The Equal Rights Amendment, also known as ERA, would have a very real effect on every part of American life, from military service to girls’ athletics. As ridiculous as it may sound, ERA would require all 50 states to allow boys to compete in girls’ athletics if they merely claim to be transgender. Under ERA, no law or government entity could make any distinctions based on sex. That means it would become impossible for girls’ sports to keep boys out.
ERA is not some pie-in-the-sky leftist fantasy either. The Virginia House of Delegates defeated ERA earlier this year, but by only one vote in a 50-50 tie. In truth, Phyllis Schlafly defeated ERA in the 1970s, and its deadline for ratification expired in 1979. However, the expiration of the deadline for ERA has not stopped radical feminists from trying to ratify it three and a half decades too late.
ERA would cause more unfairness in girls’ sports, as it has done in Massachusetts where they have a state version of ERA. There, muscular young men routinely break girls’ records in girls’ sports. In one championship game in Massachusetts, a young man caused a concussion to a girls’ field hockey goalie while scoring a goal to defeat her team.
Without ERA, the unfair intrusion of transgenders into girls’ sports can be solved by legislation forbidding it. With ERA, states will have no recourse to protect these girls. Co-ed athletics will become the supreme law of the land, enshrined in the United States Constitution. We could no more keep boys out of girls’ sports than we could take the due process clause out of the constitution.
Fortunately, ERA is not merely one state away from ratification, as some fake news headlines promote. For ERA to become part of the Constitution, Congress would need to pass it by two-thirds supermajorities, and then 38 states would need to ratify it anew, which should never happen. If we are truly to stand for equal rights for women and girls, let the Equal Rights Amendment fall back into the dustbin of history so we can focus on making sports fair for girls by keeping transgenders on the team of their biological sex.
