Suzanne Downing: Mary Peltola has a voting record, and it hurt women and girl athletes

By SUZANNE DOWNING

June 30, 2026 – There are moments when the US Supreme Court settles an argument that never should have required nine justices in black robes to resolve. Today was one of those days.

The Court ruled that states may protect women’s and girls’ sports by recognizing what every coach, parent, and athlete has known since organized sports began: Boys and girls are different. Biology is real. It isn’t hate speech. It isn’t “misinformation.” It isn’t something that changes because a government form has different pronouns.

Reality won today.

Breaking: Rep. Jamie Allard celebrates Supreme Court victory as justices uphold protections for girls’ sports

Which brings us to Mary Peltola.

As Alaska’s former US representative campaigns for the US Senate, she talks about Alaska First, coexisting with fish, and freedom. But when Congress gave her the chance to stand up for Alaska girls and women, she ducked, dodged, and then voted against female athletes.

During the 2022 campaign, Peltola was asked the simple question that candidates across America were being asked: Should transgender athletes compete according to their gender identity? Instead of giving a straight answer, she called it “more complicated than some make it out to be.” She wanted fairness. She wanted inclusion. She wanted to protect those who were already “marginalized.”

Translation: She didn’t want to tell voters where she stood.

Then came the vote that removed all doubt. In 2023, the House considered the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, legislation designed to preserve female athletic competition based on biological sex.

Mary Peltola voted no and called the bill “bullying.” She called it “federal overreach.” She worried about making life harder for transgender athletes.

What she didn’t seem worried about were the girls of America, the ones who trained for years only to lose a championship to a biological male. She said that this never happens.  It happens repeatedly, and in fact just last month, AB Hernandez (a transgender female athlete from Jurupa Valley High School, California) won first place in the girls’ high jump and triple jump at the CIF State Track & Field Championships in Clovis on May 31. He also placed third in the long jump.

The girls who lose podium finishes know that this happens. The girls who lose scholarships know.

Apparently those girls weren’t the vulnerable population that Peltola would protect.

Peltola had every opportunity to be their advocate. Instead, she became another reliable vote for the radical orthodoxy that insisted everyone ignore what their own eyes could plainly see.

While Peltola was voting in Washington to undermine the principle behind women’s sports, Alaska was moving in the opposite direction.

In 2023, Alaska adopted regulations requiring that girls’ teams in Alaska School Activities Association competition be reserved for students who were assigned female at birth. The rule wasn’t radical or discriminatory. It reflected facts of life.

The Supreme Court has now affirmed that states have every right to make exactly that distinction.

After years of being told that biology was merely an opinion, the highest court in the land has informed people like Peltola that chromosomes still exist.

Don’t read this wrong: People who identify as transgender deserve to be treated with kindness and respect. And also with kid gloves, because this is a type of illness — gender dysphoria.

But kindness does not require pretending that males and females are physically interchangeable and compassion is not the same thing as surrendering common sense.

Mary Peltola chose not to the fashionable politics of the moment, where questioning obvious biological differences could earn you labels like “bigot” or “transphobe.” She chose politics over women.

Now she’s asking Alaska to reward that judgment with a promotion to the United States Senate. Alaskans should remember that when she was finally forced to choose between protecting girls’ sports and protecting progressive ideology, she didn’t waffle anymore.

She voted against girls.

Suzanne Downing is founder and editor of The Alaska Story and is a longtime Alaskan and a runner.

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