There was a time in America when adults handled difficult conversations.
Coaches handled them.
Parents handled them.
School boards handled them.
Leaders handled them.
Now? Too often, we hand those battles to teenage girls and ask them to stand alone in front of cameras, microphones, angry crowds, and social media mobs.
That’s what struck me reading the latest controversy surrounding girls’ sports. Beneath all the politics and slogans was something much simpler — young female athletes trying to explain what fairness feels like to them. Not politicians. Not cable news hosts. Kids.
And whether you agree with them or not, there is something deeply unfair about forcing children to become the public face of a cultural war adults are too afraid to honestly discuss themselves.
For decades, women fought for equal opportunities in athletics. Title IX wasn’t created as symbolism. It was created because girls were routinely denied opportunities, scholarships, recognition, and fair competition. Those protections mattered. They opened doors.
Now we find ourselves in a moment where many people are afraid to even ask questions about competitive fairness without immediately being labeled cruel or hateful. At the same time, transgender athletes are human beings too — deserving of dignity, respect, and compassion.
That’s the tension.
And pretending it doesn’t exist helps nobody.
What worries me most is not disagreement. A healthy society can survive disagreement. What worries me is the growing inability to discuss complicated issues honestly without turning everyone into enemies.
Every issue now becomes a loyalty test.
Every debate becomes tribal.
Every question becomes a moral indictment.
Meanwhile, young athletes are left carrying emotional burdens that should belong to institutions and adults.
We have reached a point where teenage girls are expected to defend the future of women’s sports while adults sit silently in the background, terrified of saying the wrong thing.
That is not courage.
That is abdication.
You can support fairness in women’s athletics while still treating transgender individuals with humanity and compassion. Those ideas are not mutually exclusive unless politics insists they must be.
But we owe young people something better than slogans and culture war theater.
We owe them honesty.
We owe them leadership.
And we owe them the kind of respectful conversation adults used to know how to have.
The Valley Viewpoint 