48 hours of hope and solidarity

By now you may have read several accounts of the goings-on in the Capital three days ago. On January 13, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two cases that seek to resolve whether women and girls can have their single-sex sports back.

I got up at 4am on Monday to join Ellie, DIAG’s Executive Director and founder, on a flight (actually two flights) across the land to the District where America’s most vexing questions are taken up and sorted out by the learned and the honorable.

Above: a frame from reporting on the PBS Newshour’s January 13th broadcast, which went downhill from there.

Lots of DIAG supporters came from all over, and so did lots of LGB Courage Coalition, Women’s Declaration USA, Do No Harm, Our Duty, and Alliance Defending Freedom supporters — among many others — to gather outside the Court for a well-organized four-hour rally featuring a list of speakers arranged in advance.

A couple of steps to our left, separated by those waist-high metal dividers that look like bike racks (are they bike racks?) another group of people gathered to hear their pre-arranged speakers put their best spin on why women and girls should stop squawking about ‘their’ sports already. Many of them are under the impression that “this has nothing to do with sports. It’s all about power” — though it wasn’t clear which if any had ever competed in a sport; so to be fair, the claim might actually be consistent with Their Truth.

One thing I know from listening to the several young women among our speakers who very much have competed in sports: it’s definitely about sports. Its tentacles extend to safety and privacy, but those who frame the rights conferred by Title IX as a power grab — by women? — do seem to have lost the plot somewhere. Behold Exhibit B:

The young athletes who traveled from all over the U.S. to give speeches about the experience of being sixteen or eighteen or twenty years old in 2026 and having to fight for the recognition of rights their mothers took for granted — they were inspiring, to say the least. And in almost every case, there was a loud male transactivist at the neighboring mic trying his best to drown out her voice with some rant about ‘power’ or ‘inclusion,’ so as to explain why his ‘feelings’ matter more than her ‘scholarship’ or ‘safety.’

The fury and disgust those men provoked in me were useful a little later when I sat at the table in the air b&b I shared with Erin Friday [gratuitous name drop] to compose the 5 minute speech I would deliver that night, at a dinner arranged by the LGB Courage Coalition. There’s video of all the speeches on X, but the sound was compromised by the fact that we were in a pub with a bunch of people who had lots to say (no shade whatsoever), so I decided to drop in a screenshot and the transcript of my remarks in lieu of the video:

We all came to the capital today to stand up for female athletes across America who are being gaslit, insulted, and systematically deprived of a civil right their mothers and even grandmothers have taken for granted since 1972.

I’ve been thinking about the various roads that bring us all together for events like today’s Supreme Court hearings, and the phrase that came to me today was “cultural crash site” as a metaphor for our common ground.

Among the injured we care about are some very traumatized and wounded individuals: women in prison, trans widows and their children; estranged, beleaguered parents, and so many young people who have been medically harmed or just egregiously ill-advised.

A lot of us arrived here because someone we love chose a catastrophically bad remedy for a pre-existing malady, be it autism, a behavioral disorder, maybe even just loneliness and boredom.

Against this grim panorama of hard knocks and faulty judgment, one cohort is jarringly out of place, and that is of course the athletes. They simply don’t belong anywhere near our cultural crash site, and I’m sure I’m not the first to notice this.

Last spring I interviewed a group of high school girls on a cross country team in Washington State, and they were all so exemplary — as students, as athletes, and as young women who seemed to know how to make only good choices.

These girls grew up in the same ‘anxious generation’ as their peers who became fixated on their ‘gender identities’ and the peers with unhealthy relationships to social media or porn, the girls on OnlyFans, the generation breaking all the records for depression and stagnation and despair, even though they’re all in therapy and have multiple psychiatric prescriptions.

When you as an adult spend months or years trying to extricate a child from one or more of these modern miseries, and then you come face to face with one of these remarkable athletes, you realize you’re looking at someone who surveyed all of the same maladaptive options that her peers did—and literally took off running the other way.

To meet these young women is to be astounded by the grit and poise and strength of character that shine through. It can almost break your heart, to be honest.

These girls and their families should live long happy lives without ever once having to think about queer theory. But they too have been frog-marched to the scene of this cultural crash site by the absolute worst bullies and liars — and it’s intolerable!

It’s especially intolerable if you’re a Democrat, since that’s the party that has been propping up the worst bullies and liars for too damn long.

As DIAG’s founder and director, Ellie, has said, this is a problem created by the left, and it needs to be remedied by the left. To forfeit this responsibility to Republicans is to give up any claim to legitimacy. That’s an unacceptable outcome if you still care about anything other than gender lunacy.

I feel strongly that we should care, because in my view, while the other party is absolutely getting an A+ in Human Anatomy, it’s failing Constitutional Law and not even showing up for Econ.

We watched some of those amazing girls hold forth at the rally today, speaking loud and clear enough to drown out some very angry, entitled men. And they were magnificent!

After those girls succeed in restoring their rights — and they absolutely will succeed, with help from all of us — I want them to grow up and be able to buy homes, and send their children to quality schools and feed them meals that aren’t laden with chemicals.

I want them to have excellent healthcare that’s not an undue financial burden, and when they’re old enough to be grandmothers, I want them to have Medicare and Social Security.

I want these things for my own kids too, but if we have to look to Republicans to provide them, I don’t like those odds.

More than any one policy or program, this country needs and deserves leaders who are honorable, who are capable of compassion, who respect the law as well as norms of decency, and who are guided by the interests of all Americans regardless of party.

Some of the DIAG team started walking the halls of Congress today, and more of us will join them tomorrow. We petition the government because it’s both our right as citizens and the right thing to do.

But we at DIAG are nothing if not sober realists. Our party is mired in institutional capture and financially dependent on the ‘Groups’ that have lost touch with reality completely. Then there’s the tyranny of the primary process, and it’s hard to overstate the destructive influence of good old Team Kindness.

So, we’ll continue to let our current leaders know where we stand, but we’ll focus most of our time and energy this year trying to inform as many voters as possible. We are developing a targeted social media campaign to raise awareness of what’s really been going down on the cultural crash site that is gender madness. We’ll say yes to as many invitations like this one as we possibly can, and we’ll keep partnering with our friends in all the groups represented here. It’s so fortifying just being in the company of all of you, and I do believe that together, we’re gonna win.

Thank you!

Links:

Help DI-AG.org reach many more liberal voters with this message: our Party will resume contact with reality when enough of us join forces and lead them here — not a minute sooner.

LGBCC’s X post with video of all the speakers at the evening event, including Jamie Reed, Olympian Nancy Hogshead, Kara Dansky and more!

My podcast from March, 2025 featuring members of the Washington State cross-country team coached by the exceptionally brave and dedicated Dori Whitford. (They all signed the sweetest thank you note and mailed it to me after the episode was published! ) These girls, their coaches and families deserve a win, and we should do everything we can to help make that happen. More on that here for Washington residents.