This week, two female athletes testified at a hearing on protecting women's sports

Stephanie Turner and Payton McNabb spoke at the DOGE subcommittee hearing titled "Unfair Play: Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports"

Fencer Stephanie Turner and former high school volleyball player Payton McNabb testified to members of Congress at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Subcommittee’s “Unfair Play: Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” hearing this past Wednesday.

On March 30 at the Cherry Blossom Open in Maryland, Turner was set to fence against Redmond Sullivan — a male athlete competing in the women’s division — but she took a knee and forfeited the match instead.

She was then “black carded” by USA Fencing — kicked out of the tournament and hit with a 12-month probation for refusing to compete against a male.

In 2022, McNabb suffered a permanent brain injury in high school after getting spiked in the face with the ball by a male opponent during a volleyball match. Since then she has become a leader in the movement to protect women’s sports.

At the hearing, Turner spoke eloquently about the bullying and harassment from USA Fencing directed at women, discouraging them from speaking up in their own defense.

Turner said: “There is a culture of intimidation against women [. . .] A culture that includes public humiliation, doxxing, social ostracization, dismissal and even threats.”

I have experience with sport governing bodies that do this. The leaders of USA Gymnastics did the same to gymnasts speaking out about pedophile coaches in clubs across the country as well as those heading up the national team program. This is what the governing body leaders do to protect their own reputations. In the case of USA Gymnastics leaders, they were “protecting” the reputation of the sport and the governing body because it certainly doesn’t look good for there to be sexual predators on staff abusing girls at every level of the sport. The leaders of USA Gymnastics sought to retain the image of happy little pixies dancing around — by burying abuse of athletes, in order to maintain their lucrative sponsorship packages from the likes of Proctor & Gamble.

USA Fencing Chair Damien Lehfeldt is bowing down to activist pressure to retain the sport’s “woke” reputation. This is still reputational management, just a different approach. Lehfeldt doesn’t seem to care about female athletes and will not do anything to protect them. He wrote in an August 2023 blog post that “transgender women are women and gender is not sex.”

At the hearing on Wednesday, Lehfeldt described fencing as a “sport of strategy and skill,” where mental acuity and tactical decision-making are the most important elements. He suggested that men have no physical advantages in fencing such as height, speed and strength. So I guess if women ARE at a disadvantage (isn’t this why women have their own category?) he must believe that women have weaker mental acuity and decision making skills?

So many terrible and ridiculous things were said by Lehfeldt and Fatima Goss Graves, President and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, but I’m going to focus here on how moving and clear Stephanie Turner’s testimony was.

(Ok just one example of ridiculousness — in questioning Payton McNabb, Goss Graves said “I would argue that the answer is to ensure people can’t spike volleyballs into people’s heads.” Of course she doesn’t think that the real issue was a man spiking the ball into McNabb’s face causing a brain bleed and permanent injury. And Goss Graves doesn’t appear to understand that spiking the ball is an essential part of the game. Next up: no flips in gymnastics.)

Here’s a brief edit of some highlights: