A coach in Oregon lamented to state officials that ‘the damage to all the natural-born female competitors’ caused by their competition against ‘transgender’ males ‘is real and devastating.’
(LifeSiteNews) — An Oregon high school track coach was fired after he wrote to state officials requesting that they consider an “open division” for transgender athletes while preventing biological males from competing against females.
“I’m gonna fight now because I got wronged … I’m fighting for girls. I’m fighting for female sports. And I’m fighting that it be fair for everybody,” John Parks, the former track coach for Lake Oswego High School, told KATU on Tuesday.
Parks said he wrote two letters to Peter Weber, executive director of the Oregon Student Activities Association (OSAA), and to state Sen. Rob Wagner before and after the state championships.
“The damage to all the natural-born female competitors is real and devastating,” he wrote in a letter to the OSAA, according to The Oregonian. Referring to the fact that a biological male was unfairly being permitted to compete against females, he went on to complain, “Allowing this travesty to be carried out is making a complete mockery of the meet this weekend and in the future until the rules are altered to protect natural-born females.”
In a letter to Wagner, he proposed that the state alter its policies in order to prevent unfair competition while allowing trans athletes to participate in some way.
“My proposal to encourage transgender participation is to offer an open division that is so named so it doesn’t identify or discriminate but offers an opportunity to participate,” wrote Parks, according to KATU.
“But when it comes to championship events, these things involve scholarships, they involve things that they have an unfair advantage at,” Parks told KATU, alluding to the fact that a biological male could potentially be unfairly awarded a scholarship in favor of a female because he won an athletic competition.
He shared with KATU that the transgender male on his high school track team was booed after winning a state championship event against girls and views an open division also as a way to prevent backlash against transgender athletes.
“I support them like all other athletes and only seek a solution that is a win for all as we don’t need any athletes subjected to what happened last month,” he said in an email to The Oregonian.
Mary Kay Larson, director of communications for the Lake Oswego School District, confirmed that Parks was no longer working for the district, but she would not share why he was fired.
The 2016 policy of the Oregon Student Activities Association allows students to participate in the activity category corresponding with their “consistently asserted gender identity,” according to the association’s handbook.
Mandatory inclusion of gender-confused individuals in opposite-sex sports is promoted as a matter of “inclusivity,” but critics note that indulging “transgender” athletes undermines the original rational basis for having sex-specific athletics in the first place, thereby depriving female athletes of recognition and professional or academic opportunities.
There have been numerous high-profile examples in recent years of men winningwomen’s competitions, and research affirms that physiology gives males distinct athletic advantages that cannot be fully negated by hormone suppression.
In a 2019 paper published by the Journal of Medical Ethics, New Zealand researchers found that “healthy young men (do) not lose significant muscle mass (or power) when their circulating testosterone levels were reduced to (below International Olympic Committee guidelines) for 20 weeks,” and “indirect effects of testosterone” on factors such as bone structure, lung volume, and heart size “will not be altered by hormone therapy;” therefore, “the advantage to transwomen (biological men) afforded by the (International Olympic Committee) guidelines is an intolerable unfairness.”