Pray Vote Stand Summit panelists push back against administration’s trans agenda

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Oct 7, 2024 / 13:00 pm

Panelists at the annual Pray Vote Stand Summit in Washington, D.C., this past weekend discussed how the transgender movement is impacting young women in particular.

In a panel discussion titled “Saving America’s Daughters: Title IX and the Fight for Fairness,” former NCAA volleyball player Macy Petty joined sports attorney William Bock and Doreen Denny, a senior adviser at Concerned Women for America, to discuss the predicament faced by female athletes who have been forced to compete against and share spaces with biological males.

Pray Vote Stand is an annual gathering of mostly evangelical, politically engaged conservatives.

“Never in a million years would I have thought we would one day actually discuss whether or not women deserve their own spaces,” Petty told those gathered at the summit while sharing her experience as a female athlete who had competed against a biological male.

As a high school volleyball player five years ago, Petty and her teammates were forced to play against a team that had a biological male. The trans-identifying athlete was “playing on a net seven inches shorter than he should have as a man,” according to Petty, who is also an activist with Concerned Women for America.

“So he embarrassed all of us, smashing the ball in our faces in front of the college scouts,” she recalled. Petty went on to point out the disappointment of female athletes who have lost out on opportunities because they were forced to compete against men. 

Bock testified to his extensive experience as a litigator in sports law — dealing with issues including doping and Title IX — noting that men have a clear biological and physical advantage over women in sports.

The Christian attorney called the issue “an effort to deny truth and the image of the Creator God” and encouraged believers to “take the burden off of the young ladies who are playing sports” by advocating for them within their communities and the wider public sphere.

Support for inclusion of biological males in women’s sports, despite the apparent risk, is only going to continue, Denny said, “because of what [the] Biden-Harris administration has done with Title IX” and because of how the NCAA has also continued to “double down” on those policies.

As CNA reported in April, the Biden-Harris administration issued a redefinition of Title IX to include protections against discrimination on the basis of gender identity — thereby granting individuals the right to participate in programs such as organized sports that are “consistent with their gender identity” rather than their biological sex.

Opponents of the proposed changes, which were scheduled to go into effect in August, succeeded in blocking in court the administration’s expanded regulations governing the 1972 law that was originally passed to protect women from discrimination in educational spaces. 

During a related summit panel titled “Attorneys General and the War to Stop the Runaway Left,” Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost and Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall also discussed how the promotion of gender ideology has affected young girls.

Yost spoke about his experience successfully defending an Ohio law passed earlier this year that bans minor sex-change surgeries and male participation in women’s sports. He referenced the participation in the process of Chloe Cole, a prominent detransitioner and activist who has testified before Congress on how her childhood was “ruined” because of the puberty blockers and double mastectomy she underwent as a minor.

While Yost acknowledged the existence of “tragic” cases where children suffer on account of gender dysphoria, he addressed those gathered at the summit: “How about a young girl who’s confused, the doctors change her body, and she grows up and gets her head on straight, and she says, I want to be a wife. I want to have babies. And she can’t because of what was done to her when she was a vulnerable kid.”

“That’s tragic, too,” he added.