advocating for equal pay, more coverage, showing up to local games. Title 9 be damned, the girls volleyball team doesn’t have half the budget of the boys football. A handful of trans kids playing is such a non-issue compared with all of the other shit going on in the failing education system. The Olympics have allowed trans women to play for ages, and no one really gave a crap until trans people became the new target.

Why do children play sports in school? My understanding was that it was for character building - developing discipline, communication skills, etc etc. The competitive aspect is important yes, but at the end of the day the purpose is to help develop the child. There is harm done in denying a child the opportunity to participate in sports - there are lots of kids who only come to school because of sports. Trans kids need a coach they can talk with and a team they can feel a part of too.

From being pushed out of their own sport by athletes with biological advantages of being born male. I wish that wasn't the case, but there's already been documented cases of male to female trans athletes taking already scarce opportunities away from cis female athletes. Lia Thomas went from being ranked #462 competing in men's swimming to #1 in women's when she switched. Now it's obviously been bastardized by shit stain human beings, anti-trans rights voices, and homophobes but if you look at it in a vacuum there's legitimate concerns to be addressed. College scholarships being awarded to the best athletes. Endorsement deals. Records. Championships. I think Michael Phelps addresses it the best.

"I believe that we all should feel comfortable with who we are in our own skin, but I think sports should all be played on an even playing field....I don't know what that looks like in the future."

And also Nancy Hogshead-Makar supporting trans participation

"so long as they can demonstrate that they have lost their sex-linked, male-puberty advantage prior to competition in the women's category."

However, I'm not sure that there is an easy way to define what their sex-linked advantage is nor a way to measure it's recession throughout the transitioning process and it would be unwise to encourage emotionally and mentally immature children that have not yet entered puberty to make a permanent decision on transitioning. Not to mention the gradient of transgender processes and the extent to which a person even wants to go. Not every trans female takes hormones.

Not being able to name female athletes is a you and (to a lesser degree) media problem. They don't get as much press, but there's plenty of household female athlete names. Venus and Serena Williams, Brittany Grinder, Katie Ledecky, Megan Rapinoe, Alex Morgan, Yani Tseng, Mia Hamm, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Simone Biles, Lindsey Vonn, Marta, Nancy Kerrigan....probably some other huge names I'm totally missing.

Since you're not really a sports person maybe you don't see it how other highschool and beyond athletes see it. School sports is just as much about competition and championships as it is character building. It isn't only about winning and losing. I want to make that clear. Sports are used to build character sure, but it's usually being taught on the back of the competitive aspect. Being a good teammate, working together as a team, etc in order to beat the opponents or improve yourself. And I'm not saying that this girl should be denied her right to play, just that she should unfortunately be required to participate in the men's bracket of competition. She may not perform well, but that's the reality of competition. It's no different than the chubby boy sitting on the bench until the last 3 minutes of a blowout game.

Until we can come up with a more scientific and proven methodology for these individuals to compete in a fair and inclusive environment, I think that's the reality of the situation. Not all societal problems can or should be dealt with by flipping a switch and adjusting after the culture shock. I wish that were the case, but it's going to do a lot more harm than good. The first step in my opinion is to develop a coed class of sports in some fashion that allows anyone to participate while still keeping competitive sex-based sports.

I bet you can't name 3 more examples beyond the one in your comment.

It's such a non-issue. Trans people make up, what, 0.01% of the population? And what % of those are in competitive sports? People need to get a grip.

Here's a few that was able to find in this article.

  • Juniper Eastwood
  • Natalie Fahey
  • CeCé Telfer
  • Athena Del Rosario
  • Erica Smith
  • Gabbi Ludwig

Some became National champions as individuals and as part of a team. I'm sure there's some that cause more controversy than others, but the point is that this is a relatively new scenario that's only going to be more common as time passes. Already there's a statistically significant amount of competitions that have been won by transgender athletes.

Gonna start my response with this as I know most people will see a long comment and won't read it, and this might be the most important takeaway: a website about LGBTQ+ issues in sports seemed interesting, but the fact that the entire article seemed to be about counting and naming every single trans athlete they can find, I decided to do a quick search to find out what this site is about.

Sure enough:

In spring 2023, Zeigler was criticized for his public transition to the Republican Party and for his endorsement of Governor Ron DeSantis for the 2024 United States presidential election.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsports?wprov=sfla1

So either you're aware that you're purposely misleading people by using disingenuous, bad faith sources, or you didn't do 30 seconds of research before posting what is clearly anti-trans agitprop.

Do better.

Now that's out of the way:

You have (perhaps purposely) misconstrued my request. I wasn't asking for trans athletes, I was asking for trans athletes that have "dominated" in their respective sport.

And what do you know, even the article in the bigoted rag you linked to says,

Three trans athletes we know of — Lia Thomas (swimming), CeCé Telfer (track & field) and Braeden Abrahamsen (bowling) — won a national championship, with Telfer and Thomas winning individual titles.

I can tell you with 100% certainty that, if they knew about more than 3, they would have been listed in that article. I have zero doubt in my mind.

You said:

I bet you can't name 3 more examples beyond the one in your comment.

You were asking for 3 more examples and I provided them. So now you're trying to move the goalposts.

It may be a rag, but I only used it as a source for fact checking. I'm not going to source check something that's easily verified. I went to the first source that presented a list and a brief summary of their athletic activity. The whole "do better" rhetoric is such a bore. Do better at what? I've already mentioned in other comments that I'm pro LGBT rights and actively help athletes that are openly gay and/or gender dysphoric. Instead of attacking fact with empty rebuttals, maybe you should "do better".

Making excuses for basing your beliefs on obvious propaganda. Pretty sad, dude. Especially since you know you're doing it. You should be embarrassed.

College sports are tainted enough. We don't need to lean into it by letting them turn high school sports into a high stakes game too.

Obviously in college with billions of dollars on the line it's a different situation. But this isn't that. This a level that's about learning to work in teams, communicate, and stay healthy. Nothing about that requires a specific gender.

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