The national debate around transgender student athletes’ participation in categories separate from their biological gender was again discussed at a local board of education meeting. 

Over the course of a half-hour, a total of 11 speakers on both sides of the issue weighed in for the third consecutive time as elected officials representing Naperville School District 203 opened up public comment at a Monday, June 16 meeting. 

Awake Illinois complaint against District 203

Last month, speakers began sharing their views at Naperville 203 board meetings for and against transgender students’ participation in sports separate from their biological gender.

The wide-ranging comments come on the heels of a transgender Jefferson Junior High School student’s win at a Naper Prairie Conference track meet May 14 and a subsequent complaint from the organization Awake Illinois.

In a 4-page document, Awake Illinois indicating its federal civil rights complaint is based on “sex-based discrimination within education programs or activities that receive federal funding, in violation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.”

The complaint also notes Naperville 203’s history of receiving federal grants in the range of $9 million annually.

Speakers take aim at interest groups

At the June 16 meeting, some speakers took aim at Awake Illinois and other special interest groups, claiming the tactics and rhetoric used within the organizations’ communications have been harmful. 

Naperville resident Thomas Tomei described the groups’ conduct as “deeply disturbing” and suggested their efforts are “actively working against” public education.

“Our district is now facing mounting expenses to defend itself,” Tomei said. “Let’s be clear: This affects all of us. Look at your property tax bill — a large portion goes to support our schools. Whether or not you have kids in this district, you’re paying for these attacks.”   

Fellow Naperville resident Jim Best also lambasted the groups’ tactics to get their point across. 

“Why antagonize one’s neighbors and community? Why target a child? Why instigate personal attacks on teachers and school officials? And, finally, why go on local and national media with this deplorable and unethical campaign?” Best said. “Shame on these individuals and their co-conspirators, many of whom don’t even live here.”

Parents implore board to take action on sports guidelines

Parent Mike Aabram, in response to claims that opposing views are from outside the community, emphasized he is a local resident and wants to preserve the past practices that had been in place within Naperville 203.

“I’m not an outsider, and I’m not a part of any dark forces,” Aabram said. “I’m just a dad who wants to protect his daughter’s safe spaces, very private spaces.”

Naperville resident Jason Copeland suggested the board consider a series of policies on the matter, including one that explicitly states student athletes can only participate in a category corresponding to the sex assigned at birth and having in place the same provisions for locker room use. Copeland additionally suggested provisions be made available for unisex restroom facilities for students, beginning in grade 6.

“While it wasn’t needed in the past, it’s now clear the board needs policies in place to preserve spaces created exclusively for males and females,” Copeland said.

Naperville resident Simon Poole asked the board and others within the community to consider the bigger picture.

“The current situation is a huge setback for women’s morale, and women’s mental health – and girls…are obviously included in that in this particular situation, because it is going to affect their morale, and that will affect mental health,” Poole said.

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Many nights after work, as people often do, Washington Nationals first baseman Nathaniel Lowe checks his social media accounts. Unlike most, however, Lowe must brace himself to find out which anonymous trolls, miscreants and provocateurs, at that very moment, want him dead.

If the safe-word filters on his accounts do their job that night — and if Lowe happened to have excelled at his job, at least relative to the prop bets staked to his performance — the abuse might not be so bad. Otherwise?

“‘Kill yourself’ shows up pretty often,” said Lowe, who has won a Gold Glove, a Silver Slugger and a World Series in his career. Those kinds of messages, he added, are there “five days a week.”

Like many athletes, Lowe, 29, has come to view the nightly stream of online vitriol as another annoyance inherent to his line of work, no different from late-night flights and professional autograph-seekers.

“That’s just what you kind of sign up for,” Lowe said. “And that’s what gambling has brought into the game.”

But in recent months, as online sports betting continues to expand in the aftermath of a landmark 2018 Supreme Court ruling — Americans legally wagered a record $147.91 billion on sports last year — the problem of online threats and harassment of athletes by gamblers appears to have become more widespread, more specific and more sinister, alarming many in the sports industry, not least of all those on the receiving end.

“I understand people are very passionate and … love sports,” Houston Astros pitcher Lance McCullers Jr. told reporters recently after detailing death threats made against him and his family that were later traced to a bettor overseas. “But threatening to find my kids and murder them is a little bit tough to deal with.”

Famous athletes have long been subjected to verbal abuse by angry partisans, as any NFL kicker who has missed a game-winning field goal or any major European soccer player who has missed a penalty kick can attest. Horrifying incidents between athletes and deranged fans are nothing new, either, with the on-court stabbing of tennis star Monica Seles in 1993 perhaps the most vivid example.

But what is happening now, to athletes of all degrees of fame, feels like a distinctively modern problem, resulting from an explosive mixture of forces: the exponential growth, financial might and cultural penetration of the sports-gambling industry; the AI-driven ability of that industry to deliver rapid, in-game gambling products via mobile devices; and the ubiquity of social media and the anonymity it provides while obliterating the barriers between athletes and fans. The dynamic is exacerbated by socioeconomic trends, such as the widening economic chasm between fans and athletes and the rampant disaffection sociologists have identified in young, online males.

“People get this idea, like, ‘This big baseball player making a great amount of money. … I see them out there living their lives happily with their family while they’re pitching poorly,’” Nationals right-hander Josiah Gray said. “So they say: ‘You shouldn’t be living happily with your family. You should be lamenting on your rough outing or your rough day at the plate.’ And then trying to ruin your day that way. It’s more [about] psychology and how players are easily accessible [through] social media.”

It is now commonplace, in fact, for gamblers to track down an athlete’s Venmo account and request money to cover the cost of a lost bet, often including a nasty or threatening message with their invoice. Occasionally, but far more rarely, an athlete picks up their phone to find a “tip” has been sent to their Venmo as thanks for a winning performance.

“That’s why I had to get rid of my Venmo — because I was either getting paid by people or people requesting me a bunch of money when I didn’t win. It wasn’t a good feeling,” golfer Scottie Scheffler said this week. Asked what was the most money a gambler sent him, the three-time major champion replied: “I don’t remember. Maybe a couple bucks here or there. That didn’t happen nearly as much as the requests did.”

Although little data exists to demonstrate the extent of the problem, recent polls and studies as well as anecdotal evidence suggest it is affecting athletes across the sports spectrum with increasing frequency.

A December study by four of the biggest tennis federations in the world found that angry gamblers were responsible for nearly half of the 12,000 abusive social media posts directed at tennis players that year.

A May 2024 NCAA study during that year’s men’s and women’s March Madness events found more than 4,000 instances of threatening or abusive social media posts or messages directed at athletes, with women three times as likely as men to be on the receiving end. (A subsequent NCAA-commissioned study of the 2025 tournaments, however, noted a 23 percent decline from 2024 in gambling-related abuse.)

And when the Athletic, in an informal poll this spring, asked 133 baseball players whether legalized sports betting has “changed how fans treat you or your teammates,” 78 percent answered yes.

Even athletes who at one time might have toiled in relative anonymity, such as offensive linemen and backup catchers, are now fair game to disgruntled bettors on the wrong end of a losing prop bet, placed on something as specific as a basketball player’s rebound total or the first player in a football game to score a touchdown.

“It’s definitely getting worse and worse — through every social media, people being in your DMs with death threats,” said Detroit Tigers backup catcher Jake Rogers, who said he received death threats this season despite having only 48 plate appearances as of Friday. “… You can ask every single guy in here, and they’ve gotten a really bad one, probably in the last week.”

Those types of findings do not surprise those who study the problem and those who are tasked with combating it.

“The speed of gambling, the intensity of gambling — they’ve increased exponentially. We’ve fundamentally changed the way people gamble,” said Harry Levant, a certified gambling counselor and director of gambling policy with the Public Health Advocacy Institute at Northeastern University. “Then social media creates this idea of anonymity. … We shouldn’t be quite so surprised when we see an increase in the number of people demonstrating antisocial behavior.”

Levant and others in the problem gambling space have singled out the rise of microbetting — small, fast-moving, in-game wagers, delivered with the help of AI systems, on everything from the velocity of the next pitch in baseball or the outcome of the next play in football. Those bets, they say, are fueling the rise in gambling addiction, with all its attendant problems, including threatening behavior toward athletes.

“If you deliver a known addictive product to people at light speed with technology in this way, you are going to cause harm to people, and [those] people will take that harm to lengths of desperation,” Levant said.

Asked to respond to comments from Levant and others, Joe Maloney, senior vice president of strategic communications for the American Gaming Association, said in a statement: “The outcome of a bet is never an invitation to harass or threaten athletes, coaches, or officials. Abuse of any kind has no place in sports. The legal, regulated industry offers the transparency and accountability needed to identify bad actors and collaborate with leagues, regulators, and law enforcement to deter misconduct and enforce consequences.”

The gambling and sports industries have successfully prosecuted some gamblers who sent death threats to athletes and their families. Most notably, in 2021, a prominent gambler named Benjamin “Parlay” Patz pleaded guilty to transmitting threats after investigators linked him to more than 300 threatening messages sent to the social media accounts of pro and collegiate athletes, saying, for example, “I will sever your neck open” and “I will kill your entire family.” Patz’s sentence included six months of home detention and 36 months of probation but no prison time.

Publicity of such cases “could deter” such behavior, said Jeffrey Derevensky, director of the International Centre for Youth Gambling Problems and High-risk Behaviors at McGill University in Montreal, who has completed studies for the NCAA on gambling. “But it doesn’t happen very often. It’s difficult to catch these people — especially via social media because of the anonymity — unless they’re trying to influence the outcome of the game.”

The gambling industry is quick to highlight the role played by social media in contributing to the problem. Maloney pointed to a 2024 NCAA study showing only 12 percent of online abuse directed toward athletes was gambling-related, with the remaining 88 percent falling into categories such as racial, sexual or trans/homophobic abuse. (Knicks star Jalen Brunson is among the NBA players who have said they have faced racial slurs online.)

“Social media platforms,” Maloney said, “will absolutely have to be part of an overall solution to this problem.”

Many athletes, however, have all the anecdotal evidence they need to know what’s behind the rise in abuse. Most of them already had social media accounts before 2018; it was only after the landmark Supreme Court case and the explosion of legalized gambling, hastened by the coronavirus pandemic that kept people indoors and drove them online, that the problem got out of hand.

“Gambling is definitely the main thing,” the Nationals’ Lowe said. “DraftKings sponsors broadcasts, and they have [signage] all over the stadium. BetMGM is all over the place. These big companies are obviously making a whole lot of money off the [sports gambling] industry.”

Increasingly, authorities and the problem-gambling communities are trying to curb the prevalence of threatening behavior through regulation as well as services targeting gambling addiction and anti-bullying campaigns. The NCAA’s “Don’t Be a Loser” spot ran frequently during this year’s March Madness tournaments, discouraging harassment toward athletes resulting from lost bets.

“You’re going to start seeing more problem-gambling-prevention [advocacy] in middle schools and high schools, like you see drug prevention and alcohol prevention,” said Michael A. Buzzelli, director of problem gambling services for the Ohio Casino Control Commission. “And you probably won’t see a massive change in behavior until you do that — until gambling is looked at as just as addictive and just as problematic as alcohol and drugs.”

Ohio is one of 15 states that bans prop bets on college athletes, and this spring, the NCAA called for a nationwide ban on athlete-specific prop bets in states with legal sports gambling. “You have kids who have had thousands of [threats via social media] being directed at them during our tournaments,” said Charlie Baker, the governing body’s president. “Just getting prop bets out of college sports is a really important priority of ours.”

Aside from their association with threats, prop bets on individual athletes are also more susceptible to game-integrity issues, given the athlete’s unique ability to influence the outcomes of those bets.

But the AGA’s Maloney said that while the industry “isn’t standing in the way” of efforts to ban prop bets, such bans are likely to result in those wagers moving to unregulated or illegal betting markets.

“Regulated markets need to allow for growth and innovation,” Maloney said, “simply because we do compete with a vast, predatory and pervasive illegal market that has all the trappings of what a legal app, or in some cases what a legal physical space, would look like.”

In March, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) and Rep. Paul D. Tonko (D-New York) reintroduced their bill, the SAFE Bet Act, that would, among other things, limit advertising for sportsbooks; mandate “affordability checks” to restrict the amount of money a gambler can wager in a specific period; ban prop bets featuring collegiate and amateur athletes; and prohibit the use of AI in creating products such as microbets.

The bill, Tonko said in an interview, “speaks forcefully to the need to have guardrails or restrictions” on the sports gambling industry. “We don’t want to outlaw mobile sports gambling. But we’re trying to take a known addictive product and make it safer.” Still, he acknowledged their bill has a “tough journey” to passage.

In the meantime, athletes will continue to face an onslaught of vitriol on their social media accounts — unless, like many, they choose to delete those accounts, or, like Baltimore Orioles pitcher Charlie Morton, never open any in the first place.

“Personally, I don’t think the world should have access to me, to say anything they want at any time to me,” said Morton, 41. “When you threaten to kill somebody or hurt somebody, you’re doing something illegal. I don’t know why you would subject yourself to an environment where that would be normal.”

But for younger players, those who are online more often or those whose marketing teams encourage them to take part in brand-building there, that leaves only a couple of options.

“Don’t look at it,” the Nationals’ Lowe said. “And play better.”

Jesse Dougherty, Nicki Jhabvala, Bailey Johnson, Adam Kilgore, Rick Maese and Mark Maske contributed to this report.

The Unseen Battle of NBA Players

While fans and media revel in the spectacle of NBA games, the true struggles of players often remain hidden beneath the surface. The physical demands of the sport—injuries, rehabilitation, and the relentless grind of performance—are visible to all. However, the mental health challenges that accompany such pressures frequently go unnoticed.

Kyrie Irving’s Journey Towards Healing

In a recent livestream, Kyrie Irving opened a window into this often-ignored aspect of athlete life, shedding light on the importance of mental well-being. “It is Men’s Mental Health Awareness, but this is about awareness of your mental health,” he expressed, emphasizing that the journey to recovery extends beyond physical healing. This candid revelation serves as a reminder that mental health is just as crucial as physical fitness in the realm of professional sports.

Irving’s vulnerability during the stream resonated deeply, as he shared, “This stream is helping me heal—that’s as simple as I can put it.” His words not only reflect his personal struggles but also serve as a call to action for fans and followers alike. He urged listeners to engage in meaningful conversations with loved ones, advocating for openness by stating, “Don’t stay quiet. Don’t go into your shell. Reach out… say, ‘How are you doing? I love you.’ That matters.”

Building Boundaries and Finding Strength

This moment of honesty is pivotal, as it illustrates how Irving is confronting his own discomforts and challenges. “This is getting me to build more boundaries with myself,” he noted, highlighting the necessity of self-care in the journey toward mental wellness. The process of establishing boundaries is often overlooked, yet it plays a critical role in maintaining one’s mental health, especially for individuals in high-pressure environments like professional sports.

Irving’s reflections also underscore a vital truth: mental health is not a one-time fix but an ongoing commitment. He acknowledged the continuous effort required to maintain good mental health, emphasizing that healing is a journey rather than a destination.

The Importance of Community and Connection

The significance of community support cannot be understated in this context. Irving’s message encourages a culture of compassion and understanding, urging everyone to prioritize mental health discussions within their circles. As he navigates the aftermath of his injury, the livestream has become a therapeutic outlet for him, allowing him to connect with others while fostering his own healing process.

A Broader Reflection on Mental Health Awareness

Irving’s experience serves as a powerful reminder of the broader implications of mental health awareness, particularly in high-stress professions. His journey illustrates that athletes, like anyone else, face challenges that demand attention and support. By sharing his story, Irving not only advocates for his own healing but also inspires countless others to confront their struggles and foster open dialogues about mental health.

In conclusion, Kyrie Irving’s livestream is more than just a personal reflection; it is a clarion call for awareness, understanding, and action. As the conversation around mental health continues to evolve, it is crucial to recognize the ongoing nature of this journey and the importance of community in supporting one another. The path to healing may be fraught with challenges, but it is one that can lead to profound growth and resilience.

I’m not surprised, at all, at the dust up between leftist Simone Biles and absolutely right-on-the-issues Riley Gaines. Biles is the world’s most decorated gymnast who has earned 30 gold medals (7 Olympic gold and 23 World Championship gold). Gaines was a stellar student and athlete, winning copious awards such as the prestigious academic Sullivan Award, a 12-time NCAA All American, 5-time SEC-Champion and too many other athletic career notes to list. She has been deemed the “one of the most decorated swimmers in program history” at the University of Kentucky.

Both women have so much to be proud of in the stunning results of their sheer talent and painstaking hard work.

The erasure of women

Title IX is a statute that recognizes only two sexes: male and female. (It’s partially what inspired my wife and I to create our SHE IS SHE and HE IS HE children’s books.) The law was enacted to make sure females had the same access to education programs and activities as males. In an effort to challenge the unfairness of a boy pitching for the Champlin Park girls’ softball team and winning the Minnesota state championship, Riley Gaines rightfully called out the cheating. The high school posted about the win but disabled comments on their X post. “Comments off lol. To be expected when your star player is a boy,” Gaines replied. Charlie “Marissa” Rothenberger is a male “identifying” as a girl and pitched seven shut-out innings in the tournament. Seven!

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Biles went into total mean girl mode calling Gaines a “bully,” posting on X: “You’re truly sick, all of this campaigning because you lost a race. Straight up loser.” This is the same Biles who demanded “justice” for teammate Jordan Chiles over losing a third place Bronze medal at the 2024 Olympics over a time technicality. Imagine if that technicality was a male competitor. Would Biles still have Jordan’s back? Or would she call her a “loser” and tell her to get over it? The gold medalist didn’t stop there. She demanded “inclusion” for “transgender athletes” and then bizarrely tried to body shame Riley Gaines by telling her to “bully someone your own size, which would ironically be a male.” 

Riley is only 5 feet 5 inches tall, which is an inch taller than the average height of American women her age and 4 inches shorter than the average height of American men. Charlie “Marissa” Rothenberger, that star “trans-identifying” pitcher, is a male who is 6 feet tall.

The irony in this is that Biles isn’t doing flips around Gaines. She’s fallen flat on her face. I love when liberal thought highlights its own confusion. We know guys are taller than girls on average. They’re stronger, faster, have greater lung capacity, more muscle mass, and longer arm spans. It’s the whole reason for this fight. Also, isn’t Biles angry in the first place because Gaines is “bullying” a male athlete? Yet, she tells her, in essence, to go bully a guy. Hmmmm. A guy like Charlie? In her effort to body shame Gaines, Biles revealed the crux of the issue: guys and girls are undeniably physically different. It’s why girls and guys are segregated onto different teams in nearly every sport.

GOATs are born

Sure. Simone Biles has achieved a unique pinnacle of greatness, at least by worldly standards. And she would never have been able to do this if she had been aborted. Funny how that works. You have to be born in order to become anything later in life. Tragically, she radically supports abortion. As an adoptee and adoptive father, I’m so glad she was adopted and loved.

A recent USA Today opinion piece calls her a G.O.A.T. (Greatest Of All Time) and makes the irrefutably anti-science claim that “There is no scientific evidence that transgender women athletes have a physical advantage over cisgender women athletes.” There’s no scientific evidence that men have many physical advantages over women? You mean like here, here, here and here? The female writer, Nancy Armour, is not lauding Biles for standing up for other women but for men who displace and replace women in their own sports. It’s such a bizarre thing to applaud. It’s literally patriarchy. Since 2001, according to SheWon.org, 2,258 female athletes have been robbed of 3,151 medals by males in 46 women’s sports.

Even the far-left United Nations decries this reality, that other leftists keep pretending doesn’t exist, in its 2024 report, Violence Against Women and Girls, Its Causes and Consequences. The UN concludes: “To avoid the loss of a fair opportunity, males must not compete in the female categories of sport.”

Simone Biles then and now

The good thing about a keyboard warrior is that, sometimes, your keystrokes expose you as a fraud. Back in 2017, Simone Biles sounded more like any  female athlete with common sense (like Riley Gaines), tweeting: “ahhhh good thing guys don’t compete against girls or he’d take all the gold medals !!” Was that “transphobic”? Was that not being “inclusive”? Those two words should be stricken from our lexicon. They’re meaningless. Leftist LGBT “inclusion” demands the exclusion of women and girls’ participation, the expulsion of their achievements, and the erasure of our language. There’s even visual proof, featuring Simone herself, of the difference between a female gymnast and a male gymnast. She can’t do what the guy does. And this isn’t about demeaning women in any way. They’re awesome. But they’re not the same as men. Let’s stop the LGBTQ charade. 

As I was writing this article, Simone Biles issued an apology of sorts on X, probably because the backlash was swift and fierce. But she’s still asking for the same “inclusion” nonsense, now calling for a need for an oxymoronic “competitive equity.” How in the world does that work? Equal outcome in competition? Gaines has accepted the apology and invited Biles to the fight for women and girls, saying: “I welcome you to the fight to support fair sports and a future for female athletes. Little girls deserve the same shot to achieve that you had.”

Sorry, Simone. You were adopted not aborted. You were awarded not robbed. Your hypocritical rhetoric never sticks the landing.

Kyrie Irving’s Strong Message Amid Men’s Mental Health Awareness Month originally appeared on Athlon Sports.

Kyrie Irving was enjoying a productive 2024-25 season with the Dallas Mavericks when disaster struck on March 3 during a game against the Sacramento Kings. Irving tore his ACL that night and was subsequently ruled out for the rest of the season.

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The injury was a massive blow to Irving and the Mavericks. The nine-time All-Star averaged 24.7 points, 4.8 rebounds, 4.6 assists, 1.3 steals and 0.5 blocks per game before going down, and his absence was sorely felt.

The Mavericks, the defending Western Conference champions, would finish the regular season 10th in the standings with a 39-43 record. They would lose to the Memphis Grizzlies in their second game in the play-in tournament and miss out on a spot in the playoffs.

While many in Irving’s shoes might be feeling miserable about the current situation, he isn’t letting himself get too down. With June being Men’s Mental Health Awareness Month, he decided to send a strong message to his fans during his Twitch stream.

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“I’m watching the Finals, recovering from my ACL injury — I could be bogged down or depressed,” Irving said on his stream, via Legion Hoops. “But I’m sharing this unfiltered because you deserve it. I let people spin narratives, get into my head, violate my spiritual boundaries. That led to a spiral of emotions. I know what it feels like to lose it all or not want to be on Earth anymore. So please — don’t stay quiet, don’t retreat. I care. Reach out to your loved ones.”

While Irving is a beloved figure now, it is easy to forget that things were very different a few years ago. He caused an uproar by refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine and also shared a link to a movie that has been deemed antisemitic. The latter act contributed to Nike ending their partnership with Irving.

Those were some difficult times, but Irving has now turned over a new leaf. He has been a model citizen ever since he came to Dallas in 2023 and has spoken openly about the subject of mental health as well.

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Related: Tracy McGrady Names Better Ball-Handler Than Kyrie Irving Without Hesitation

This story was originally reported by Athlon Sports on Jun 15, 2025, where it first appeared.