Third-wave feminists have set women back 50 years. Just look what they’ve done to women’s sports. Their forebears in the movement would be appalled.

Once the promises of voting and property rights had been fulfilled by the early suffragettes—the Mary Wollstonecrafts and the Susan B. Anthonys—the second-wave feminists turned their attention to other iterations of sex equality. The Gloria Steinems and the Bella Abzugs burned their bras in the streets, descended on Capitol Hill, and demanded equal employment, equal pay, and equal educational opportunity. Their crowning achievement was perhaps Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972—the federal civil rights law guaranteeing sex equality in education in all its many manifestations, whether admissions, scholarships, graduate programs, housing accommodations, or athletics.

What a difference a half-century makes. To watch the patent discrimination extant in women’s sporting events these days, you’d be hard pressed to think Title IX exists at all.

For this, we have third-wave feminists to thank, those who have sacrificed women’s equality on the altar of equity for trans-identified males. They believe gender is performative, that the coherence of gender expression is illusory, that one’s “natural sex” is transitory. These feminists—the Judith Butlers and Gloria Anzaldúas—gifted us the poison of “queer theory,” and set up a battle of the sexes playing out in real time in high school gymnasiums everywhere.

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These same feminists have fed us the narrative that divisions over transgender athletic participation are based not on the fulsome evidence of the athletic advantages of transgender-identified males, but rather on “our deeply-held and rather largely unexamined assumptions about biology and gender.”

But if the widely recognized proof of male athletic advantages isn’t sufficient for third-wave feminists to call an end to men in women’s sports, perhaps evidence of injured female athletes will be. These injuries sustained by girls and women during athletic contests with transgender athletes are not the stuff of mere speculation. Significant bodily harm to young women is already well-documented, and on the rise.

Take a recent game between the Collegiate Charter School of Lowell in Massachusetts and KIPP Academy in Lynn, Massachusetts. A trans-identified six-foot-tall male player with facial hair playing for the KIPP Academy girls’ basketball team, injured multiple players and eventually forced the Collegiate Charter School to forfeit. In now widely circulated video, he is seen wrestling the ball away from one of the girls, causing her to hit the ground where she clutches her back in pain.

Events like these are no longer an aberration in school sports, thanks to Education Secretary Miguel Cordona’s illegal interpretation of “sex” in Title IX to also include “gender identity or expression.” Indeed, they are evidence that this new wave of sex discrimination has not yet reached its zenith.

In 2022, North Carolina volleyball player Payton McNabb suffered serious injury after a trans-identified male player spiked a ball at her head and rendered her unconscious.

Last year, a female athlete was injured by a trans-identified male opponent during a field hockey game in Massachusetts when a ball he threw at her, knocking her teeth out.

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Examples of other females being injured by males participating in overseas or semi-professional women’s sports abound, occurring in soccer, rugby, hockey, and mixed martial arts. And these injuries are just the ones we know about; the political overlords at legacy media companies who are fully beholden to the trans minority have surely kept others quiet.

Where, now, is the feminist outrage of our grandmothers? Where the dismay of the third-wave feminists at what their prescriptions on intersectionality and queerness have wrought?

How many more female athletes must be injured before a new wave of feminists rise up—those with the first wave’s understanding of moral order and natural law, possessed of the outrage and unflinching demands for equality of the second wave?

We modern women—we who have held the vote for little more than 100 years, considered by many segments of male society for centuries to be little more than skin and bones—must recognize the third wave has failed us and ceded ground it took our grandmothers and great grandmothers years to claim. We must never cease to believe our own eyes, call out discrimination where it hides in plain sight, and identify the chauvinism platformed by commitments to “queerness,” and equity, and the fungibility of sex—something even arch feminist Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote was “not fungible.”

We must do these things, if not for our own sake, then for that of those women yet to come.