29
[May 2024] Oregon High School coach, John Parks, fired for writing letters criticizing the States rules on Transgender athletes
The head track & field coach at Lake Oswego High School said the district terminated his contract for writing letters to state officials advocating for change to laws pertaining to transgender athletes.
John Parks wrote two letters to Peter Weber, the Executive Director of the Oregon Student Activities Association, and state Sen. Rob Wagner before and after the state championships in May, respectively.
In the letters, Parks wrote that current state law, which protects athletes who wish to compete against the gender that aligns with their gender identity, compromises the integrity of girls' sports.
"The OSAA competition rules need to be aligned with what the rest of the world competes under," Parks wrote to Wagner, referring to hormone testing requirements enforced by the International Olympic Committee and other organizations. "My proposal to encourage transgender participation is to offer an open division that is so named so it doesn't identify or discriminate but offers an opportunity to participate."
Parks told KATU he supports transgender athletes and does not want them to be excluded. He said he witnessed the crowd at the State Championships 'boo' a transgender athlete after they won a girls' event.
"I want them to be able to participate where they're not 'booed,' Parks said.
He's recommending a separate division or that they can't do varsity sports.
He was fired for not sharing they're religion.
This is the only reasonable framing for cases like these. The “science is settled” crowd is ironically more religious than many regular church-goers and, like most zealots, they walk around acting like theirs is the one true faith. Magical senses of gender that are not only unprovable but contradict observable reality are no basis for firing people who disagree, because then why not just enshrine in law every other magical sense that is not only unprovable but contradicts observable reality?
Kudos to the man for standing up for women & girls.
I get where his proposal of a third category is coming from, but it's unworkable. Not least bc the trans reject these things anytime they pop up. The discrimination of women & girls is not incidental, it's the whole point of transing.
I'm sure he knows it's all a farce, but he won't get his job back without paying some sort of minimum lip service to tw@nz inclusivity.
Personally, I'm in favor of a third 'trans' category. Namely because when they DO show up and compete, it still shows a clear sex demarcation in competitiveness between the female athletes with beards fine as frog's hair and Kermit voices and the 'After starting estrogen, I'm too weak to even LIFT a jar, let alone open it!' males. And because when TIMs refuse to compete in them and instead wail 'BUT I WANTED THE WOMEN'S TROPHY!!!!' it once again reveals the lie of 'We just want to [play sports/ pee/ etc.]' and the unhinged entitlement they have.
Good point. My only gripe is, when swimming did offer a third category in a race and no one showed up for it, the story got memory-holed completely. The media will obfuscate and lie, there is no point at which they will interrogate these developments.
I am afraid that it rlly does not matter one bit how many good arguments we have and how many times trans activists make themselves look horrible, this take-over is top-down. The establishment will lie and smear and attack to keep up the narrative. It will take so long for things to change.
Yeah, it doesn't ever end up being the Great Peaking event on a massive scale that we hope for (although I did see a few media platforms cover it when that one event happened, so not a complete media blackout), but that being said, I'm a big believer in giving them plenty of rope and think this qualifies. When people who are beginning to see the untenability of this movement's hardline stances start looking for a 'reasonable compromise' between a GC perspective and TRA demands, the track record of unhinged entitlement in how TRAs respond to 'compromise' is clear. They refuse. And I've seen this very example used to great effect in comments sections when people start going 'well, what about a third category?' Because that's a question asked from a place of 'everyone should get an opportunity,' from a poster coming at it looking for something that's 'fair' to both claimants who can at least see that just sharing doesn't work in this case. So they assume a very reasonable-sounding, very fair solution...and so it lands home when they find out that when generously given their own opportunities in sports, TIPs throw them away. That TRAs don't care about fairness like the person who suggests that does and this isn't about getting to compete in a sport you love. That shines sunlight into their claims designed to obfuscate what they're doing, that they don't want to play sports, they want women's sports.
Plus, despite this not being something that makes the headlines, I think the little things are more likely to get us to where we need to be, at least until we reach a critical mass of people who are done with "being kind" to this destructive nonsense, as much as those little things are easy to discount. Kind of like how if you're trying to budget, the tiny, cumulative differences in price and small, unnecessary expenditures can incrementally add up to a massive difference by the end of the month if you get in the mindset of '$0.20 doesn't make a difference' or 'I don't need it, but it's only $5.' Here, it didn't peak the world, but it did provide some illumination for the people who pushed for it and cared enough to check up on it, for the audience who were there, for the officials who created the category. A person here and there, 10 people, 20 people, a couple hundred or more, it all adds up in our favor, and adds to the growing pool of people peaking every day from myriad other sources. And it provided us with one more 'receipt' to back up our statements when we find ourselves in a position to argue them.
it is unworkable. I'm pretty sure he has a student on the team that triggered this issue, how he describes the crowd booing him and all. So a team of one, maybe a handful for the whole county... that just wouldn't work.
Coach Parks is a hero. Listen.to his heartfelt testament of how Title IX's impact on his Sister helped inspire his own decades of coaching Girls' track—it speaks volumes that he's the kind of influence that transgenderists are hellbent on removing from the lives of Girls and young Women.
oh nice! Thanks i did not see that. She became a judge, but passed away 4 years ago (i was worried for a sec his sister would get some of this backlash). And as he explains, he has transgender identified people in his family. I really think, sports is the issue that will peak most people.
Especially in the U.S. and Canada, for reasons I wrote about at length here.