Fox's Laura Ingraham: Allowing trans athletes to participate in gender-segregated sports is “insanity”
Ingraham hosted extreme anti-LGBTQ group Alliance Defending Freedom and called it “a fantastic organization.” The group has appeared on Fox 12 times this year.
Written by Brianna January
Published
Fox News’ Laura Ingraham misgendered trans students and called their participation in gender-segregated sports “insanity” in an interview with an attorney for extreme anti-LGBTQ group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) about its complaint against trans student athletes.
The October 15 segment was the latest example of Fox News giving ADF a platform to discuss its anti-LGBTQ cases and policy positions. A Media Matters analysis found that so far in 2019, ADF clients and lawyers have been on Fox at least 12 times. It has not appeared on CNN or MSNBC in that time. Moreover, ADF appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox show to announce this same complaint in June.
On August 7, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) agreed to investigate ADF’s complaint against the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference’s nondiscrimination policy, which allows trans students in the state to compete in sports as the gender with which they identify. According to the Washington Blade, “The complaint argues the trans-inclusive policy violates Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which bars discrimination on the basis of sex in public schools.”
While OCR routinely “evaluates, investigates, and resolves complaints alleging sex discrimination” to enforce Title IX, the decision to take up this complaint is particularly troubling because ADF has allies throughout the federal government, including within the Department of Education. In fact, the group’s former director of litigation projects, Thomas Stack, now works as a senior attorney at OCR, which received ADF’s complaint.
During the segment, Ingraham and ADF lawyer Christiana Holcomb misgendered transgender girls as “males,” “boys who identify as girls,” and “biological males,” which is a form of harassment that goes against journalistic standards. Additionally, ADF client Cheryl Radachowsky, the mother of a student athlete who ADF is representing in the complaint, said trans-inclusive competition “destroys [girls’] athletic opportunities.” Radachowsky pushed the same claim in an anti-trans op-ed in the New York Post just two days before appearing on Ingraham’s show. Ingraham also called ADF “a fantastic organization.”
Citation From the October 15 edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle:
LAURA INGRAHAM (HOST): That was Alanna Smith, a rising high school track and field star. Her dreams of being a college athlete are being shattered because two teenage boys who identify as girls are allowed to compete against her. It's a question at the heart of a new complaint at the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights. Cheryl Radachowsky is the concerned mother of the female athlete you just heard, and she joins me now along with her attorney, Christiana Holcomb, from the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is a fantastic organization by the way. Cheryl, why do you feel it's so important for your daughter at this moment in time, with all the politics of gender issues floating around, that she compete with only biological females?
CHERYL RADACHOWSKY (ALLIANCE DEFENDING FREEDOM CLIENT): Girls deserve the right to compete on a level playing field, and forcing female athletes to compete against biological males isn't fair. And it destroys their athletic opportunities.
INGRAHAM: Well this is not a political issue, right? I mean, this is about your daughter working her tail off, and I played, you know, quite a few sports in high school and some in college and, I mean, it's a lot of work. And boys are built differently and all the studies are showing that, Christiana, even if it turns out someone takes hormones, you are still stronger, faster, biologically -- bigger internal organs, lung capacity -- all gives an edge to the biological male regardless of hormonal treatment. So, Christiana, as a lawyer here, what's the case you make?
CHRISTIANA HOLCOMB (ALLIANCE DEFENDING FREEDOM): As Cheryl said, girls deserve to compete on a level playing field. Title IX is a federal law that was designed to stop discrimination against women and to ensure that girls like Cheryl's daughter Alanna have equal athletic opportunities with boys. But when you allow males to come in and to dominate women's sports, that destroys these girls' athletic opportunities -- not just their opportunities, but potentially their future athletic careers as well. So Alliance Defending Freedom has filed a Title IX complaint on behalf of Cheryl's daughter Alanna as well as two other young female athletes in Connecticut just asking the department to restore fairness and a level playing field to women’s sports.
…
INGRAHAM: This is insanity. If this is where feminism takes us, and gender politics takes us -- I mean, it's not feminism, it's gender politics -- all feminists across the country should, you know, think about it again because this will destroy girls' sports eventually.
This is not the first time Ingraham has attacked trans athletes. In a February segment, she hosted anti-trans advocate Meg Kilgannon, who is a leader of a coalition of anti-trans groups that includes several transgender-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) groups. (TERFs claim to be feminists, but they hold vehemently anti-trans views and are widely rejected by intersectional feminists and LGBTQ advocates.) TERFs and the religious right have employed similar language about trans rights threatening women's rights, and Ingraham's long history of making anti-LGBTQ comments makes her show a perfect place for groups like ADF to push those narratives.