United Nations holds panel on fighting violence against women, girls in sports

Female athletes and global human rights leaders called on the United Nations to protect safety and fairness for women in sports during an event at the general assembly on Wednesday. 

Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) International, along with leaders at the UN Headquarters in New York City, convened an event to advocate for the human rights of female athletes in the U.S. and across the globe.

Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies, U.S. collegiate athlete Lainey Armistead, ADF International CEO Kristen Waggoner, as well as the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, Reem Alsalem, addressed government and UN officials, asking them to keep women’s sports fair and female-only.

Alsalem presented a report to the UN General Assembly last week, calling for global protection of women and girls in sports, which she addressed in her comments on the panel.

Alsalem argued that women and girls are increasingly being affected by the removal of single-sex spaces in the field of sports, raising the risk of sexual harassment, assault, voyeurism, and physical and sexual attacks in unisex locker rooms and toilets. 

“As patriarchal structures continue to evolve, women and girls in sport are experiencing new forms of discrimination based on their sex,” she said. “One glaring example is opening the female category of sports to males, further undermining their access to equal opportunities and the right to participate in safety, dignity and fairness.” 

“In fact, I do not hesitate to say that the failure to protect the female category is one of the most egregious forms of violence against women and girls as the essence of being ‘female’ is willfully pushed aside and ignored, resulting in distress, pain, humiliation, frustration, and anger at the loss of dignity and sheer injustice confronted,” she added.   

The Biden Administration, under Title IX, has expanded the definition of sex discrimination and harassment to include gender identity and sexual orientation, which athletes, experts and activists have argued will have significant implications for women-only spaces. 

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 was originally a 37-word provision barring schools that receive federal funding from discriminating against students on the basis of sex, ensuring equal opportunity for women in the educational setting.

Alsalem publicly warned the Biden Administration in December 2023 that altering the definition of what it means to be a woman under Title IX would result in a ”loss of privacy, an increased risk of physical injury, heightened exposure to sexual harassment and voyeurism, as well as a more frequent and accumulated psychological distress due to the loss of privacy and fair and equal sporting and academic opportunities.”   

ADF is challenging the Biden-Harris Administration’s attempted rewrite of Title IX’s protections for women and girls and while the Department of Education has said its contentious update to Title IX won’t implicate sports or allow transgender women to compete against biological females, experts argue the current rule already does that.

Armistead is a former West Virginia collegiate athlete who, along with other athletes, is fighting a legal battle with the help of ADF to stop biological males from competing in female sports categories. She shared her experience with the UN panel, describing the situations she faced as “demoralizing and unfair, and just plain wrong.” She also discussed the conflict between the Title IX changes and state law.

“West Virginia has a law that ensures that only biological women can compete in women’s sports,” she testified. “Yet during my time as WVSU [West Virginia State University], I began to hear stories of women getting sidelined – and even getting hurt – while competing against males in women’s sports.”

“In just the last three years, the one male athlete who has been allowed to compete against girls in West Virginia has already displaced nearly 300 girls,” she added, referring to a state track athlete. “And that’s just one athlete.”

Armistead is appealing her lawsuit to defend West Virginia’s protection for women in sports to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Davies, who competed as a swimmer at three different Olympic Games, also shared her experience with unfair competition. She lost out on winning gold in the 1980s Olympics against an East German competitor who had been given testosterone as a teenager to improve her performance.

“Females are at a physical disadvantage. This doesn’t mean that we’re worse or better, it just means that we’re biologically different,” she said. “I don’t know a single person that wants to exclude anybody. However, we do want to see women have fair and safe sport.”

“And we cannot wait until a woman is seriously injured or worse still, killed, to be able to deal with the science and the obvious and the common sense,” she added.

Waggoner spoke about ADF’s legal efforts to protect women, as well as international law, which has long recognized equality and non-discrimination, including on the basis of sex, as a pillar of human rights.

“Unfortunately, many countries have fallen short of their human rights obligations toward women and girls in sports,” she said. “We’ve learned the hard way that if female sports aren’t protected, it does grave harm to women and girls.”

“Our plea to the world is to learn from the mistakes that have been made – and that are now being corrected – so that your daughters can walk into a future of fair and safe sports,” she added.

Elyssa Koren, panel moderator, international human rights lawyer and director of legal communications for ADF International, said the inability of women and girls to fairly compete in sports extends far beyond their personal lives.

“Ensuring that female athletes can access and enjoy the benefits of sports free from violence and discrimination empowers women and girls and benefits everyone,” she said. “Female athletes today increasingly are seeing incursions into their female-only spaces, with devastating implications for not only their opportunities, but also their basic safety.”