Rep. Barbara Ehardt travels country on ‘Take Back Title IX Tour,’ promoting women’s-only athletics and private spaces
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IDAHO FALLS — The “Take Back Title IX Tour,” a nationwide effort to push back against recent Biden Administration regulation changes permitting transgender athletes to participate in women’s sports, stopped in Idaho Falls Tuesday morning.
Rep. Barbara Ehardt, R-Idaho Falls, an ambassador and speaker on the Take Back Title IX campaign, led guests in signing a tour bus covered with slogans such as “Our bodies, our sports,” “She’s gone too far to be erased,” and “Equality is not a game.”
“Now we are battling the complete erasure of girls and women, not just in sports, but in all of our other private sex spaces, such as bathrooms, locker rooms and prisons,” she said in a statement to EastIdahoNews.com. “The Biden Administration has taken upon itself to rewrite the ‘37 words’ that defined Title IX in 1972 and created 1500 pages of punishments that will be administered against anyone who dares to defy this administration’s decree.”
The Title IX regulation, which is approaching its 52nd anniversary later this month, originally stated, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
On April 19, the U.S. Department of Education released updated Title IX regulations, “prohibiting discrimination based on sex stereotypes, sexual orientation, gender identity and sex characteristics.”
The tour, which started in Scranton, Pennsylvania, held rallies in White Fish, Montana, on Monday, a luncheon with legislators in Salt Lake City on Tuesday and a rally in Las Vegas on Wednesday.
As a former Division 1 NCAA coach and current legislator, Ehardt co-sponsored the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act in 2020, making Idaho the first state to require student athletes to compete on teams that correspond with their biological sex.
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Versions of the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act bill have since been adopted by 25 other states, Ehardt said.
She is joined on the tour by prominent athletes, politicians and coaches – including Riley Gaines, a 12-time All-American swimmer and five-time SEC champion; former Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard and Martina Navratilova, winner of 18 Grand Slam titles in tennis singles.
Gaines lost out on a NCAA Swimming Championships trophy after tying with a transgender individual, Lia Thomas, in the 200-yard freestyle in March 2022.
“We were blindsided,” Gaines writes on her website. “There was a new swimmer, Lia Thomas, who swooped in out of nowhere and broke record after record. It didn’t take long for us to realize that Lia Thomas was formerly Will Thomas. He swam for three years on the men’s team at University of Pennsylvania where he was mediocre at best, before switching to the women’s team his senior year. We spent our entire lives training to be the best in women’s sports, just to have to compete against a man – and be told to celebrate it.”
“We tied,” Gaines continued. “And yet the NCAA officials told me that the trophy belonged to Thomas. The officials claimed this was necessary for public relations. I was shocked. I felt betrayed and belittled, reduced to a photo-op. But my feelings did not matter. What mattered to the NCAA were the feelings of a biological male.”
The incident also set off a fierce debate on gender identity, freedom of speech and expression in the NCAA.
“Although the NCAA claimed it acted in the name of ‘inclusion,’ its policies, in fact, excluded female athletes,” Gaines wrote.
Coach Kim Russell shared her experience Tuesday at Club Apple. Russell was fired as the Oberlin College lacrosse head coach after speaking out against transgender individuals’ participation in women’s sports.
Following Lia Thomas’s victory as the first transgender athlete to win a NCAA title on March 20, 2022, Russell posted on her Instagram story, “Congratulations to Emma Weyant, the real winner of the 500-yard freestyle.”
“… (At) the top of that post, I said, ‘What do you believe? I can’t be quiet anymore. I’ve spent my entire life playing, coaching and starting sports programs for girls and women,” Russell said.
In “Burned at the Stake,” a documentary about Russell’s story, she relates, “I was blown away that a male was being allowed to compete with women in NCAA swimming.”
“I’ve been a coach for 28 years and a college coach for 11, and I was called in and told that I was now being called a member of a hate group,” Russell said on Tuesday. “I was told by another administrator that it’s okay for me to have my own opinions, but when those go against that of the college, it could be a problem for my employment. I was then subject to a number of, oh, crazy Marxist-type of meetings, a Maoist struggle session, and then when I went public with my story a year later, I was removed from my coaching position.”
Since that time, Russell has served as an ambassador for the Independent Women’s Forum, a women’s advocacy group. The group is one of a dozen organizations — including the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, Women’s Liberation Front, Women’s Sport Policy Working Group, the International Consortium on Female Sport, Young Women for America and Concerned Women for America — helping to sponsor the tour.
“I’ve been honored to be associated with all these great ladies and these great organizations who form this coalition that initially began in 2020 after the ‘Fairness in Women’s Sports (Act)’ was passed,” Ehardt wrote. “We needed this coalition to battle the ACLU and their allies. But our coalition has grown, the people involved, such as Riley Gaines and Tulsi Gabbard, has grown.”
The controversy over transgender’s access to women’s sports and private spaces continues to grow.
According to the Independent Women’s Voice, biological males presently “have (won more than) 913 trophies, medals and titles in 441 different women’s and girls competitions and over 30 different sports.”
The tour will continue across the United States, culminating with a celebration of the 52nd anniversary of Title IX in Washington D.C. on June 25. You can learn more at ourbodiesoursports.com.
“This is why I fight,” Ehardt wrote. “The future of women, how we are defined, what spaces and opportunities are ours, will be lost if we don’t stand together and demand that women be treated with the respect and traditional identity that has always been ours.”
