this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2025
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The principal really needs to read the law. This school is so fucked.
https://codes.findlaw.com/az/title-15-education/az-rev-st-sect-15-120-02/
The law in question only prohibits biological males from participating in female sports. It does not prohibit females from joining boys teams. Compare and contrast sections "B" and "C":
I also thought this was pretty interesting:
This is literally one of these first things they teach in a (at least NY public high schools) coaching course.
AFAIK, when a law says something like "This section does not [do something]" It's usually because some other law explicitly prohibits [something]. Without such language, the two laws could be seen as conflicting.
I think excluding girls from boys teams violates Title IX.
Title IX requires gender equity in access and spending. It doesn't strictly require women to access men's sports, but it does require the school fully fund/admit women to equivalent in the abstract.
So, for instance, if you spend $100k/year on the boys-only football program, you need $100k dedicated to a girl accessible sport (typically volleyball or softball or soccer).
This is not at all accurate. If a girl wants to play a sport for which there is a boys team but not girls team, she must be allowed to try out and participate on the same basis as the boys (a boys team is really an "everyone" team - this actually applies beyond schools and Title IX as no professional sports league in the US actually bars women from competing). Only girls/women's teams get to set restrictions with respect to sex/gender. For Title IX, this is a wildly discriminatory interpretation of a low that bans discrimination, but it's the one that has been in use for years.
And Title IX doesn't require equal funding, but something much more nebulous about impact and opportunity that makes the whole thing kind of intentionally wishy washy so anyone they need to be can not be in compliance. To make it even more impossible to actually comply, questions of funding and opportunity are not limited to what the school itself supplies, so for example anything donated by parents or volunteers (such as the work of a booster club) also counts. So for example, if you cut funding to a boys team and parents more than make up the shortfall in donations and fundraising, it's entirely possible based on that you might have to cut it further. Related, this kind of thing is why less popular boys sports are prone to being cut at the drop of a hat - football and sometimes boys basketball make money, most other sports teams lose money so the school is incentivized not to make cuts from King Football or Prince Basketball, but they have to target equal opportunity and impact between boys and girls athletic spending which means they spend what they're willing to have as a cost on girls teams and cut whatever boys teams they need to cut to avoid cutting into the football budget, because the football budget has an ROI.
Per NFHS website (https://nfhs.org/stories/title-ix-compliance-part-iv-frequently-asked-questions):
Sure. And occasionally you get a girl to qualify. Sarah Fuller as the place kicker for Vanderbilt Commodores, for instance.
But the disparity in builds - particularly in a high contact sport like football - makes women qualifying virtually impossible.
This was in response to early efforts to effectively privatize student athletics and freeze women's sports out.
I'm sure it's a matter of time before our current patriarchy fetish SCOTUS to reverse this out. But for the time being, you can't just find a few mega-donors to create a "Private Men's Club" on a public campus. What is ultimately being measured is access, which does get nebulous, but is necessarily the case when so many misogynists are intent on digging out loopholes to render Title XI toothless.
There's a simple reason for that - the second sentence is required under current interpretations of Title IX, while the first is not. The argument for that is about girl's sports being a sort of protected space for girls, so it's OK to bar non-girls (however your jurisdiction chooses to define that) from girls sports, but "boys" sports are actually for everyone who can compete.
The problem is the Trump administration is pushing for this. They're saying schools can only allow students to play on teams based on their assigned gender at birth. The federal government is using coercion to force states to comply
There is no specific law to follow, since it's just based on the whims of the federal government. The punishment is withholding funding. There is to judge, jury, or courts of any kind involved. Simply the federal government refusing to release funding if they dislike what states are doing. The AZ law is comparatively toothless
The effect of this is the same as it always is with these types of capricious authoritarian governments: A chilling effect. Actors are overly cautious to avoid drawing the wrath of the powerful central government -- Trump in this case