State of Disruption

Trans in sports executive order latest example of Illinois leadership vacuum

The first 90 days of Trump 2.0 have rarely been without drama. Mass disruption of our long-held—and frankly, stale—institutions has caused panic in the markets and other sectors. We’ll have to wait and see how it all shakes out over the next 12-18 months. The courts will be the ultimate arbiter of much of the disruption.

When there is upheaval at the federal level, it trickles down to the states. We are seeing that play out in Illinois regarding several issues. The latest: trans and athletics.

In February, President Trump signed an executive order banning trans female athletes (men transitioning to women) from competing in women’s sports. This EO came on the heels of Trump’s Inauguration Day EO recognizing male and female as the only two sexes.

Depending on residency, these moves either affirm or contradict what’s already on the state books. Those states that have a law counter to the trans EO can either change the law to align with federal legislation or not. This being Illinois, if Trump cured cancer, they’d reject its efficacy. So the fight is on.

About a month or so after Trump signed the February EO, the Republican branches of the state House and Senate of Illinois (yes, despite rumors to the contrary, there is an organized GOP in the Land of Lincoln) sent a letter to the Illinois High School Association asking for their stance on the matter. Last week, the IHSA responded to the inquiry. After questioning the legal status of Trump’s EO, the statement signed by Executive Director Craig Anderson and Board President Dan Tully cited the Illinois Human Rights Act, which “requires that transgender athletes be permitted to participate in events and programs aligning with the gender with which they identify.”

The statement from Anderson and Tully added:

The IHSA simply desires to comply with the law and takes no position as to which of the foregoing is correct or whether there can be alignment between claimed federal and state law. Given the conflict described above, however, we are left in an untenable position. We therefore urge that state officials, including the legislature, the governor and the Attorney General, work together with federal authorities to provide clear direction on this issue.

Sure thing, Mr. Anderson and Mr. Tully. Urge Pritzker and Trump to “work together.” And maybe things would have worked out better for Napoleon at Waterloo if he’d gotten on better with Wellington.

If advised, I would have told both caucuses not to waste time or energy on the IHSA. As much as it preaches detachment, the organization openly campaigns against legislation not aligned with its “scholastic first” philosophy.

Over the past month, the IHSA has sent repeated messages to athletic administrators pleading for interference with a proposed bill (HB 0473) currently tied up in committee (but gaining momentum) that would allow high school athletes to transfer from one school to the next without penalty. The latest I heard over the weekend was that the IHSA, realizing a full-throated stance of “no” on transfers is not going anywhere, is repurposing its messaging to endorse a “one-time” transfer rule. This is after previously saying it preferred to fence-sit on the topic.

We just want to quietly run our little mom and pop shop down here in good ‘ol Bloomington, far away from the long arm of big city politics. All this affairs-of-the-state mumbo jumbo, y’all work it all out amongst yourselves and leave us out of it. We’ll make sure girls badminton and lacrosse have referees for the state tournament and the kids get their medals. Best Wishes and God Bless.

For the first three months of Trump 2.0, the IHSA has taken spineless neutrality to an entirely new level. Maybe those in charge are finally paying attention to what’s happening around them, how other state sports associations are adjusting rules to sync up with impending state legislation. It could be the lawyers in their ear, warning of future litigation if rule tweaks are not made. Bottom line, arguing for the status quo on transfers is a losing issue in 2025, and the IHSA appears to be reluctantly waking up to that impending reality.

On the trans & sports issue, the IHSA is again on the wrong side, but unlike with transfers and Right to Play, the organization has political cover. Be it gambling, weed, abortion, sanctuary for illegals, gender identity, and, since January, anti-Trumpism, Illinois Dems boast about being trendsetters. Imagine having a house full of mosquitoes and bragging about how frequently they bite the guests. That’s Illinois Democrats and Chicago politicians every day.

GOP leaders were right to call out the trans sports issue with a strong rebuke of the IHSA’s non-participation. But it amounts to whistling in the graveyard.

House leader Tony McCombie said in a statement, “The IHSA has once again chosen deflection over direction, and ambiguity over action. Their response is not just late—it’s weak. Saying, ‘It’s not our problem,’ doesn’t serve the students of this state. It’s not leadership—it’s a cop-out.”

And state representative Blaine Wilhour (R-Beecher City) told Fox Digital, “The whole policy is sick. Either you believe in fair competition or you don't. The Democrat Party today, and specifically JB Pritzker, does not believe in fair competition. They put their woke ideology over protecting girls in sports."

Neither are wrong, but what did McCombie, Wilhour, and their colleagues expect?

Pritzker stole any authority the IHSA had from them in the spring of 2020 when he cancelled sports and the association offered no rebuke other than to adopt the state’s public health propaganda. Trump’s re-arrival this January has them dropping to their knees on the asphalt searching for a lost pair of eyeglasses after a rough game of recess dodgeball. The IHSA, like so many institutions tied to the public sector, is lost in the wilderness over a subject that defies logic as to its mushrooming escalation within the culture wars.

Transgender participation in sports should be simply a matter of science.

I don’t think I need to be a medical professional to write this and believe 100 percent it to be true: when boys hit puberty, their testosterone increases along with muscle mass, bone size, strength, etc. Those increases are all directly the result of boosted testosterone levels. When a man transitions to a woman, yes, their hemoglobin levels go down, but muscle mass, bone shape/size does not (other than spell-checking “hemoglobin” I did no online research before composing the above graph. Just what came out of the old ‘noggin. If I can do it, so can millions of other Americans).

So, based on that simple truth, wouldn’t pitting a man against a woman in competition be an unfair fight?

But ideology has overtaken science. We’ve seen this quite a bit over the past half-decade or so, folks willing to abandon science if the science is inconvenient for ideology.

The argument from the ideologically driven: we must reduce human suffering, we must make sure we have equal human rights for those who have differences. And if science tells us that some of these differences are grounded in biology, well, that doesn’t mean they are immutable. We want people to feel better, so let’s just change the terms. Another frequent redirect by the gender-affirming crowd: Why are those opposing trans rights so fixated on sexuality? What’s the big deal? It only affects a few people (a popular argument pushed by the social media ghouls, many of whom are not dumb individuals but chase the dopamine rush of social orthodoxy over rational thought).

Well, here’s the thing. It is a big deal. By affirming such imbecilic ideology, we ignore basic facts and choose the individual struggle over the rest of society. It’s next to impossible to put that genie back in the bottle once it’s out.

To be clear, most of those on the side of binary genders are not rejecting the idea of being sympathetic towards an individual's struggle. But does the path to do so require us to change our reality and the reality of centuries and centuries of recorded history?

In this country, in general, we don’t make rules or policies based on exceptions to the rules or the extreme. We make rules based on the averages, and over generations and generations, when it comes to gender, we have boys and we have girls. If there’s a biological argument made to dispute this, go ahead and make it. But absent scientific evidence, if dividing sports participation into a boys group and a girls group makes someone feel uncomfortable, too darn bad. If they don’t like it, they can form their own sports league and invent as many genders as they want (private is the way to go…less bureaucracy!).

That’s the messaging the IHSA and others should be delivering but won’t, afraid to take on the anti-Trump establishment that controls our institutions.

We need more leaders in Illinois and around the country willing to put aside personal feelings towards the president and take a position on the side of common sense. But the progressive movement made them weak-kneed, and the return of Trump has broken their brains.

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