OPINION:
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger is the mother of three school-age girls and, as such, should know better.
The liberal Democratic chief executive had better hope that if her young daughters ever try out for scholastic sports teams, they do not have to compete against transgender faux females — or be forced to share private spaces with them.
That is because, with surprisingly little fanfare, Ms. Spanberger quietly scrapped her Republican predecessor’s October 2025 executive action aimed at banning biological males from participating in female scholastic athletics and from entering the restrooms and locker rooms of real XX-chromosome girls and women.
This means that if Ms. Spanberger’s daughters — Claire, 18; Charlotte, 15; and Catherine, 11 — were to participate in, for example, interscholastic swimming, tennis or volleyball, they hypothetically could find themselves cheated out of athletic titles, medals, trophies or scholarships by bigger, faster and stronger — but delusional — boys.
That is not a rare occurrence, as the LGBTQ lobby and its liberal Democratic acolytes such as Ms. Spanberger would have you believe.
According to SheWon.org, which has meticulously documented this phenomenon, since the year 2000 some 3,599 female athletes have been robbed of 5,167 “medals or records, scholarships, or other opportunities” in 2,151 competitions across 53 sports and games by intersex interlopers who have been unfairly allowed to invade their athletics.
WJLA-TV Channel 7 — the ABC affiliate in Washington — reported Wednesday that Ms. Spanberger apparently “didn’t issue a news release, make a formal announcement on social media or otherwise give public notice that she was ending the rulemaking.”
That under-the-radar action was uncharacteristic of the ordinarily attention-hungry governor, but it is perhaps unsurprising because she is playing for the wrong team here: Polls consistently show this to be an 85% to 15% issue in favor of such a ban.
WJLA reported that Ms. Spanberger “withdrew the rulemaking on July 30, but the public is only finding out about it now, a month and a half later. The withdrawal of the rulemaking is buried on a government website that few people look at.”
Last year, female athletes petitioned the Virginia Board of Health to issue the ruling, and Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s board sought to make good on the request, directing the state Department of Health to develop regulations to codify the ban.
Ms. Spanberger has inexplicably and indefensibly pulled the plug on it.
We say “inexplicably” because, as a former three-term congresswoman, Ms. Spanberger is surely aware that she is all but spitting on the grave of a fellow Democrat, Rep. Patsy Mink of Hawaii, who championed the 1972 passage of Title IX. That landmark federal law prohibits sex-based discrimination by any school or any other education program that receives federal funding.
It has greatly expanded girls’ and women’s opportunities to participate in school sports.
President Trump, who has spoken out forcefully and repeatedly against allowing gender-confused males to invade female athletics, should direct his Education Department to withhold all federal education funds under Title IX from Virginia until Ms. Spanberger recants.
Additionally, Bert Mizusawa, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate from Virginia, should make it a central issue in his bid to unseat three-term Democratic Sen. Mark R. Warner in November.
The retired U.S. Army major general should force Mr. Warner to explain and defend his party’s irrational — and yes, sexist — support for transgender interlopers in female sports.
By one estimate, transgender individuals make up a scant 0.003 of 1% of the population, yet Democrats side reflexively with them against the 51% who are actual women.
No self-respecting woman should vote for any politician who favors so-called transgender girls and women (aka biological males) over real ones on this — or any other — issue.
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