Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2023

Floor Speech

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Ms. CLARK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chair, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I am from Boston. If you want to talk about sports, I am all in. If you want to talk about equality for women and girls, if you want to talk about Title IX and ensuring fairness in sports, sign me up.

As far as kids in sports go, as a mom of three, I can't tell you how many hours I have spent cheering on my kids. It is lacrosse, basketball, and baseball. It has been soccer, rugby, cross-country, and track. We have seen in my family championship teams through T-ball teams where our entire goal was to just get the outfield to stop digging for worms.

All of this is about kids and their experience, about learning, growing, forming friendships, knowing what it means to work hard, to practice, to see results, and to be a team.

I was very interested when this bill was filed to see what it was, what the problem was that the NCAA in Massachusetts and across this country, the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association and its counterparts around the country, the Olympics, the International Track and Field Association, what they were missing. I read this bill, and what they are missing is nothing.

This is not a problem in our communities, on our sports fields, for our children. I think it was articulated so well by the Republican Governor of Utah when he pointed out numbers that were important to his decision to veto a similar bill: 75,000 kids play high school sports in his State, just four of them are trans kids, and one of them plays girls' sports.

Mr. Chair, 86 percent of our trans youth will have suicidal ideation, and 56 percent will attempt suicide.

What are we doing here? What are we doing here as Members of Congress?

As the Governor said, we are expending so much fear and division on so few, on kids. Think about what we are doing as Members of the United States House of Representatives.

I keep thinking about the mom who told me about her rural community where her concern was the grief because they were losing their children, losing them because there wasn't economic opportunity for them in their hometown and losing them because they are dying of opioid overdoses.

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Ms. CLARK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chair, let's think about this. We need to be working on the issues that matter to families and kids.

To make these children responsible for all of that and to incite fear, discrimination, and hatred, you should hang your heads in shame.

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