‘All Issues Are Women’s Issues,’ says Carrie Sheffield, Senior Policy Analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum

By John Grimaldi

Title 9 was established half a century ago. It prohibits discrimination based on sex in our schools. That’s a good thing. However, the Biden administration is seeking to change the definition of sex to include “gender identity.”  When biological male students are allowed to identify as female, this puts biological females at a huge disadvantage when it comes to sports.

More than a dozen states have passed laws to prevent male athletes from competing in women’s sports. It’s an issue high on the agenda of organizations such as the Independent Women’s Forum [IWF].  And it is a topic discussed by Carrie Sheffield, the IWF’s senior policy analyst in an interview with AMAC CEO Rebecca Weber on her Better for America podcast.

Polling shows that a majority of Americans, by a two-to-one margin, dismiss the gender identity issue when it comes to women’s sports, according to Sheffield. “On June 23rd, we held a big rally in Washington, D.C. called ‘Our Bodies Our Sports’. It was all about preserving Title 9, a bipartisan effort that has benefited and protected women for half a century. We held it on the 50th anniversary of Title 9.”

Sheffield told Weber that the controversy over Title 9 is a pure and simple ideological issue “because biology tells us that even if you have testosterone blockers or hormone suppression therapy, there are immutable characteristics that cannot be changed. Things like your heart chamber, your lung capacity, your bone structure, your bone length … you have immutable advantages if you’re a biological male that can’t be changed by these types of treatments.  And so that advantage puts women’s sports at a risk.”

The veteran international journalist also had a lot to say about the failure of the Biden administration to deal with the unprecedented crisis on our Mexican border. Sheffield noted that at the height of the covid crisis, the president demanded that we all wear masks and issued mandates for testing, vaccinations, and passports. Meanwhile, the surge of illegal immigrants at the border was gaining momentum but Mr. Biden was giving them a pass. He was “not requiring the screening of these illegal immigrants to see if they had covid.  And in some cases, they were reportedly putting [illegal immigrants] on buses and airplanes and spreading them throughout the country, but without any sort of screening.”

She also shared her thoughts about the growing lack of patriotism and respect for American traditions. Sheffield pointed out that “NPR, for example … broke its very long-standing tradition on July 4th of reading aloud the Declaration of Independence. They said we’re not going to do that this time because we disagree with these Supreme Court rulings.”

And she went on to express her dismay at the progressive left’s unabashed promotion of the communist creed via the introduction of the Critical Race Theory in our K-12 schools.  

“We have to push back,” Sheffield said, telling us that we need to teach our children what America stands for. “We don’t lie about our past … We had slavery in this country, and that’s evil. But the fact of the matter is that we had a civil war where hundreds of thousands of predominantly white men gave their lives to end slavery. And there’s no other country in the world where that happened, where hundreds of thousands of white men gave their lives to free black people. That has not happened anywhere else in the world, and that is exceptional.”

As for her organization, Sheffield explained it’s the voice of independence. “We welcome men as well, but our mission is that we believe all issues are women’s issues. We don’t believe that women should be pigeonholed, that there are only a couple of issues that define women. Women are multifaceted, we’re renaissance women. And so, we advocate for issues that range from foreign policy to education, freedom to economic freedom, the whole gamut.”