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Hundreds of women golfers call on LPGA to ban ‘transgender’ male player, protect women’s sports

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From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

275 female golfers are demanding that the LPGA and other governing bodies of golf revoke policies that allow men to compete in women’s golf events and protect female golfers’ right to compete only against ‘members of the female sex.’

Hundreds of women golfers have signed a letter calling for a “transgender” player – a male claiming to be a female – to be removed from Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) competitions.   

The August 19 letter, signed by 275 female golfers expressing their concerns over a gender-confused male competing in women’s golf to the LPGA, was also sent to the United States Golf Association (USGA) and the International Golf Federation (IGF).  

While self-professed “transgender” golfer “Hailey” Davidson comports with the LPGA’s current pro-transgender qualifying guidelines, hundreds of women in the LPGA’s ranks have stepped forward to object to him competing in their professional sport.

The letter makes two demands of the LPGA and the other governing organizations in the world of professional golf: “Repeal all policies and rules that allow male golfers to participate in women’s golf events” and “establish and enforce the right of female professional golfers to participate in women’s golf based on sex-eligibilty [which] must be limited to members of the female sex.” 

Lauren Miller, who has competed against Davidson and is leading the charge against males competing in her sport, spoke out in a recent interview with OutKick’s Dan Dakich.  

“There is no world where I ever thought this would be the case,” Miller told Dakich. “I’ve been talking to my parents about it, and they can’t believe they have a daughter who is having to go through this. It’s truly shocking to realize kind of where we are today and that this is the state of the world.”  

Miller said in another interview published by Independent Women’s Forum, Davidson “would hit the ball 10 or 20 yards past me, and sometimes 50 to 60 yards past me.” She added that “distance is one advantage… but there’s a lot more to it than that.”  

She also noted there was also the question of “superior upper body strength,” which can give “greater clubhead speed, and allows the ball to come out higher and with more spin,” according to a Newsweek report.  

“We all know there can be no equal athletic opportunity for women without a separate female golf category. Yet, the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) continues to propagate a policy that allows male athletes to qualify, compete and win in women’s golf, even as several national and international governing bodies of sport and state legislatures increasingly reject these unjust and inequitable policies that harm female athletes,” states the letter, reviewed by OutKick 

LPGA policy does not explicitly state eligibility based on sex. It is essential for the integrity and fairness of women’s golf to have a clear and consistent participation policy in place based on a player’s immutable sex.  There are differences between the sexes—female and male—that specifically affect our sport of golf. 

The male advantage in driving the ball is estimated around a 30% performance advantage; this is an enormous difference in the context of sport. Anatomical differences between males and females affect clubhead speed and regulating consistency at ball contact.  

Females have higher mean heart rates and encounter greater physiological demands while playing, especially at high altitudes. The anatomical differences are not removed with male testosterone suppression. There is no way to turn a male into a female. Being female is not equated to being male with a reduction in strength. 

“Someone needs to do an investigation into the LPGA — and all other sports organizations that are allowing men to play women’s sports,” Family Research Council’s Mary Szoch told The Washington Stand 

“They must be receiving massive amounts of funds from somewhere,” Szoch added. “Why else would a sports organization [repeatedly] destroy fair play and jeopardize the safety of women?”  

“We cannot give up the fight for women’s sports,” said Szoch because, “doing so would be giving up on truth — something that our society cannot function without.” 

The LPGA needs to “immediately change their policy. Second place to a man isn’t good enough for women in sports,” insisted Szoch.  

Davidson, who was born in Scotland but now lives in Florida, played college golf on the men’s team at Virginia’s Christopher Newport University.  

In 2015, he began hormone drugs and had transgender surgery in 2021, a requirement to compete under the LPGA’s gender policy, according to Golfweek. 

“We have to protect young girls and their opportunities and their dreams,” said Miller.  

Bruce Dowbiggin

Latvia Loss Reminds That World Juniors No Longer Canadian Walkover

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It’s a Xmas holiday thing. With nothing better to do over the extended break Canadians watch the World Junior Hockey Championships. Little things get big very quickly. So it’s probably a good idea to put team Canada’s 3-2 SO loss to Latvia into some perspective.

After beating plucky Latvia 10-0 in a game last year, the highly rated Canadians allowed Latvia to tie this game late in the third period. Then, after a scoreless overtime session, Latvia scored the only goal of the shootout on their eighth try at Canada’s goalie, 17-year old Jack Ivankovic.

Meanwhile, Linards Feldbergs stopped 55 shots over 65 minutes before adding eight more in the shootout. For Latvia it’s the pinnacle of their hockey year. For Canada it will be quickly forgotten if they pull things back together to make the final.

But for Canadian fans on holiday, unsettled by Donald Trump jibes about making them the 51st state, the loss portends something deeper and darker. Canada has owned the tournament for much of its being, winning five golds in the past decade. But now the U.S. is suddenly king-in-waiting, winners three times in that decade, including last year. They seem a lock to win again this year (despite losing to Finland).

Meanwhile some pundits are calling this edition of Team Canada its weakest in years. Realists point out that, were it not for playing in the NHL, Canada could still have Connor Bedard, Macklin Celebrini and Carter Yaremchuck, among others, in their lineup. And yes, the quality of all the nations in the tournament has risen. This is no longer shooting fish in the barrel.

And here there might be some traction for the argument that with all its hockey advantages, Canada is not developing its elite talent properly. Generally the U.S. (or that small portion of the country that likes hockey) has adopted a hothouse strategy, concentrating its best players in exclusive development silos.

That’s the typical European soccer model, too. Elite prospects as young as 14 are brought into development programs run by top-tier teams. Canada, meanwhile, spreads its elite players over 60-plus CHL teams, second-tier junior and the NCAA. Best-on-best occurs at tournaments, but most players are trained for the unique rigours of team play and travel at the NHL level. For all the spaghetti thrown at the wall too much doesn’t stick. Or so goes the theory.

But there’s also the new reality. As we wrote upon the death of Walter Gretzky in March of 2021, “The days of amiable Ab Howe, father of Gordie, smiling benignly as his son taught himself the game are over.” Walter taught Canada how to train seriously for the Soviets. Inadvertently, he created an expensive, elite training model favouring those with true cash to train prodigies.

“As a pioneer of more sophisticated training, Walter adapted a number of the practises used by the USSR team under Anatoli Tarasov in the 1960s, drills and strategies that stood Canadian conventional thinking on its head. As I wrote in my 1998 book “Of Ice And Men”, Gretzky was unsurprised when the 1972 Soviet team swamped Canada in the early going of their Super Series.

“People said, wow, this is incredible,” Wayne Gretzky remarked later. “Not to me it wasn’t. I’d been doing this drills since I was three years old. My dad was very smart.” Among the many innovations in his Brantford backyard rink were playing Wayne on defence as a tyke so he could learn to see the entire ice and how plays developed. It also increased Wayne’s peripheral vision.

There were many more drills and insights, as Walter’s many tributes have described. Wayne has always bridled when people attributed his success simply to instinct. He always said he trained for his craft in the same way a doctor or scientist might train. “I’ve put in almost as much time studying hockey as a medical student puts in studying medicine.” That training was often under Walter.”

Their success started a quest for the best techniques. “Power skating, off-ice training, ice rentals, new equipment, travel and coaching all became necessary to get a leg up on the competition. It was also very expensive. Having the resources to send your child to the top fitness gurus like Gary Roberts or to place them in a school like Shattuck St. Marys (as Sidney Crosby was) becomes a process costing tens— or hundreds— of thousands of dollars.

“Where the NHL was predominantly players from blue-collar backgrounds till the Euros arrived in the 1970s, today it is often constituted of young  men from families of means and education. The idea of the farming father of the six Sutter brothers affording his sons’ training today is highly improbable. Today’s NHL has a number of college-educated players and products of dedicated European training. 

“In that way, through no fault of Walter Gretzky, hockey has become a sport for families of means or friends with means. He taught parents that the proper training and equipment was imperative. And that doesn’t mean simply the rink in your backyard. With a new pair of skates costs $500, a stick costs $125  or a set of goalie equipment runs into a few thousand dollars you are losing a segment of the population to financial costs. And so Walter’s legacy of training development if forever tied to a big price tag.”

Players in other nations observed the same, too, and soon were applying intensive training methods from soccer and other sports. No wonder Canada is no longer gets walk-overs from the midrange nations.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

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Bruce Dowbiggin

How The NFL Grinch Bought Xmas: Drowning In A Sea of Football

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After rummaging about for two months to no great effect the NHL has now embarked in its traditional Xmas break. Under the NHL’s collective agreement, no one plays any games from Dec. 24-27. This comes after a roster freeze that forbids trading a player during said holiday season. The annual World Junior champions, too, doesn’t crank it up till Boxing Day.

It’s a throwback to a more tranquil time when most of the Western world went home to eat too much and fall asleep on the sofa for three days. Then go shopping. So props to Gary Bettman’s NHL for keeping to their family stance. In such frenetic times there’s something to be said for pausing to sniff the frozen roses.

But catching your breath in the sports world is now an anachronism, driven by the massive dollars paid by networks and digital providers to sports leagues. In a time when the NFL rakes in $105 B ($2.1 billion a year) from its broadcast partners while the 32 teams collect a tidy $300 million each it’s no wonder the equity in NFL franchises has soared of  late.

And that means using every minute of the calendar to schedule games— especially on days like Christmas when hundreds of millions are sitting at home after opening the prezzies, itching for something to watch besides It’s A Wonderful Life. So the Xmas break this year features two games on the day and another on Boxing Day. Followed by a full weekend of games on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

In doing so it big foots the NCAA CFS’s new 12-team playoff and bowl-game format which also uses every day but Sunday this time of year. On the past Saturday FS games were given a head start before the NFL stole eyeballs with its own games an hour later. Tough luck college boys.  It’s unlikely to change as the CFS is eager to expand the playoffs in the future.

The NFL is not the first to exploit this previously virgin calendar break, of course. Th NBA broached the prohibition against Xmas Day in 1947, first placing a single high-profile game that day. Later it expanded to an all-day menu of games. Anything sacred about the family day went bye-bye as folks either went to the TV or the kitchen for the rest of the day.

The reason that pro sports is creating also many windows for their product is the sudden arrival of so many new outlets for games. Where legacy TV/ cable networks had exclusive dibs on buying rights for decades, cable cutting has now exploded the bidders. As GTM expert Rhys Dowbiggin told us in our July 29, 2024 column the model was UFC. Yup. UFC. “ESPN+ (Disney) has been working directly with the UFC for a number of year and packaging their events on the streamer. 

And let’s not ignore the monkey in the room: YouTube, which dominates all the streamers for eyeballs – YouTube (Google) has more live sports than any of the other streamers. Just for context, there is a massive amount of money in these deals: the recent NBA media rights deal is going to be 70B+ – split across a number of media partners. All the streamers took a similar GTM strategy – and they’ve led us back to 2001.”

Disgruntled consumers dumping cable/ satellite carriers sought other outlets for their spots viewing for NFL, NBA, NHL and NCAA. Leagues responded so we now have special placement games for YouTube, Amazon Prime, Apple, Disney and Google. And the Xmas season cornucopia of games. Watching whatever you wanted. The strategy was to compete on bidding for original content to bring in the subscribers.

Then a funny thing happened. It was now only some of what you wanted. The expansion of carriers pissed off viewers just as much as the arbitrary cable companies. the magic solution of cable cutting is now the tragic solution. Explains Dowbiggin, “The original product fit for streaming was the promise of all the content you could need was in a single place, on-demand. You only needed Netflix (in a sense) and you never had to wait or choose what to watch.  Once the market fragmented into multiple players, the fit evaporated. Half the problem that was solved by streaming was now gone: 

Watching whatever you wanted. It was now only some of what you wanted.  The streamers GTM strategy was to compete on original content to bring in the subscribers. But creating content and not consolidating content exasperated the issue.”

The latest strategy is to bundle services across outlets to give consumers easier packaging. Says Dowbiggin, “Will bundling partnerships change things? It can’t hurt. But unless it drastically shrinks the numbers of players at the top to 2-3, the problem of ‘watching whatever you want’ won’t be solved, because I’ll still need Disney for my Star Wars. 

All I know is, I’ve kept my library card for years, because I always saw this coming. And I don’t plan on getting rid of it anytime soon.”

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

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