MORGANTOWN, W. V. When I moved to this college town in the summer of 1975 as a 10-year-old Muslim immigrant girl from India, I found my stride doing something very simple: tackling the rolling hills outside our home on Cottonwood Street.

Each day, I logged my mile running the same route, down Cottonwood, down Headlee, up Pineview, up Cottonwood as religiously as I did my prayers. I subscribed to Runners World magazine and Boston Marathon winner Bill Rodgers became my hero. Every morning, Id meditate upon the image of then-Bruce Jenner to put a kick in my step. Running 10ks and competing in cross country and girls track in middle school and high school made me a lifelong athlete.

In recent years, girls and women in sports have come under attack as a result of an aggressive, well-funded campaign to allow boys and men who identify as girls and women to compete in female sports, in the name of transgender rights. University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, a male who competed in mens swimming then last year started swimming on the womens team after identifying as female, has most notoriously dominated womens swimming after the NAACP allowed Thomas to compete in womens swimming.

Too often, athletes, parents, and sports organizations who disagree with males in womens sports have cowered or stayed silent in the face of this controversy because shaming naysayers as transphobic is a tactic of activists on this issue, just as racist and Islamophobic are weaponized to silence people on issues of race and religion.

But that is now finally changing. Earlier this week, the International Swimming Federation (FINA) voted to approve a new policy restricting most transgender athletes from competing in elite womens aquatic competitions. Then on Wednesday, the International Rugby League ruled that transgender athletes cannot compete in womens sports,

A mother in Australia, Katherine Deves, expressed relief, writing on Twitter: I am relieved and delighted my daughters sport is now safe and fair at [the] elite level.

On Thursday, the 50th anniversary of signing Title IX into law, a diverse team of athletes stood under the banner, Our Bodies, Our Sports, at Freedom Plaza on Pennsylvania Avenue, blocks from the White House, to stand together for protecting girls and womens sports for guess what girls and women. The rally was supported by the Independent Womens Network, where Im a senior fellow in the practice of journalism and a parent advocate.

After much reflection, as a classic liberal and feminist, I am proud to have stood with the athletes and advocates speaking up for girls and women in sports. This is not just an issue any longer of conservatives.

Included among the advocates were lesbian rights activist Lauren Levey and womens rights advocate Amanda Houdeschell, a leader at the Womens Liberation Front, known as WoLF. Ive created a Whos Who on my Substack. These athletes are champions in their sports and now they are trailblazers in public policy. They include:

Former Democratic Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, an original sponsor of the Protect Womens Sports Act, says protecting girls and womens sports is a feminist issue that should be supported by anyone of either party who wants to increase opportunities for women and girls.

Activists and politicians have just gone too far in laying claim to womens and girls sports. I say this as someone who has faced death threats advocating for the rights of gay, lesbian, and transgender people in Muslim countries, where in too many nations a person having anything but heterosexual sex within a marriage can be a crime punishable by death.

Long before I was a journalist or senior anything anywhere, I was just a girl running the Coliseum track in Morgantown. Athletics specifically girls athletics empowered me as a Muslim girl in West Virginia.

I still remember, as if it were yesterday, the call I got from a classmate named Jane, inviting me to join a relay team for our track meet at Suncrest Junior High School. As I passed the baton to Lynda McCroskey, I felt strong and empowered.

A cousin came one day and saw me running in shorts, and he told my father, That is haram for her to show her legs. Haram is the Arabic word for illegal.

Indeed, too often, girls in my religiously conservative Muslim communities arent allowed to bicycle or run as we near puberty for fear of breaking our hymen, or maidenheads, and losing our virginity. Whats more, our movement, the sun on our bare arms, or the wind in our hair can be deemed haram. In Pakistan, women have defied threats to run a road race.

My father, a firm believer in girls and womens rights, ignored my cousins complaint. I continued running and competing against girls my age.

At Morgantown High School, I had to run against boys in cross country because it was 1978 when I was a high school freshman. My classmate, Kaye, and I didnt have enough girls to make a girls team. I still remember a boy hobbling as if his knee was in pain right before I was about to pass him.

As hard as we trained, Kaye and I were only fast enough to qualify for the boys junior varsity team. It would take us four years on junior varsity to qualify to letter and get the much-coveted lettermans jacket as a Morgantown High Mohican.

The cartilage in my right knee wore thin by my junior year when Big Al, the trainer, had me popping daily ibuprofen for the pain. I couldnt run cross-country my senior year, alas, and never got my varsity letter. What I did get was a priceless, lifelong devotion to athletics.

Its with much meditation that I now say we have to keep girls and womens sports for those born female. As parent advocate Harry Jackson, a lacrosse and football referee and former Olympic-level athlete, suggests: sports federations can create open categories in which athletes born male and self-identifying as a female can compete. Or sports authorities can find some other solution. But having males compete with girls and women isnt the answer.

My younger self is an empowered woman today because of what running the Coliseum track with girls as Jane and Kaye allowed me. As we find solutions to support transgender athletes, we should allow the same destiny for all young girls.

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The Tide Is Finally Turning Towards Fairness In Women's Sports - The Federalist