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A women’s public policy group is calling on governing bodies in the Irish dancing world to amend their participation policies after a male dancer qualified for the world championships for a third year in a row after previously competing as a male.
“I just happened to be at the competition where this boy won in the girls’ category for the very first time back in 2023,” Maggie McKneely, Director of Government Relations at Concerned Women for America, told Fox News Digital. “He has been Irish-dancing for a long time and had gone to the World Championships as a boy years before, but then in 2023, he suddenly started identifying as a girl and dancing in the girl’s category.”
McKneely said that in 2023, while competing in the girl’s division, the male competitor won a regional title for the first time, and he has since gone on to win two more times, including this past December in Florida.
Concerned Women for America (CWA) sent a letter to two major governing bodies for Irish dancing, An Coimisiún Le Rincí Gaelacha and the Irish Dance Teachers’ Association of North America, calling on them to remedy their participation policies allowing dancers to compete based on gender identity. The letter pointed to other major sports governing bodies, such as the International Olympic Committee and World Athletics, the governing body for track and field sports, which CWA said have announced or adopted plans to institute strictly sex-based eligibility requirements.
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Maggie McKneely, Director of Government Relations, Concerned Women for America is pictured next to an image of female Irish dancers. (Getty Images/Fox News)
Speaking to Fox News Digital, McKneely lamented what she described as a “ripple-effect” caused by the male dancer being allowed to continue competing in the girls’ division.
“Not only did a boy win the girl’s title for his age category, placing the girl who got in second who should have been in first, but that also means that the girl who got in 11th did not qualify for Worlds because the top 10 dancers qualify for worlds. It means the girl who got 26th did not qualify for nationals because the top 25 qualify for nationals,” she said. “You have a boy on top of the podium and all these girls who have dreamed and have set goals for different placements in their age category who were not able to make them because of this one boy disrupting the entire category.”
CWA Pressident and Founder Penny Nance also pointed to the chilling effect caused by male competition, arguing that the male’s ability to compete “undermines young women” and makes them less likely to compete.
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“We strongly encourage our Young Women for America members to be involved in sports. We think it’s a great training proving ground,” Nance said. “We know that the majority of women who make it to the C-suite are women who competed athletically in some way. And so it’s good sociologically, it’s good for women’s identity, it is good for their bodies.”
Meanwhile, when pressed on the importance of separating Irish dancing by sex, McKneely and Nance told Fox News Digital that Irish dancing is not just an art form, it is “an extremely athletic art form.”
Maggie McKneely, Director of Government Relations, Concerned Women for America, (left) and Penny Nance, CEO and President, Concerned Women for America (right). (Fox News Digital)
The ex-Irish dancer pointed out that the dancing requires a lot of consistent leaps and jumps that necessitates dancers to move very quickly and execute complicated rhythm patterns while maintaining endurance. She also pointed out that if you have stronger muscles, or even different lengths of your femur bone, dancers can get higher off the ground, which is an advantage in the competition.
“At the elite level competitions that we’re talking about, like regionals and nationals, men and women don’t compete against each other. But at our local competitions, they do, just because it’s a smaller field,” McKneely shared. “And nine times out of 10, when boys are competing against girls in those local competitions, they win, purely because they do have greater endurance and greater capacity to do more of the tricks and complicated things in Irish dance than the girls do.”
Fox News Digital reached out to An Coimisiún Le Rincí Gaelacha and the Irish Dance Teachers’ Association of North America for comment on the policy push and criticism from CWA, but did not receive a response.
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A female Irish dance competitor leaps in the air mid-competition. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)
According to McKneely, a petition was sent to the governing bodies from dancers and parents who were unhappy with a male competing against females when the incident first happened in 2023, and their response was to vote on establishing a third category for people who are not biologically male or female, a sort of middle-road position.
However, McKneely said that the motion to take this action was ultimately tabled, and it never moved forward. She added that the bodies have been embroiled in a cheating scandal making them “allergic to legal threats” and afraid of upsetting folks who might sue them even further over sex-separation policies.
