Nevada Wrestles With Gender and Sport

The Winner is Women

Well, ladies and gentlemen, the great state of Nevada has finally done what it should have from the beginning—shut the barn door before all the horses turned into zebras. The Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association (NIAA)–after what one can only assume was an exhausting amount of hand-wringing and paper-shuffling, has declared that student-athletes must compete in sports according to the sex God and their unaltered birth certificate assigned them, rather than whichever gender they happened to fancy that morning.

The decision met with great rejoicing among those who still believe words have meaning and that fairness in competition isn’t an old wives’ tale. Lt. Gov. Stavros Anthony, never one to mince words, heralded the move as a victory for women’s sports, ensuring that young ladies no longer have to compete against gentlemen in borrowed skirts for their scholarships and trophies.

Of course, there was the usual gnashing of teeth from the professional outrage industry, who immediately began squinting at the Nevada Constitution in search of an escape clause. The ACLU’s Athar Haseebullah declared the decision “patently discriminatory,” proving once again that common sense is an acquired taste.

Meanwhile, some school officials fretted over the logistics, wondering aloud how to verify birth certificates for students without them—though one might reasonably ask whether verifying someone’s birth sex is any more complicated than figuring out if they turned in their math homework. The Board, in true bureaucratic fashion, has scheduled an emergency meeting in May to complicate the obvious even further.

In any case, Nevada has now joined 38 other states in stating the simple truth: girls’ sports are for girls. It is a radical concept, to be sure, but one that worked quite well for several millennia before some folks decided to reinvent reality.

In the meantime, perhaps we can all enjoy the quaint and antiquated notion that fairness, after all, is not just an old relic of the past.