A high-school athlete slammed the Biden administration this week for pulling the federal government’s support from the Trump-era legal effort to prevent boys from competing in girls sports.
Alanna Smith was one of a group of Connecticut girls who filed a federal lawsuit last year against her public school system after it began allowing transgender males to compete on female sports teams.
The suit challenged the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference’s recently adopted policy of allowing males compete in women’s sports.
Former Attorney General Bill Barr filed a statement of interest in the case, signaling the Trump administration’s support for the effort. But this week the Biden administration withdrew that statement of interest, saying, “The government has reconsidered the matter.”
Biden’s Education Department also withdrew letters sent out by the Trump administration threatening to cut off some federal funding from Connecticut school districts that enforced the policy.
The department will be revoking those letters, “as well as the underlying findings and determinations,” it said in its announcement this week.
Smith said the plaintiffs were disappointed by the reversal.
“We have worked really hard to get our stories out there to get people to realize that fairness needs to be restored in our sport and in all other women’s sports,” she told Fox News on Wednesday.
“The transgender athletes have taken spots on the podium that belong to biological females,” she continued. “We train for so many days a week, so many hours to be able to be the best in our state and the best in our region, and these biological males are just taking it away from us, and we really deserve it.”
Smith’s attorney, Christiana Holcomb of Alliance Defending Freedom, said the lawsuit will proceed despite the Biden DOJ’s “politically motivated” decision to back away from it.
Holcomb argued this is just the latest effort by the Biden administration to force its radical gender ideology on the rest of the country.
“Even now, the Biden administration is pushing the so-called Equality Act, which ignores the physical differences between men and women and threatens women’s privacy, women’s homeless shelters, and yes, even women’s sports on a national level for female athletes like Alanna,” she said.
