A boy is favored to win the girls' high jump at the New Hampshire Indoor Championships, and a lawmaker responds by saying no one cares about the event anyway
Another duly elected brainwashed liberal, another incoherent, self-defeating argument
Maelle Jacques is a sophomore member of the girls’ indoor track team at Kearsarge Regional High School in North Sutton, New Hampshire. A versatile athlete, Jacques placed second in the 1,600-meter run and fifth in the high jump at the 2023 New Hampshire Division III Outdoor State Track and Field Championships last June as a freshman. After playing soccer in the fall, Jacques now sits atop the state’s Division II performance list in the high jump heading into Sunday’s 2024 New Hampshire Indoor Track and Field State Championships. (New Hampshire has three divisions for outdoor track, but only two for indoor.)
Although Jacques’ best jump this season of 5’ 1” is relatively modest—the girls’ indoor statewide record is 5’ 10”, set by Bishop Guertin’s Paige McConney in 2005—he has attracted an exaggerated amount of attention for his exploits as a result of every pronoun in this sentence being correct. I wrote about Jacques’ new and unruly appearance on the Granite State high-school track scene last May, and yesterday, NH Journal published a story about the still-blooming controversy.
The NH Journal story’s author, Damien Fisher, writes:
This season, Jacques dominated in the high jump competition and is the only athlete in the state competing in the girl’s division to break five feet. Competition among high school boys in New Hampshire has seen more than a dozen athletes break the five-foot mark this season.
Tweaking this a little in ways that strengthen Fisher’s point: Jacques has jumped only one inch higher than two of the girls he’ll be jumping against on Sunday, and two girls from Division I schools have jumped higher this season than he has (one of those girls has a best mark is 5’ 5”, while the other has cleared 5’ 2”). So, Jacques hasn’t really dominated the event this winter. But if this is an overstatement, it’s far more of an understatement to note that “more than a dozen” boys have cleared the five-foot mark this indoor season. The 24 boys who will compete in the high jump on Sunday—12 in Division I and 12 in Division II—have all cleared at least 5’ 8”, with the top-ranked boy seeded at 6’ 4.25”.
Fisher can be forgiven for being unfamiliar with the high jump, and he did a thorough job gathering quotes from relevant figures—at least the ones who would talk to him. Fisher unsuccessfully sought comment from Jeffrey Collins, the executive director of the New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association. Collins, whose job includes answering exactly such queries from the public, will be hearing from at least one more person about this shortly if he chooses not to break his silence.
Winfried Feneberg, the Kearsarge Superintendent of Schools, had this to say (oomphases mine):
Each student-athlete has the right to compete in the activity of their choice. We believe that limiting access to any activity violates our core mission and vision, which are grounded in supporting every student and student-athlete’s right to pursue their goals and interests.
Do girls have just as much a right as boys do to pursue goals and interests like girls’ track and be supported in this endeavor? And regarding the bolded words, today’s deviant class of school administrators love pulling this dirtbag move—pretending to speak for the herd when in reality most people think they sound batshit insane, but have limited ways of expressing their disagreement without being either ignored or hectored into simmering quasi-assent.
The most mindless words in the article arose from one Timothy Horrigan, Democrat of Dover.
Rep. Timothy Horrigan (D-Dover) testified against SB 524 on Tuesday, arguing that “so-called ‘biological females’” did not need protection from males in their sports.
“We’re especially worried about cis women or cis girls, but this also prevents trans men from competing,” Horrigan said.
And Horrigan dismissed the case of Maelle Jacques because it involves an “obscure competition.”
“We don’t even know if she’s actually trans,” Horrigan said of Jacques, “but if she is, that’s certainly a very unfair thing [to keep her from competing]. A lot of these cases, they are pretty obscure competitions that normally sports fans wouldn’t be paying much attention to.”
So, according to a pretty obscure legislator that normally sports fans wouldn’t be paying any attention to, the high jump is irrelevant, but also sufficiently important to allow “trans girls” to enter and ruin. But it’s nice of this brilliant arbiter to want to keep the door open for the thousands of American girls who want to suit up on boys’ sports teams and get knocked unconscious or nearly so a few times a week. And again we see the same nonsense with the plural personal pronouns, as though everyone else is as ignorant as Horrigan—even if a startling number of state and U.S. legislators from coast to coast do in fact qualify for one or more mental disabilities and the rest are perilously close.
But most disappointing of all is that each and every one of us remembers when Democrats, and New Hampshire Dems specifically, were reliable voices for trying to protect the vulnerable. Now, elected officials like Horrigan are degrading the lives of high-school girls nationwide and making the most asinine excuses imaginable for keeping the circus in place. Even if the protesting girls didn’t face censure from within the school itself for opposing the endless promulgation of the demented transgender rodeo, teenagers of any sex cannot and should not be expected to step up and say “Enough of this crap is enough” themselves. Especially not when they’re watching so many of their parents, coaches, and teachers speak and behave as if they all regularly bathe in paint thinner.
The NHIAA’s main phone number is (603) 228-8671 and its e-mail address is info@nhiaa.org. Rumor has it that both modes of contact are sorely underutilized in the dead of winter, and that the organization’s grunt workers like hearing from as many of us track fans as possible.
Historical footnote: the New Hampshire girls’ outdoor state record in the high jump is also 5’ 10”, set by Alison Poulin of Oyster River at the 1988 Meet of Champions. I’d like to be able to say I watched Poulin’s record-setting leap, as I was competing in the 3,200 meters for Concord High School at the same meet thirty-six years ago. But all I really remember was turning my head and looking across the field when I heard the crowd roar in response to the feat (not during my race).
Poulin is easily the best multi-sport female athlete ever to emerge from the state. She and I were part of the same University of Vermont track program before she wisely transferred to the University of New Hampshire. Over thirty years after graduating from college, Poulin still holds five individual Wildcat records in outdoor and indoor track, including 14.01 for the 100-meter high hurdles, and she competed in the 1992 and 1996 U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials.
Other historical footnote: North Sutton, New Hampshire is not far from where a now-deceased and genuinely dirty uncle of mine grew goats and raised weed in the 1970s and 1980s before eventually going to prison for molesting as many of his grandchildren as he could get his hands on. As far as “black sheep” and public-menace status, no one in the Beck family stands a chance of topping the legendary felonious antics of Uncle Karl.