Episode 255: Thinking Through 50 Years of Title IX
In this episode, Jessica Luther, Brenda Elsey and Lindsay Gibbs breakdown the impacts of Title IX as the historic legislation turns 50. But first, they talk about their summer vacation plans. Then, they talk about how the passing of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 by Congress has impacted women's sports and educational opportunities for the last 50 years. They discuss how the NCAA fought and still fights the implementation of Title IX, the ways the rule impacts athletes and coaches according to their race and gender as well as how the amendment plays out regarding on-campus sexual violence.
Following this discussion, you'll hear a preview of Brenda's interview with Bonnie Morris on her book about Title IX called What's the Score? Then, they'll burn the worst of sports this week on the Burn Pile. Next, they celebrate those changing sports for the better like Torchbearer of the Week, the U18 Canada Women's Hockey Team. They wrap up the show with What's Good and What We're Watching in sports this week.
This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Links
USA Today series: Title IX Falling short at 50 https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2022/05/26/title-ix-falling-short-50-exposes-how-colleges-still-fail-women/9722521002
Women’s Sports Foundation: 50 years of Title IX (PDF) https://www.womenssportsfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/FINAL6_WSF-Title-IX-Infographic-2022.pdf
U.S. Olympic teams now carried by women in medal count in lasting Title IX impact: https://olympics.nbcsports.com/2022/06/13/title-ix-olympics
Video essay: Amira Rose Davis on Title IX https://vimeo.com/687486937/91cb5d353d
Transcript
Jessica: Welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need. I'm Jessica, and today I'm joined by Brenda and Lindsay. On this week's show, we are going to talk about the legacy of Title IX, which was passed on June 23rd, 1972, which is exactly 50 years ago this Thursday. Then we'll burn things, highlight the torchbearers, let you know what's good in our world, and tell you what we're watching this week. Before we get into all of that, it is summertime, which is normally a time of travel, but also – in case anyone needs a reminder – it's a pandemic. So it makes me wonder if y'all have plans for travel this summer? Are you hunkering down? Bren, what are you doing?
Brenda: I am going to Mérida in Mexico.
Jessica: Is that a beach town?
Brenda: Mérida? No, it's a colonial town that has a national library. It was actually its own independent socialist republic in the late 1930s, so I'm going to do research–
Jessica: [laughs] I love you so much.
Brenda: I know.
Jessica: Okay. That's awesome.
Brenda: Totally on brand. And the girls will go to Spanish school while I read books, which is awesome. But there is a beach like an hour away. So I will…It’s that pink beach, sometimes you see on Instagram, where people…That’s actually algae and you can't like swim in it, which is sad, [laughs] but I guess people really Instagram it, with flamingos. So, there is a beach that's not contaminated that’s close. [laughs]
Jessica: Okay. I look forward to your Instagram-worthy photo from that beach. That sounds wonderful.
Brenda: Yeah.
Jessica: Aw. Linz, what are you doing?
Lindsay: Oh, I don't know. I have no idea, [laughter] which is just about par for the course for me, if you know me. But my goal is to do a lot of travel for Power Plays, but I've got to do a little bit of growth first and we'll see, I mean, hoping to make it to Chicago, hoping to make it to the west coast. At the very least, hopefully I'll do some driving. But gas prices are so expensive that it’s just not…It's just not that much cheaper to drive. But I'm hoping to get to at least Atlanta, DC and New York, You know, summer's the big work time for me with, you know, NWSL and WNBA in action. And so I'm looking to take advantage of that as much as possible. And I can have vacation later.
Jessica: We drove last week actually to Big Bend national park, which about eight hours. And yeah, we just paid for the gas and didn't think about it. I made the boys go out to Marfa with me, the Prada Marfa art installation. If you dunno what that is, just Google it. It's about 30 minutes outside of the town, and they were both like, what the hell is this? [laughs] I was like, just take a picture! This is what you do. Talk about Instagram spots. And we went into Big Bend national park, but we were staying in the desert and it was like 112 degrees. So, while it is absolutely gorgeous out there, and if you can make that trek at some point in your life, you should, maybe not in June. But it was fun as a family to do that. We hadn't really had family time away from this house in a really long time. But we are also going to…I feel like my summer travel is like family catch up from the pandemic.
Like, we are going to Atlanta for a week. Our brother-in-law and his wife and our nephew and niece, they live out there and they are huge MLS, Atlanta United season ticket holders, fans, and Austin will be playing Atlanta in July. So we'll be going with them. We'll be those people in the green jerseys amongst all of the Atlanta fans. And then my parents are renting a cabin in North Carolina, the Smoky Mountains, in August. And so we'll be going out there for a week to see them, because we haven't seen them in years. My son went to see them last summer when we had that magic lull where everyone was like, “It is better now!” [laughs] But I haven't seen them in so long, so that will be nice. But yeah, apprehensive and just getting on planes feels like such a risk at this point, but I guess we're all just in it now.
Jessica: 50 years ago, a full half of a century ago, on June 23rd, 1972, Congress passed Title IX of the education amendments of 1972. That is the law we all shorthand to Title IX. It is only 37 words long. So I'm going to read the entire thing: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” That's the whole thing. That is all the Title IX is. In short, it's a civil rights law that tries to ensure equal access to education for everyone, no matter their sex or gender. It's the federal government basically saying it will not give money to any educational institution, from elementary schools through to universities, any kind of educational institution, if they discriminate on the basis of sex. It was that bit in the law's wording about “educational program or activity” that brought athletics under the umbrella of Title IX.
Most people still think of the law as mainly being about athletics, but it's also about making sure pregnant students have access to education, that survivors of gendered violence do, that transgender students do. And Senator Birch Bayh, the author of Title IX, wrote it because his wife Marvella couldn't get into law school. Like, real straight up discrimination was part of where his support of this law came from. So looking specifically at athletics, because this is Burn It All Down, it's hard, honestly, to overstate the impact of Title IX. The Women's Sports Foundation says that there are now. 3 million more athletic opportunities for girls in high school than there were pre-1972. Today, women make up 44% of all NCAA athletes, which is roughly 3.4 million athletes compared to 15% pre-Title IX, which was, it was fewer than 30,000. Those are wild numbers, that growth. Before we dive into analyzing more about the impact of Title IX, Lindsay, can you tell us a little bit about the very early days of Title IX back in the 1970s?
Lindsay: You know, there's a couple things to note. First of all, the NCAA spent about a decade, at least in court, fighting against Title IX. The NCAA did not want Title IX to exist.
Jessica: Hated it.
Lindsay: The NCAA had nothing to do with women's sports. So actually in ’72 it was the AIAW, which is the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women. But that launched in 1971, so right before ’72, to govern women's athletics in colleges. And I'm just gonna read very, very quick excerpt from Pat Summitt's biography, where she talks about the first AIAW basketball championship. She said, “It was a 500 mile road trip, but somehow they begged and borrowed the money to send us.” This was UT Martin, her school. “After we won the state tournament, we went to a drugstore on the main drag and bought a large glass piggy bank and literally carried it around on the streets, seeking donations.” Title IX and AIAW both really helped boost women's sports in the decade, and it was finally in the early 80s that the NCAA kind of usurped and took over women's sports. But even as the NCAA was taking over women's sports, they were fighting Title IX in court still. So. [laughs]
Jessica: Yeah, they absolutely hated it. So, let's dive into the 50 year legacy of Title IX, and we're gonna start with the good. We're gonna do the shiny parts of this. Brenda, what is one lasting impact of Title IX that you wanna highlight?
Brenda: I don't know how to like oversell this, because it's so important. But women in school, women in education, just period. I mean, before Title IX, the number of women in graduate programs, the number of women in teaching positions was a fraction of what it is now. So from, you know, less than a quarter to more than half of university students are women. Those women were not eligible for far more than athletic scholarships. They weren't eligible for the Rhodes scholarship. They weren't eligible for loans. They weren't eligible to serve on a fucking jury until three years before. [laughs] I mean, so it's huge, you know, to go from like, I want maybe to have a trial by my peers and let's just fulfill the constitution, to now I'm a judge. All of that is just incredible to me. And sports has been, you know, it went unchecked forever. It's the worst of the worst sometimes, in terms of bastions of patriarchy. So the fact that Title IX included sports is incredible to me as an aspiration. And even if it’s not perfect and has so many flaws, and we're gonna talk about those, once you have it on the books, you can do something. If you don't have it on the books, then you're just fighting this on an informal level.
Jessica: Yes. I think that's such a great point. I do think it's fun to talk about concrete numbers, like places where we can really see what Title IX has done. And of course, I think we are all Title IX babies, right? Like, anything that we did was because we came of age when it was a reality. But I wanted to point out, for example, Nick Zaccardi wrote a great piece for NBC Sports this week looking at how women have come to dominate Team USA at the Olympics, which is just a direct result of the passage of Title IX. And he wrote, “Starting with the 1992 Barcelona Games, US women won a greater percentage of available medals than the US men in every summer Olympics, except 2004. Women outnumbered men on the US Olympic team for the first time in 2012, and did so by greater margins in 2016 and 2021. The last time the US won more medals in men's events than women's events at a Summer or Winter Olympics was 2010.” And just to see, like, how many women get the opportunity, girls and women get the opportunity, to participate in sports, and how good they fucking are? [laughs] I just find it absolutely thrilling as we're looking over the last 50 years, thinking of where few opportunities really did exist in 1972 at its passage. Lindsay, will you talk to us about the impact on women's sports internationally? Because this is obviously a US law.
Lindsay: Yeah. I think, you know, what we've seen is…And I don't have exact statistics on this, but I think a ton of anecdotal data of just seeing like colleges in all sports starting to recruit more players internationally. And then that bleeds into the Olympics, right? Because as women's sports have grown and opportunities for women's sports have grown in the Olympics, more countries want to have, you know, athletes in women's sports. So I think if you watch the Olympics, there are a lot of athletes from other countries who are NCAA athletes, you know, that played in college in the United States, that got scholarships. And I think that's another cool way of seeing the way it's kind of helping facilitate the games globally because there are all these opportunities that exist now.
Jessica: Yeah. I love that. But of course, here we are, on a show called Burn It All Down. And so you know we're gonna have a critical eye to cast onto this 50 year legacy. The starting place for me always is that Title IX is a civil rights law. It was based on laws about race, laws about disability. And the way civil rights law works in the US is that they almost never have teeth or any kind of real enforcement. It's all reactive. So it's not that the federal government is out there monitoring to make sure that all the schools are complying in the way that they should. Most of the time, the way that the federal government finds out that someone is possibly not complying is someone complains directly to the office for civil rights in the Department of Ed, journalists come along and publish pieces that get enough eyeballs on them and there's enough chatter about them, or people sue. They have to go through the courts in order to force the schools to comply.
My understanding is that basically anytime someone has sued under Title IX, especially with athletics, the school always loses. Like, the schools are not in compliance, right? So whenever they're actually pushed within court, they're losing these. The only repercussion for failing to comply with Title IX is that the federal government can take away that funding that they give to the educational institution. This law is 50 years old, that has never happened. The federal government has yet to use the one way that they have to enforce this law. They have threatened to, but they have never actually done it. And so it's difficult, right? Because there are so many more, like we just talked about, there's so many more opportunities in sports for girls and women. But there are more now for boys and men than there were in 1972 as well.
So like, let's just look at the numbers for the fact that this is not really an enforceable law at this point. According to Women's Sports Foundation, there are a million more sports opportunities for boys in high school than there are for girls right now. To drive this point home, the WSF points out that “girls still do not have the participation opportunities provided to boys pre-Title IX.” Did you get that? In 1972, 3.6 million boys played high school sports. Today it's 4.5 million boys. And while it went from 295,000 girls playing high school sports in 1972, it's now 3.4 million, which…That’s humongous. That change is humongous. But that 3.4 million girls is still lower than the 3.6 million boys in 1972. Whew.
Lindsay: Wow. Wow. [laughs]
Jessica: Yeah. It's so much better. It's like, the idea of criticizing it is hard. But on the collegiate level, there are still 60,000 more collegiate sports opportunities for men than women. One other area where we've seen an impact is on female coaches. And I wanna play a little bit of Amira's video essay for ESPN that played the night of the March Madness selection show, where she addressed this exact discrepancy.
Amira Rose Davis: But while we celebrated more women on the court, we didn't notice they were disappearing from the sideline.
Muffet McGraw: When you look at men's basketball and 99% of the jobs go to men, why shouldn't 99% of the jobs in women's basketball go to women?
Amira Rose Davis: When Title IX passed, 97% of women's college basketball coaches were women. Today, that number is under 50%.
Jessica: One of the main voices you heard there, other than Amira’s, was Muffet McGraw, former head coach at Notre Dame, and flamethrower on this podcast. And she was talking about this because our own Lindsay Gibbs set off a firestorm with a story in 2019 about how Muffet only hired female coaches and how she was proud of it. Lindsay, what are your thoughts on female coaches now versus in 1972?
Lindsay: Yeah, I think once again it goes back to that raw numbers thing, right? Overall, there's a lot more money and a lot more opportunities for women in coaching. But percentage wise, I think it's only about 40% of coaches for women's teams are women. Whereas before it was in the 90 percentile, when it was with the AIAW. It’s very important when we're noting that, that the percentage of women coaching men's sports is still, I think, below like 1 or 2%, right? There's been no increase. What you'd want is for there to be an increase in that number, right? So that women were getting more opportunities to coach men and to coach women. What you're seeing is men getting more opportunities to coach men and to coach women. And so that's just really…That’s why, like what Muffet said in 2019, I think what she did was give people permission to be purposeful in their hiring, to think about it in the bigger picture. In basketball and sports I follow, we have seen an increase of high profile jobs going to former players, to Black women, in recent years. I don't know if it's enough yet to make a statistical difference other than just an anecdotal one, but I think that things are moving the right direction. But we're not really truly gonna see a change in these percentages and in the power balance until women can coach men's teams as well.
Brenda: Absolutely. I wanna think through that for a second too, because the other question in the kind of forward future thinking question is what happens to a field when women dominate it? And what happens to fields historically, when women start to dominate them, is that they get lower pay and worse working conditions. And so there's one thing to say, yes, we want women to do this. There's another thing to be very mindful – we’re not changing that – but to be very mindful about what happens. We see this influx of professors and professors of color are still a minority compared to women, but they are increasing in number, fortunately. And as we see women start to be in higher ed, you start to see professors’ salaries tumble relative to other salaries. You start to see, you know, PhDs having a more and more difficult time getting full time jobs and adjunctification happen. You start to see challenges to the curriculum in a way that you didn’t if it was a white man teaching it, whether it's at the high school level teaching history, whether it's at colleges teaching history.
So, patriarchy is insidious. It moves around. It works through women. There's all kinds of ways in which we have to stay I think very mindful of, you know, what does that look like? And there's jokes, you know, which is like, as soon as there are more women brain surgeons than men, they're gonna go back to the minimum wage. And it's like, no fucking joke. [laughs] You know, this happens all the time. Men go into nursing, nursing salaries rise, you know? Those types of things are operating all the time. And so this discourse of victimization, which is constantly “like we're being pushed out of these great jobs” say white men, that we deserve, is that when that doesn’t work, then the job itself is sabotaged. The field itself is worthless.
Jessica: That's really interesting, Bren.
Lindsay: Yeah. And I was just gonna add to that, like it's also who's doing the hiring. When we're talking about AIAW, most of the people who were athletic directors there were women, right? When they merged, when the NCAA took over, it was men all of a sudden running these programs, doing the hiring, hiring the people that they knew.
Jessica: That was on purpose. The NCAA, they had a whole plan to subsume women athletic directors under male athletic directors, so when it came time to vote on whether or not a school should move into the NCAA or stay in the AIAW, the men would be deciding. Like, it was a purposeful plan.
Lindsay: Don't you love how that happens? [laughter] As Amira has done so much great work, like, you've also seen like the power of HBCUs and their athletic departments decrease a lot as Title IX grew, as college athletics grew. And so white men began taking over everything. There are these few bastions that they didn't own, and then part of this merging of forces was they took over everything.
Jessica: One of the things we don't talk enough about is like who actually benefited with Title IX and, as Brenda has pointed out to me, just like with affirmative action, it’s mainly been white women, right, Linz?
Lindsay: Yeah. I think there's a couple of statistics. First of all, I always kind of forget about the high school component of all this, and there aren't as many statistics available. But Title IX does apply to high school. And so in this Women's Sports Foundation report, it says that “In a typical heavily white high school, girls had 82% of the athletic opportunities that boys had. In a typical heavily minority school, girls had only 67% of the opportunity to play sports compared to the boys.” And if you go on to like the colleges, you've got 30% of all college athletes are white women, and just 14% of college athletes are women of color. And of course, when you look at the coaching numbers, like when we say that only 40% of women have these head coaching jobs, like, the majority of them are white women, of course. So, vast majority.
Jessica: And I'll just point out on the college level, if you think about it, the way that schools have grown their college athletic opportunities are creating sports that mainly white women, women of wealth, are participating in. So like, they have giant rowing teams, they have giant equestrian teams. They're adding field hockey. Like, it's things that girls of color don't often have access to. And so even those actual athletic opportunities are just created and then filled by a lot of white women. A couple more things before we move on from here. I reported on a piece for USA Today that came out back in March about spending disparities between men's and women's collegiate teams. To no one's surprise, athletic departments almost always find ways to spend more money, often a lot more money, on men's teams than women’s, even when the two teams are pretty much equal in size and what they're actually doing.
But I wanted to let listeners know that that piece was just the beginning of a much larger package that USA Today has continued to roll out about how Title IX has fallen short. We’ll put a link in the show notes on our website, so y'all can go check out all of them. There are pieces on the disparities and athletic opportunities and how athletic departments cook the numbers. You can actually look through a database to see if and how the school you love inflates their numbers on women's rosters. It's just a lot of really solid, good work that I know the team at USA Today put like over a year's worth of investigation into. So, I just wanted to point people there. Lindsay, you have a couple final points here, right?
Lindsay: I wanna remind everyone, of course, the conversation around Title IX got really reignited in the national conscience a couple of years ago, Sedona Prince’s video about the disparities at the NCAA basketball championships when they were COVID bubbled in 2021. And that led to the Kaplan Heckler report, which Jess, Amira and I have done multiple podcasts about at this point. But just showing that there's no equality when it comes to championships and the NCAA's approach to championships. And of course the NCAA technically has these loopholes with these championships where they don't have to be Title IX compliant, right? Like, they're different. It's the member schools that are held to Title IX. So, it’s just kind of…The spirit of Title IX just continues to be eroded in any possible way.
And I also wanna mention, there's a lot of…I call this good faith concern, because there's a lot of bad faith concern about NIL, which is just like, we don't want college athletes to have more power and money, right? Like, boo, boo, kids these days. But you know, I'll have a piece coming up in Power Plays in a couple weeks about some I would say good faith concerns about how NIL and name, image and likeness deals are gonna impact women's sports and, you know, how a lot of these colleges, through their boosters, they're finding ways to really circumvent the spirit of Title IX. And there's a lot of concern about that within the women's sports community. And like I said, basically we're 50 years in, and people are still trying to not comply with this every single fucking chance they get. Like, it's exhausting! Like, what are we doing?
Jessica: Yes. It is exhausting. Oh, thank you, Lindsay. I look forward to reading that piece and understanding that part of NIL better, because I do feel like that's been really under reported and, as you said, because it's like all the men handwringing over paying players, and we just give all of our attention there. I do wanna think a bit broader about Title IX. Since the late 1970s, Title IX has covered the issue of sexual harassment and eventually gendered violence more fully in educational spaces, especially college campuses. If you listen to the show, this will be very familiar to you. The idea being that someone who's experienced gendered violence, such as sexual assault, stalking, or domestic violence, is going to have a harder time accessing education as someone who has not, especially if the person who harmed them is on campus and in their classes. Brenda, as the person in this group here today who has spent literally decades working on college campuses and with college students, how have you seen Title IX work in practice?
Brenda: I feel like it's just beginning to work.
Jessica: Mm, interesting.
Brenda: I feel like many of, I guess, you know, a result of the litigious nature of this is that many universities have finally created a team, an office that is a real office for Title IX. That took a very, very long time. I would say my first classes teaching, in another century, [laughs] was indeed without a Title IX office, even at a SUNY school. There was one person that did multiple jobs and was also a Title IX officer.
Jessica: And that's still true on some campus.
Brenda: Absolutely.
Jessica: But it's much more rare.
Brenda: Absolutely. And so I now, at Hofstra University where I teach, but also whenever I'm around, have noticed there are full offices. And that has been huge, right? So as a mandatory reporter, I deal with this all the time. I would say students are coming in with a much savvier, informed outlook. Especially depending on the high school that they went to, in terms of what they can ask. What does it mean to restrict education? So for example, one student who came in who had been assaulted only wanted her assaulter not to be at her graduation. That’s it.
Jessica: Right. It’s often much less…The wants and needs are much less than people often imagine them to be.
Brenda: I mean, how little did she want? You know what I mean? And so I had a very good experience in being humbled by, like, how little it took to get her through a very important ceremony, for her family and her parents. And so I've seen it work really well in some cases, and then [laughs] I've seen it work very poorly. And I don't really wanna talk about that too much, because I know we're focused on athletics. But only to say there is a problem with the interaction between Title IX offices, lowly teachers like myself and campus police versus the real police.
Jessica: Like city or county.
Brenda: Yeah. And that's been a real issue. And just to keep in mind going forward, ICE getting involved in these things is a whole nother layer.
Jessica: It's interesting, Bren, because that makes me think too about like when I was reporting on Vanderbilt, which is one of the first big schools that I reported on, and they're private, and they – at least at the time, I mean, this was now seven years ago – there were all kinds of jurisdictional fights between this private police force that has to tell nobody anything publicly, and the Nashville PD and Vanderbilt PD were trying very hard to sort of push their jurisdictional area out and out and out, which would make it harder and harder and harder to know what's actually going on on campus. There's all kinds of ways that this needs to be improved and worked on. And it's tough. This is obviously one of the thornier parts of Title IX, I would say.
Brenda: It really is.
Jessica: [laughs] That’s like an understatement.
Brenda: It really is. One of the best parts, and I'll just end on this, and this applies to secondary schools, high schools, and all education as well, is the ability of faculty who tend to care the most – not always the most, but usually the most – about our students and their ability to have access to sports, to theater, to education at large. And that is, with Title IX, faculty have been able to pressure administrators. So, think about the case for example two years ago, of Oregon State, where king Alexander had been appointed…Do you know something about this case, Jessica? [laughs]
Jessica: I know a little bit. He came from LSU.
Brenda: What was going on at LSU, Jessica?
Jessica: They were not handling sexual assault well at all, to say the least.
Brenda: To say the very least. And so when he came over, people were so incensed about what he had let the athletic director get away with at LSU, that the faculty were able to have a vote of no confidence and he was forced to resign. He got a relocation fee of about $800,000 – funded by the taxpayers of Oregon! Okay. And so just like those coaches that he enabled to continue sexual assault at LSU, he also got a very sweet deal. So I don't wanna hear shit about victimization on this. [laughter]
Jessica: Oh man. Lindsay?
Lindsay: I mean, there's so many egregious examples of how this works in practice, but one that like I always come back to is at Maryland in 2017, when a student accused two football players of sexual assault. This woman was within the athletics department in some way, whether it was…We don't know exactly how, she was an athletic or trainer or what, but she was in the athletics department. The athletics department paid legal fees of the two people she was accusing of sexual assault! So, you know what I mean? Like, they find ways to just like circumvent this at all times.
Jessica: I say this all the time when I'm reporting on Title IX, but like, it's amazing that I can still be shocked by it. But every time you dig at all, you find something shocking. To wrap this up, I'd like to hear from you both about this particular moment in time. Obviously this is the 50th anniversary of Title IX, but this is a horrific moment for civil rights in this country. We could talk about it looks like the Supreme Court's gonna roll back Miranda rights. We could talk about voting rights, all these sorts of things. But in particular, for this discussion, we are about to see Roe overturned, which would hit its 50 year anniversary next year. We are seeing trans athletes and trans students just constantly under legislative attack. Like, just in general, but from actual laws. What does equity in education even mean at this point in time when half the population's bodily autonomy is not only not guaranteed, but is actively being diminished in this moment? Linz, what are your thoughts around this?
Lindsay: Just terror, I think. [laughs] Like, I don't know that I have any really super constructive thoughts. I mean, I think it's just horrific. I mean, I wish there was any way to believe in the NCAA and believe that they would go back to using their power in any way to like, you know, make sure that championships and anything within their control weren't taking place in states that were banning abortion, weren’t taking place in states that are discriminating against trans youth and trans adults, you know? But it doesn't seem like that's a reality. They are just sitting on their thumbs. You know, I just wanna kind of really blare the siren here. So, we're waiting for like the new official kind of regulations to come out from the Biden administration on sex discrimination and making sure that gender identity discrimination is included in that and part of like, you know, the alterations to Title IX.
And the people in the Women's Sports Policy Working Group, which we've talked about here, which is the anti-trans group that has very, very powerful figures in it, including Nancy Hogshead-Makar, is doing a writing campaign to get the Biden administration to not do this. And the fear-mongering they're doing is saying that equating sex discrimination with gender identity discrimination would mean that girls and women will have no right to single sex sports that we've had for the past 50 years. They're literally saying that that one change is the end of Title IX because they don't believe that trans people are real people with like real wants and needs. And the fear-mongering they’re doing is alarmist. And I'm also afraid it's going to work, because people don't know enough about the situation. And this group is very organized. And it is not the end of Title IX. Like, that is transphobic bullshit. I'm really scared.
Jessica: Yeah.
Lindsay: I’m really, really scared.
Jessica: Gosh, I'm so with you. Bren?
Brenda: I don't think Title IX has the word “women in it.”
Jessica: No.
Brenda: Right. We did the 37 words. There's no women. There's no segregation in there. It says on the basis of sex. It’s very clear to me that protects trans athletes. Civil rights legislation. It's not complicated, which means that the fight against it is very clear too. And the political strategist in me says you prioritize the most vulnerable within your movement, right? You go for the ones that are most likely to be hurt by your opposition, whether that be, let's say like the environmentalists, or their children, you know? In this case, it's obviously trans children.
Lindsay: Yeah.
Brenda: Like, there's like one in some states, and there are entire pieces of legislation being passed about a child. You have to know, first they come for them and then they come somewhere else. But I hope you don't need that argument. I hope people don't really need that argument. So I think we need to prioritize trans children. And I also think, so, what does bodily integrity mean when you say that, Jessica? I think it means that we need to shift everything and just put them first. And I think, to my mind, people who spend a lot of time at school board meetings have to ask the question, what is your current policy? What are you going to do? Not only how are you going to “tolerate” trans athletes, how are you gonna recruit them? How are you gonna welcome them? How are you going to be ready to embrace, celebrate, whatever changes are coming down the pipeline? And get your shit together now. And parents who don't suck and community members who don't suck, you do the same thing, because they're gonna come for your high school. They are. These people will come in the name of girls and in the name of women to hurt members of your community that are the most vulnerable.
Jessica: And as always, as we enter this next 50 years of Title IX, Burn It All Down will be thinking and talking about it as we go.
Jessica: On Thursday's interview, Brenda talks to professor Bonnie Morris. They discuss how Title IX has changed women's sports, teaching them, playing them, and advocating for them.
Bonnie Morris: Society has said in so many ways, you can succeed as an athlete but fail as a woman. And for many years, girls were “suspect” if they were simply talented at sports.
Jessica: Now it's time for everyone's favorite segment called the burn pile, where we pile up all the things we've hated this week in sports and set them aflame. I'm gonna go first. We learned last week from a piece by Laura Wagner at Defector that The Athletic, which is now owned by the New York Times, is implementing a “no politics” rule. I feel like the easiest way to try to explain what The Athletic means by no politics is to let The Athletic’s chief content officer Fichtenbaum do it. Here is what he said in a meeting last week: “We don't want to stop people from having a voice and raising their voice for appropriate issues, but there comes a point where something that is a straightforward, hey, I'm concerned about guns in America, for instance, right? That's an apolitical statement. It becomes political when you say, I'm concerned about guns in America, and this political party is the reason why we're having an issue, right? That's when it tips over. So again, we don't wanna stop people from having a voice and expressing themselves. We just need to keep it from tipping over into the political space.”
If you were like, what? That doesn't make any sense, and it seems weird for a news outlet to not let reporters note which political party is a reason for an outcome that's the direct result of politics, I'm with you. Fichtenbaum also said, “We could stand up for our rights, but we should not say we disagree with somebody's politics.” I just…First, the idea that because a journalist does not express publicly their politics does not mean that journalists do not have politics. Not acknowledging your biases and your prejudices is how you get a white dude in power saying things like “I don't personally view matters of race as politics. Again, like, it could become a matter of politics if it goes that way, but on its own, I don't think that race is a political thing in what we're talking about.” Yes, Fichtenbaum said that too. “We should not say we disagree with somebody’s politics” is the most white dude thing a white dude has ever said.
I tweeted this last week, but it's worth saying it again here. It took me about four seconds to find out that people think a woman who believes mitigating sexual violence is a good thing is “political.” So it must be really nice to be politically neutral. I wouldn't know. I will never know. Second, I believe that the mere existence of women's sports is a political act. Women's sports are inherently political, the existence of them. That's what happens when countries have passed laws to keep women out of sports and, like Title IX, have had to pass laws to make sure they even get a chance at sports. How are you gonna tell the people at The Athletic who cover women's sports not to be political?
Third, there is a political party trying to literally eradicate trans people, that wants gay and queer people back in the closet, that is gleefully, stripping away the bodily autonomy of half the population, that wants to deny civil rights to people of color in any way that they can. Right now they're doing this. To implement a rule like this at any point in time is bad. I wouldn't ever agree with it. But to do it right now, that's some wild shit. I'm not gonna give up on The Athletic because there are people doing great work there, like really important work, and I care about them and I care about what they have to say. But I am sure is hell gonna burn this fucking terrible no politics rule. So, burn.
All: Burn.
Jessica: Lindsay, what are you burning?
Lindsay: Yeah, I've got a double here. First of all, just a reminder, by the time you guys are listening to this, it'll have been of 122 or 123 days since Brittney Griner has been wrongfully detained in Russia. It's time for her to come home. It's devastating. Her detention has just been extended, which was not unexpected, but the truth is this negotiation isn't getting any easier through time, and the pressure needs to be on the government now to make a deal. It’s shitty, but this is where we are. It's time to bring BG home. To find out more about everything that's going on with Brittney Griner, go to, wearebg.org.
But anyways, Deshaun Watson, frequent burn pile member, was back in front of the media this week for Cleveland Browns' mini camp or whatever they call spring camp. And one reporter asked Watson how he's “holding up emotionally,” with lawsuit after lawsuit being filed against him. [laughs] You know, just gotta check on him and his mental health. And another one said – shades of Johnny Depp here – said, “These allegations have done a tremendous amount of harm to your reputation. And do you want to counter sue for defamation?” So this is what another reporter is asking Deshaun Watson.
Jessica: That feels political. So I hope that wasn’t… [laughter] I hope that wasn’t an Athletic reporter.
Lindsay: Yeah. So anyways, Jenny Vrentas of the New York Times has done just phenomenal work on this. And you know, her latest report said that he met at least 66 women for massages over a 17 month period, and that the Houston Texans played a role in enabling his behavior. Literally, pro athletes, like, they defend one another, and you can get a lot of pro athletes to defend a lot of shit. I have not heard one pro athlete say on Twitter anywhere that–
Jessica: Normal numbers!
Lindsay: [laughs] That this is normal! That 66, that that's not a giant red flag.
Jessica: I don't know what else you need, yeah.
Lindsay: Nobody can defend that! Like, there's nobody even trying to defend that number. So, throw the reporters who are most concerned about how Deshaun Watson is handling this tough time in is life, throw that line of questioning onto the burn pile. Throw the Cleveland Browns back onto the burn pile, burn, burn, burn.
All: Burn.
Jessica: Brenda, what's on your burn pile this week?
Brenda: It's a many-headed Hydra, [laughs] but I'm just gonna focus in. The Concerned Women for America – this is a benignly named organization, which is nefarious – has back in March filed a civil rights complaint under Title IX with the US Department of Education against the University of Pennsylvania, stating that Lia Thomas, a trans woman swimmer who won an Ivy title, she was actually a torchbearer a couple months ago, “compromises women's opportunities in sports.” And there's so much wrong with. But we've covered a lot of it, a lot of ground. So I'm just gonna put Newsweek actually on the burn pile for giving Concerned Women for America…I’m also, you know, pretty pissed that they're taking the acronym of a major labor union.
Newsweek gave CEO Penny Nance a platform this week to talk about the case, and Nance states that this is a violation of opportunities because of scholarships. And I'm very mad and I wanna put it on the burn pile, because Ivys of course don't offer athletic scholarships. So, fuck you, you idiot. Like, just go fuck off. There's no opportunity. Guess what? They don't offer any academic scholarship either. I mean, I don't think that's great. I think it kind of sucks, but it's true, right? But because they're so great and they're all so smart and supposed to be well rounded little individuals, they don't give those scholarships. So, go and Google and like look at a Wiki or whatever. Lia Thomas is taking nothing from anyone, and Newsweek should not let, even in the opinion page, a gross, gross misstatement of facts go unchecked. So, I would like to burn that decision on Newsweek's part. Burn.
All: Burn.
Jessica: Now to highlight people carrying the torch and changing sports culture. Brenda, please get us started.
Brenda: Yes. In the Portland Thorns’ thrashing of the Houston Dash last weekend, 16 year old, Olivia Moultrie scored her first goal in the NWSL, and in doing so she became the youngest goal scorer ever in the league.
Jessica: Ampem Darkoa Ladies FC, a Ghanaian professional women's football club, are the 2021-2022 Women's FA Cup champions in Africa. Lindsay?
Lindsay: Yeah. Two more women's national teams have gotten closer to equity. We love it. Spain's women's soccer team will receive the same bonuses as their male counterparts as part of a new five year agreement. They will also see improvements in the team's working conditions. And Scottish rugby has announced a funding package for their women's team ahead of the rugby world cup this fall that will provide training for 36 athletes for a full 11 weeks before the world cup. Players will be compensated to offset the time taken off of work or study to participate in the training in the tournament. What a novel idea! [laughter]
Jessica: Yay. Can I get a drumroll, please?
[drumroll]
On behalf of Shireen Ahmed, this week's torchbearer is women's hockey in Canada, which has won every gold medal in the last year, including of course the Winter Olympics, the world championships, and now the u-18 women's world championship. Here’s to maple leaves and syrup and moose and all things Canada.
Jessica: Let's talk about what is good. I'll start off. I already mentioned that the family went to Terlingua outside of Big Bend national park last week. That was great. I mentioned earlier in the year that my kid’s archery team did really well. They won state here in Texas for middle school, and then they went to nationals. To honor their accomplishments on the state level yesterday, the mayor of Austin proclaimed June 16th, 2022 in honor of that team. So, it was really exciting. All the kids went down to city hall and got to have their pictures taken. And that was fun. And then I just have to mention, there is a show on Peacock called Girls5eva. It is so funny. It is about, well, there's now four, but there used to be five women in the 90s, like Spice Girls-esque group, and they've come back together in 2021. Season two is now out. It stars Sara Bareilles, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Busy Phillips, Paula Pell. Like, these are incredibly funny and talented women. The show is absolutely ridiculous. They're called Girls5eva because 4eva is not long enough. And they say things like, “What are you waiting five?” It's a ridiculous show. But the whole point is in the second season, they are creating their new album. It's on the Property Brothers record label. And the payoff for the Property Brothers joke happens in the season finale, and it is the hardest that I have laughed in a long time. Like, I was in physical pain from how hard I laughed at the Property Brothers joke that comes down in the season finale of Girls5eva season two. And so I just have to say that that was very good for me this week. Lindsay, what's good for you?
Lindsay: Well, I love that behind the scenes, there're balloons behind Brenda that say “meow” and they're just like perfectly in the frame, and it just really makes me happy every time I look at it, because that's a really weird thing for balloons to be saying. [laughter]
Jessica: But it also fits Brenda.
Lindsay: But it fits Brenda! And it's just like, yeah, it keeps me on my toes a little bit. [Brenda laughs] Meow, you know? The Dream On documentary, if you guys did not see that this week, it is a documentary, ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, on the 1996 women's basketball team that did a tour, you know, won gold in Atlanta, and paved the way for the WNBA. And it is everything I always want women's sports documentaries to be, which means it got into real shit, right? Like, it got into tough times on the team, disagreements between the coach and the players. Like, it did not paint people as these one dimensional heroines. You know what I mean? It was real, and also just like the stuff that a lot of these players were dealing with off the court and of course on the court, it's just…It’s pretty remarkable. I just think absolutely everyone should see it. I think you'll get a much better understanding of women's sports just in general, you know, what these pioneers did. So, I really highly recommend that. And it's just good to see. I'm very picky when it comes to filmmaking and documentaries and stuff, and I just loved how this one was done.
Jessica: I love that. Thank you, Linz. Bren, what's good?
Brenda: Now I kinda want like a Burn It All Down top 10 sports films and documentaries. For those of you that don't know, I mean, I think Lindsay was a film major.
Lindsay: Yeah.
Brenda: So, she knows many things. Many things.
Jessica: She's serious about it. Yeah.
Brenda: I would love that. Hmm. Anyway. Okay. So maybe that's my what's good, is I just got a new fun idea. [laughter] But World Cup 2026 announced the host cities. I don't know if this is what's good. I mean, I guess. I have weird feelings. I'm kind of glad it's not in Qatar. And it can be held on time. So that's pretty awesome. Hoping Kissinger dies before it actually ends up that he is on the committee of the organizing. I mean, dies metaphorically of course.
Jessica: Sure. [laughter] Metaphorically.
Brenda: Totally metaphorically. But yeah, Robert Kraft and him and Jerry Jones, they're all pretty fucking gross. But soccer culture in the US is actually kind of great right now. And I was happy to see all the independent supporter cultures from the MLS teams that had worked on the bids that had actual input into the human rights programs for these cities celebrate yesterday. So that was really nice. They were really excited. Except if you are from DC or Nashville, sad face. I don't know why Kansas City, I can't explain it to you, so quit asking me in my DMs. But I will say, I am gonna hunker down in Miami. You better believe it. That is gonna be fun! Atlanta's gonna be fun. New York is gonna be fun. Boston, Philly, Houston, Dallas. Oh my gosh. So anyway, kind of psyched about thinking about it. It's so far in the future, but it's just like fantasy making, like, which groups are gonna go to which city? Like, I can't wait. I'm so excited.
Jessica: [laughs] I’m excited that Bren's excited.
Lindsay: Also, I meant to mention, Serena Williams says she's coming back and playing at Wimbledon–
Jessica: Yes!
Lindsay: And she's taking a doubles wild card with Ons Jabeur, which is so cool!
Jessica: That’s so exciting. It is.
Lindsay: That's like the BIAD dream team there. Like, that's just, that's so cool. So that's another bit of good news.
Jessica: And Coco Gauff is one win away from entering the top 10. She's still rolling, man. It's just such a very fun time.
Brenda: Amazing.
Jessica: So, what we are watching: the NWSL, WNBA regular seasons are ongoing. I've heard that baseball is also having one regular season right now. The NHL finals have begun. And of course, like for me personally, watching Austin FC. The MLS was on an international break, and now they are back. And so that's exciting for me.
That's it for this episode of Burn It All Down. This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon does our website, episode transcripts and social media. You can find Burn It All Down on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. If you wanna subscribe to Burn It All Down, you can do so on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play, TuneIn, all the places. For information about the show and links and transcripts for each episode, check out our website, burnitalldownpod.com. From there you can email us directly or go shopping at our Bonfire store and get some Burn It All Down merch. As always, an evergreen thank you to our patrons for your support. It means the world. You can sign up to be a monthly sustaining donor to Burn It All Down at patreon.com/burnitalldown. On behalf of all of us here, burn on and not out.