A college softball player told a Washington audience this week that she lost a Minnesota state championship semifinal to a team that fielded a transgender athlete as pitcher, and that the experience pushed her out of one university before she found support at another.
The player, now a sophomore at Colorado Christian University, spoke Wednesday at a press conference on Capitol Hill following a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on opportunity, fairness and safety for female athletes. She had been a senior when her Minnesota high school team lost in the semifinals of the state tournament to an opposing team whose pitcher, she said, was a boy whose parents had changed his legal documents to reflect the opposite sex when he was young. That team went on to win the girls’ high school state championship.
She said the loss devastated her not simply because her team lost a game, but because she could not understand how administrators, policymakers and legislators had allowed a male athlete to compete on a girls’ team.
After the tournament, she was recruited to play Division I softball at Western Michigan University. She said she felt isolated and shamed there for speaking publicly about her experience, and was directed not to identify her university to the media. In an introductory sociology class, she said she received a zero on a paper for treating sex and gender as synonyms, with her professor telling her to “remove any bias and dive deeper into the difference between the two.” She said the lack of support from coaches, combined with pressure in her coursework, led her to transfer after her freshman season.
She now plays for Colorado Christian University, where she said she feels supported and unashamed to describe what happened to her.
A Hearing on Capitol Hill
Her appearance came after a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the topic of fairness and safety in women’s sports. Separate reporting on the hearing noted that Democratic senators either left or did not appear for the session.
The player argued that when a male athlete advances through a girls’ tournament, the effects ripple beyond a single game, touching roster spots, playing time, championships, awards and recruiting opportunities for girls across an entire state.
She said she does not expect the outcome of that Minnesota semifinal to change, but wants her younger sister and cousins to grow up knowing that girls can stand up for one another when, in her view, adults fail to protect them.
