Editor’s Note: This column was coauthored by Sarah Parshall Perry, Senior Legal Fellow, Meese Center.

It’s becoming harder and harder for high school and college girls to compete against other females without intrusion by transgender-identified males. To see just how far we have fallen in refusing to recognize the fundamental injustice of allowing these males to compete against biological females, consider some historic scandals in the Olympic Games.

Once, everyone from the organizers of the Olympics to every national athletic association to every high school gym teacher understood that the biological differences between men and women gave well-trained male athletes an inherent advantage over their similarly well-trained female athletes. These biological distinctions are not insignificant.

Males have greater lung capacity, larger hearts, more bone density, and more muscle mass — advantages which allow them to jump higher, throw further, run and accelerate faster, and punch harder than females. One recent study revealed that in the sports where upper body strength dominates, males possess more than a 50% athletic advantage over their female counterparts. This athletic gap emerges around age 12 when males experience a 20-fold boost in testosterone.

That is why the rules governing sporting competitions — especially those considered to be at the pinnacle of athletic achievement such as the Olympic Games — long maintained strict prohibitions on female athletes taking male hormones and other kinds of performance-enhancing drugs for both male and female athletes.

From the 1960s through the 1980s, East German Olympic athletes “swam their way to glory, winning Olympic gold medals, setting world records.” It was only after the fall of the Iron Curtain that the secret to their success was revealed: an elaborate, organized doping system that fed hormones and steroids to the athletes, including the female swimmers, intended to enhance their performance and give their female swimmers a distinct athletic advantage of the kind only found in their male counterparts.

The Russian government has been caught doing the same thing multiple times with the same hormone-doping system as the East Germans had. Last year, Kamila Valieva, a 15-year-old Russian figure skater who won a gold medal in the Beijing Olympic Games, tested positive for Trimetazidine, a drug classified by the World Anti-Doping Agency under “hormone and metabolic modulators.”

Today, liberal pundits seem to have forgotten history. They’re willing to turn a blind eye to the universal disapproval of hormone use at all levels of national and international athletic contests.

It’s not hypocrisy, apparently, when we normalize allowing male-bodied athletes with overwhelming athletic advantages to compete in women’s sports, but sanction female athletes like Marion Jones, a standout winner at the 2000 Sydney Games, for using performance-enhancing drugs. Jones admitted in 2007 to lying to federal agents about her use of those drugs, spent six months in jail, and was stripped of all five of her Olympic medals by the International Olympic Committee.

But now a new rule has emerged in sports: men that psychologically feel like women can compete with all the physiological advantages rendered them by accident of birth against real women. However, real women get the book thrown at them for taking performance-enhancing drugs that give them the same advantages that biological males develop naturally in contests against their own.

So much for equality.

The future of female athletics is on unstable ground. The inclusion of men competing as women is greeted with nods of approval from liberal elites, cultural Marxists, leftist politicos, and gender ideologues at home and abroad. The evisceration of spaces where the enduring differences between the sexes are most on display is, for trans-evangelists, their brass ring.

As goes sport, so goes the rest of the gender contagion. This generation’s greatest “doping” scandal seems to be just getting started, but it is already cheating high school and college girls out of medals, awards, and the athletic scholarships they use to pay for their educations.

Now is the time to divest fake females of their titles, and call an end to athletic fraud. It is a matter of common sense, fundamental justice, and the important principle of fair play in sports that — up until now — has been a hallmark of our culture.

Republished from The Heritage Foundation.