This isn't like a woman wanting to go to The Citadel. This isn't even about the female kicker getting sexually harassed on the college football team. This is about a six foot tall 12 year old basketball prodigy that is no loger allowed to play on her team because she is a girl.

Jaime Nared has been playing on the same basketball team since she was in the second grade and she was recently told she could no longer play on the team. Some parents complained that the boys weren't fouling her or playing her hard because she was a girl and it wasn't fair.

So maybe that is why she scored 30 points in a game.

The girl is good. She is amazing. Now she is playing with a team of sixth grade girls, but this isn't a competitive team. They don't travel.

A lot of people are saying she wasn't kicked out of the Hoop League because she was female but because she was too good and she was making the boys look bad.

"curiously, the timing of her ban came in the wake of a 30-point effort against an all-boys team."

Honestly,
I'm not too worried about the girl. It's a shame that she has to go
back to playing on a less competitive girls' team in which her coach
likened to "having Shaq on a high school team."
But at the same time, she's a phenom and college recruiters are
probably already licking their chops at this 6'1" prospect. If she can
keep from getting bored in the meantime, she'll be fine.

Fannie's Room 

And from Ananka's Diary:

Jaime has been playing in a boys' basketball league for a while, and
though her teammates seem in awe of her talent, the parents of the
competition weren't thrilled to discover a basketball goddess
dominating the court. As soon as they caught a glimpse of Jaime's
unbelievable skills, they searched the books and found an obscure rule
banning mixed gender teams. So Jaime--by far the best player in the
league--got the boot.

Because she's a girl. And because she's the best.

I would imagine it would be hard being a phenom like Jaime especially in Jr. High. What I remember about sixth and seventh grade is wanting to blend in and not stand out. I wanted to have the same haircut and the clothes as all my friends. I also wanted to kiss everyone in Duran Duran, but that is another story. I would imagine at 6' 1" Jaime is going to stand out even more on the girls team.

I love this quote from Alexis the Tiny:

Boy, talk about starting boys early on learning how to become absolute
male chauvinist pigs and on conventional gender roles...  after she scored 30 points against an opposing team in
a game. The parents who called for her ban claimed that it has nothing
to do with her basketball skills as a girl and yet the same people are
complaining that their sons ‘played differently against her because she
was a girl’. Yeah right. I have one word for that ban. Lame. And shame
on the people who actually enforced it citing a policy of no mixed
gender teams. Shame on all of them.

Melissa McEwan from Shakesville wrote a wonderful post on Jaime. I wish I could just copy and paste the entire thing here, but I can't. That would be stealing. I encourage you to read the entire piece that she wrote but two parts of it really stick in my mind.

...Let Jamie play with the boys her own age, as she's been doing. But it's better to make her, and all the rest of the girls in her age group,
suffer than risk emasculating boys who her team may beat. And forget
about the boys on her team who are challenged and inspired by Jamie,
like her teammate Joey Alfieri, who adorably says, "Her greatness, like, it, like, sprinkles off and goes onto us, and it kinda makes us better as a player, too."

Instead,
it's the same old shit: Protect the boys most indoctrinated into the
patriarchy (and/or their parents) and fiercely defend their privilege.
Maude forbid they actually have to face the possibility that there
might be a girl on the planet who's better at something than they are,
or learn how to treat girls as their equals.

Meanwhile, the
girls are taught one of the most important lessons of the patriarchy:
The promise that if you work hard and do as well as the boys you'll be
treated equally is a lie. If you do as well or—gasp!—better
than the boys, you'll just be barred from competing, or segregated, or
stopped however the rules allow, or demeaned until you quit.

Melissa went on to point out the same part of the story that made me cringe when I saw Jaime Nared on Good Morning America: 

The saddest part of this story for me is that Jamie
says she wants to join the NBA when she grows up. Not the stinky old
WNBA, but the NBA. The men's league. Because of course she's already
learned that aspiring to the best women have got is still second-best.

I'm not sure how to feel about that. Part of me hates it that women basketball players don't all aspire to play in the WNBA. Shouldn't we be proud of out league? But that other half of me understands and cheers her on. Why shouldn't she be in the NBA? The fact that she has a vagina should not exclude her from the premier basketball league in the world if she is good enough. My inner feminist is conflicted. 

More Here:

Long Live the Message

Unapologetically Female

Pretty Tough 

Contributing Editor Sarah also blogs at Sarah and the Goon Squad and Draft Day Suit.