By Suzanne Bowdey

It used to take the Olympics or a World Cup to get people interested in women’s sports — a blip on an otherwise male-driven business model. But that’s all out the window this March Madness, as the girls experience an unprecedent boom from the once-in-a-generation talents like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, and JuJu Watkins. After years of taking a backseat, the NCAA women are front and center, shining on an unusually bright stage. It will go down in history, many believe, as a milestone moment for women’s sports. What a shame, then, that radical Democrats are out to destroy it.

America is living through a unique time in female sports, Variety’s Cynthia Littleton writes, where the girls’ bracket frenzy not only rivals the men’s but has “conferred a level of respect to the women’s game that is rarely been seen across sports media.”

Monday night’s Elite 8 match-up between the University of Iowa and LSU shattered ratings, making it the most watched female college basketball game ever. More bets were made on that game than any event in women’s sports event in history, the sportsbooks announced. Even tickets to the women’s Final Four are “selling for more on the secondary market” than the men’s. All around the country, girls’ sports are gaining so many followers that enterprising business owners are opening women’s sports bars, where televisions exclusively cater to everything from collegiate softball to the WNBA and pro hockey.

A Bar of Their Own, the owners’ play on the classic “A League of Their Own” movie, has sparked an entire cottage industry of restaurants featuring women’s sports. Oregon, Minnesota, and Colorado all boast these uniquely sex-specific watering holes, birthed in large part over the frustration that women’s sports are so rarely available. One entrepreneur, Annie Weaver, says she can remember all of the times that she’s been at a sports bar watching a women’s game on her phone because only men’s sports played on the TVs above. Female athletes, Weaver insisted, weren’t “shown … streamed … or really highlighted.”

Slowly but surely, that’s changing. But will the girls’ game survive long enough for America to enjoy it? Right now, there’s an all-out war to erase women from their own turf — to shove them off the podium and replace them with biological men. In the effort to be more trans “inclusive” and “tolerant,” almost 300 first-place finishes have been stolen by men who already have their own category. And extreme governors like Wisconsin’s Tony Evers (D) are ensuring they’ll be more.

This week, in a slap to the face of America’s daughters (including his own two), Evers vetoed a bill that would have protected the superstardom of the country’s budding Clarks, Reeses, and Watkins. Using his LGBT radicalism as a shield, he repeated the far-Left’s tired (and based on polling, ineffective) soundbites about the hatefulness of keeping biological men on their own teams. A month after publicly celebrating International Women’s Day, the governor eviscerated the very sex he claimed to be grateful for.

“I am vetoing this bill in its entirety,” Evers wrote, “because I object to codifying discrimination into state statute and the Wisconsin State Legislature’s ongoing efforts to perpetuate hateful and discriminatory rhetoric and policies targeting LGBTQ Wisconsinites, including our transgender and nonconforming kids. LGBTQ kids, including transgender and nonconforming kids deserve our love and respect just like any other kid.”

Of course, this proposal had nothing to do with respecting and loving trans-identifying kids. It had to do with giving real girls a safe space to compete, undress, achieve, and excel. But the governor, like so many radical leftists, trashed fair play and privacy as a veiled attack on confused children.

“I restate again today,” he continued, “this type of legislation, and the harmful rhetoric beget by pursuing it, harms LGBTQ Wisconsinites’ and kids’ mental health, emboldens LGBTQ harassment, bullying, and violence, and threatens the safety and dignity of LGBTQ Wisconsinites, especially our LGBTQ kids. I will veto any bill,” Evers vowed, “that makes Wisconsin a less safe, less inclusive, and less welcoming place for LGBTQ people and kids, and I will continue to keep my promise of using every power available to me to defend them, protect their rights, and keep them safe.”

“States across this country,” he railed of the 25 who’ve come to our girls’ defense, “may give way to radical policies targeting LGBTQ individuals and families and threatening LGBTQ folks’ everyday lives and their ability to be safe, valued, supported, and welcome being who they are. As long as I am governor of this great state, Wisconsin will not be among them.”

Unfortunately for the 70% of Americans who disagree with Evers, neither state chamber has the two-thirds majority to override his veto. Despite the popularity of the bill in the state senate (63-35) and state assembly (21-11), the dream of giving girls a level playing field vanished with one stroke of the governor’s pen.

As Concerned Women for America’s Doreen Denny told The Washington Stand, “Governor Evers’s veto of the Save Women’s Sports Act is a clear message to female athletes that he doesn’t care about their rights or their risks.” If anyone’s “hateful,” she insisted, it’s “Evers’s callous indifference to the real impact of trans inclusion in women and girls’ sports today denying Wisconsin female athletes the equality of opportunity based on sex they are entitled to under Title IX and the fairness, safety, and dignity they deserve. We applaud the strong Republican majority of Wisconsin’s legislature for acting to protect female athletes from sex discrimination and urge further action in the state to override Evers’s shameful rejection of women’s rights.”

Evers’s move comes as the most pro-transgender White House in history quietly put its rewrite of Title IX on ice. “Folks close to Biden have made the political decision to not move on the athletics [regulation] pre-election,” a source told The Washington Post this week. “It seems to be too much of a hot topic.” Even this president understands the political ramifications of sanctioning what has become known as “massive, unauthorized cheating.” As most Democratic strategists understand, nothing says “election loser” like setting fire to Title IX. 

And yet, the hypocrisy of the administration is hard to miss. Last Wednesday, Vice President Kamala Harris hosted a celebration of female athletes in conjunction with the Women’s Sports Foundation — an organization she and Biden are actively undermining with their pro-trans policies. It was a convenient photo op for a White House who’s spent the last three years obliterating the differences between boys and girls.

“When we think about Title IX,” Harris told the activists, “it was only 52 years ago. And what leaders like those in this room … did to push for that and so many other policies in order to create that kind of empowerment and to create that kind of access to opportunity, you have to be conscious of it, and you have to be purposeful and intentional and put the resources into it.”

Right now, Democrats are intentional all right. They’re intentionally bulldozing the half-century of progress made by trailblazing females. And in the exciting explosion of women’s sports this March, that’s the real madness.

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.