Twelve-year-old Madison “Maddy” Paige Baxter was astonished when her middle school refused to let her try out for football. The young athlete had played as her football team’s starting defensive end during the previous school year.
Young Baxter expresses shock at her school administration’s decision. “The coach was preparing us for [tryouts],” she tells a local news anchor, “and all my teammates were really supportive.”
Strong Rock Christian School’s athletic director Phil Roberts clarified in an email: “Our official policy is that middle-school girls play girls’ sports and middle-school boys play boys’ sports.”
But according to Baxter’s mother Cassy Blythe, that isn’t why her daughter was expelled from boys’ athletics at all. She explains to a local news affiliate, “I was told that the reasons behind it were, one, boys are going to start ‘lusting after’ her and have impure thoughts about her.
“And that the ‘locker-room talk’ was not appropriate for a female to hear, even though she had a separate locker room from the boys,” she concludes in visible disbelief.
Baxter’s mother, a former police officer, goes on to say that the responsibility to make boys “control their urges and their thoughts” does not fall on her daughter. She continues: “They need to learn how to handle what’s going on with them, just like she needs to learn how to handle what’s going on with her, growing up.” During this explanation, Baxter’s mother’s hand-gestures try to indicate “hormones” without ever saying the word directly.
“And,” she says, “I think it could be a good learning experience for both the boys and, um, any girls that decide to play at the school.”
“It just really, really hurts,” the 12-year old adds. “Because knowing all that fun is going to be taken away, just because I’m a girl.”
The whole thing is devastating. Of course private Christian schools may legislate their own rules; Baxter’s mother is presumably paying tuition for the privilege of discovering her daughter can’t play “boys’ sports.” Nevertheless this family has encountered the main reason some churches don’t allow women in religious leadership positions—it’s because girls, as stewards of boys’ chastity, might unwittingly lead boys astray.
My heart breaks for this kid. In my favorite childhood book, “There’s a Girl in My Hammerlock,” young Maisie Potter tries out, successfully, for her high school wrestling team. But opponents refuse to wrestle her, her hometown reacts with ire (it’s pre-Internet, so the comments are all addressed as anonymous letters-to-the-editor to the local newspaper), and it plays out exactly the way this scenario has.
That book, written by Jerry Spinelli (of “Maniac Magee” fame) was published in 1991. Not to diminish young Maddy—real lives are so much more complicated than some book’s piddling story—but Maddy Baxter was my hero when I was 11 years old. And she might well still be, 20 years later.
In the same local news interview, Maddy says her mother “counted five sacks” during her last season, but Maddy only “counted… four.”
[Feministing]
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