Stacking the deck at the casino makes for bad feelings among friends.

Things get more serious when you’re a government official stacking the deck at public forums with speakers in favor of your personal political views. That not only makes for bad public policy—it violates the First Amendment.

The Prince William County Virginia School Board convened last Wednesday to vote on a proposed rule that would undermine the principle of student privacy between the sexes. It would have laid the groundwork for opening up sex-specific locker rooms, showers, and other private facilities to members of the opposite sex.

Many parents have legitimate convictions that maleness and femaleness are essential biological, anatomical attributes, and they would like to openly defend the policy of maintaining privacy between the sexes, despite the claims of gender identity advocates.

Nonetheless, before the meeting, Ryan Sawyers, school board chairman, sent a text to the clerk telling her to frontload a list of favored speakers to comment before those who had already signed up.

This violated local school board rules, which say the public is to speak in the order that each citizen contacts the clerk.

This is particularly significant because at Prince William County Public School board meetings, only 10 to 15 people get to speak before the vote, since initial public comment is limited to 30 minutes. Everybody else has to wait until after the vote to make their views known.

But dishing out political leftovers to one’s opponents and frontloading the initial discussion with allies goes beyond violating local school board policy. It’s flatly unconstitutional.

School board meetings must protect viewpoint neutrality to satisfy First Amendment principles of free speech. If a school board chooses to open a forum for public comment, the process of determining who speaks cannot be determined by the viewpoint of the speaker.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit agrees.

In Child Evangelism Fellowship of MD, Inc. v. Montgomery County Public Schools, the majority opinion notes that “‘the state may be justified in reserving [its forum] for certain groups or for the discussion of certain topics,’ subject only to the limitation that its actions must be viewpoint-neutral and reasonable.”

And just last week, the Supreme Court reiterated in Matal v. Tam that government officials cannot “regulate speech in ways that favor some viewpoints or ideas at the expense of others.”

The traditional method of letting people speak in the order they sign up with the clerk is an orderly way to achieve these objectives. But giving the chairman the power to decide who speaks before the vote does not satisfy these criteria.

If the chairman is not bound by a limiting principle, then he has unbridled discretion to determine who can use the coveted 30 minutes of speech. It will be difficult, over time, for him not to hand-pick allies, particularly since he is a Democratic candidate for Congress.

Indeed, the first speaker on the chairman’s list, Danica Roem, is also a political player, a local Democrat recently nominated to run against incumbent Republican Bob Marshall in a Virginia House of Delegates race.

To be clear, after the chairman’s text messages were made public and Alliance Defending Freedom sent a letter to Prince William County Public Schools, the chairman did not stick to his original plan on Wednesday night.

But it remains unclear whether the final speaking order came from a new alternative list he created, or whether he reverted back to school board policy and used the original list of speakers, based on the order that local citizens signed up to speak.

That is precisely the problem. In the American system of ordered liberty, government officials don’t have the power to make that choice. They cannot dish out fast passes for the view they like while relegating opposing views to second-class status.

Rather, if officials choose to set up times for public comment, they must set up an orderly process that respects the free speech of all participants.

All voices should equally receive free speech protection, because our Constitution recognizes that when the government plays favorites, everyone’s freedom flounders. (For more from the author of “This School Board Leader Tried to Rig a Public Forum in Favor of Transgender Advocates. That’s Unconstitutional.” please click HERE)

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Kate Hall won the 100m sprint at regionals her sophomore year. But a year later, Hall was beat by Andraya Yearwood, a high school freshman. Yearwood was born male but “identifies” as female. At the time of the race, he had not undergone hormone treatment or surgery to “transition from male to female.”

More Than Testosterone

Much of the debate about “transgender” athletes has focused on testosterone. Consider the NCAA policy for such transgender athletes focuses only on testosterone. According to the NCAA’s policy for men transitioning to women:

A trans female [male transitioning to a female] student-athlete being treated with testosterone suppression medication for Gender Identity Disorder or gender dysphoria and/or Transsexualism, for the purposes of NCAA competition may continue to compete on a men’s team but may not compete on a women’s team without changing it to a mixed team status until completing one calendar year of testosterone suppression treatment. (NCAA Inclusion of Transgender Student-Athletes, 2011)

Notably, a trans male (female identifying as male) does not have to wait a year before competing on a men’s team.

Testosterone plays a big role in athletic performance. But when we start talking about high-performance competition, especially in track and field, small variations make all the difference. These go well beyond testosterone.

Hip Structure and Center of Mass

Some differences can’t be changed, even with surgery and hormone treatments.

One of the major differences between male and female runners is the hip structure along with everything attached to hip movement. It’s not just a matter of having wide or narrow hips. A key difference is the ratio between hip width and femur length. Women tend to have a greater hip width-to-femur length ratio, which leads to greater hip adduction — that is, movement toward the center of the body. This difference has a domino effect that results in small differences in joint rotation and muscle recruitment.

In other words, men and women differ in how the lower parts of their bodies move as a coordinated wholes.

Other Differences

Men also tend to have more fast-twitch muscles than women. According to experts this isn’t something that can change with training. Fast-twitch muscles are what you want for sprinting because they help you explode off the starting line. They also help produce the kind of “anaerobic” energy you need for sprinting . Slow-twitch muscles are good for conserving energy. They’re the kind of muscles you want in a distance race.

Men also tend to have larger internal organs. This sounds like a disadvantage for sprinters, but larger lungs and heart result in more oxygen uptake. The more oxygen you can take in, the more that can be transported to your muscles. VO2max measures an athlete’s maximum oxygen uptake. It’s higher in men than it is in women, even for men and women that have the same body mass and equivalent lean muscle mass. Biologically, men have a higher VO2max, all other things being equal.

As a result, men also tend to have a higher concentration of hemoglobin in their blood than women do. For athletes, that’s an advantage. This is why doping with EPO, a protein that increases your oxygen-carrying hemoglobin, is illegal in sports. A runner who is born male, therefore, has an advantage over most female athletes wanting to run a clean race.

The Body Can’t Be Completely “Reformatted”

Even with surgery, doping, and hormone treatment, you can’t change every piece of your body. The body functions as a cohesive whole. The skeletal system, the size of major internal organs, and one’s center of mass are all fundamental components of the body. We see this in athletes who use steroids. They often sustain injuries because steroids change muscle mass without changing the ligaments and tendons connected to the muscle.

Doctors can change some things about the body. But they can’t “reformat” the body to become something else completely. A biological male is going to have the fundamental structures of a male body. That’s an inherent advantage in many sports.

Subordinating Athletes Who are “Born Female”

Separating men and women in sports has opened the door for many opportunities for women. Title IX has allowed women athletes to attend college on a scholarship and compete at a high level. Women athletes have also served as role models to other women.

Consider some of the great female runners. Joan Benoit Samuelson took gold the first year the women’s marathon was part of the Olympics. Paula Radcliff holds the women’s marathon world record. Jackie Joyner Kersee holds the best heptathlon score and the second farthest women’s long-jump. Florence Griffith Joyner, considered the fastest woman of all time, ran the women’s 100m in 10.49 and the 200m in 21.34.

All these female athletes have made huge contributions to running. Yet even Florence Joyner’s times would not have qualified her for the men’s semi-finals. In fact, the top twenty-five fastest men in 100m have times under 10 seconds, beating Joyner’s time of 10.49.

Of course elite athletes are by definition outside the norm. But there’s something wrong when half of the population has an inherent disadvantage. If biological males can compete against biological females, it won’t be long, especially in elite sports, before males win all the races and hold all the records.

Women will, in effect, but pushed out of competition because they were born with female bodies. Does that make any sense? As Jeff Jacobs asks in his thoughtful article in the Hartford Courant, “What do we tell these girls? A transgender’s journey is more important than your journey?”

Kate Hall showed grace and maturity in the face of disappointment. But how many more young women will have to say what Hall said in response to her defeat, “It’s frustrating … but that’s just the way it is now”? (For more from the author of “Transgender Sports: Men and Women Have Physical Differences That No Surgery or Hormone Treatment Can Change” please click HERE)

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