Josh Godbold is in an odd position — the 8th grader desperately wants to obtain some experience so that he can have a shot at trying out for a high school baseball team next year. There’s only one problem. The middle school Godbold attends has a girl’s softball team but no boy’s baseball team — and the school and state law forbid him from trying out for the team.
Although there are a few hundred female athletes playing on boys teams in North Carolina, where Godbold live, Title IX has never been interpreted by courts to allow boys to participate in girls sports, even in cases such as Godbold’s where the school does not offer an equivalent boys version of a girls sport.
NewsObserver.Com notes that North Carolina relies on a 1994 interpretation of Title IX written by the then-director of the Southeast regional director of the Office for Civil Rights for the U.S. Department of Education. In language that is purely Orwellian, that interpretation maintains that,
For example, a male may not argue that his opportunities to play on a female volleyball or softball team have previously been limited because his school has never offered these sports for males. … Overall athletic opportunities for males are not limited because, at a particular school, females may be permitted to try out for all teams while males may not try out for female teams.
Godbold’s father, Ricky, offered a much more common sense interpretation of fairness saying, “He’s being discriminated against playing a sport because he’s a boy. If a girl has a chance to try out for any sport at a school, he should, too.”
Laws to alleviate sexual discrimination should, at a minimum, be symmetrical when it comes to sex — if it is wrong to sexually discriminate against women in a given situation, it should also be wrong to sexually discriminate against men in a similar situation. Godbold should be allowed to try out for the softball team.
Source:
Girls’ team only option, boy says. T. Keung Hui, NewsObserver.Com, February 15, 2002.