A Colorado high school junior is on track to become the first girl to play varsity baseball at Longmont High School, and the local press is treating it as a civil rights milestone — never mind the uncomfortable questions about what it means when sex categories in sports become optional.
Evie Mumm, who has played at the freshman and JV levels for the Trojans, is vying for a varsity roster spot next spring. The Boulder Daily Camera gave her the full inspiration-treatment: a feature story framing her presence on the diamond as a triumph over sexism and exclusion, complete with tales of hostile umpires and beanballs.
Mumm started playing baseball about five years ago after missing softball sign-ups, according to the Daily Camera. Her father Erik, who played college ball at Nebraska in the late 1990s, praised her grit walking past a dugout full of "17- and 18-year-old guys, almost men."
Mumm told the paper she was hit by pitches "14 or 15 times" during her freshman season and believes it was intentional: "I don't think they wanted to have to admit I got a hit off them." Teammate Liam Forsythe said umpires have asked her after games why she isn't playing softball, and that opposing players have made jokes about "getting her number."
If Mumm was deliberately targeted, that's wrong — and worth reporting. But the Daily Camera's framing does more than document bad behavior. It advances the argument that sex-separated sport is itself the problem.
Colorado, like most states, offers softball as the girls' equivalent to baseball. Mumm chose baseball over softball — her right, and her family's call. But the press isn't just cheering for one girl. The celebration feeds a broader cultural project: the insistence that maintaining sex distinctions in competition is arbitrary and oppressive rather than grounded in biological reality.
The same media ecosystem that champions Mumm's right to play boys' baseball also champions biological males competing in women's sports. The logic is identical — sex categories are discrimination — but the consequences aren't. When the category "women's sports" dissolves, it isn't girls like Mumm who lose roster spots and scholarships. It's female athletes forced to compete against males with undeniable physical advantages.
The Daily Camera never engages that tension. It doesn't ask whether any boy lost a roster spot, or whether the school offers a girls' baseball team, or what happens to the concept of women's athletics when the word "women" itself is treated as optional.
The Oregonian, meanwhile, spent the week publishing a 1,400-name list of Oregon seniors headed to college sports — a data dump on everything from acrobatics to water polo that treats sex categories as administrative line items rather than contested ground. Both outlets cover the terrain without naming the fault line underneath it.
The question isn't whether Evie Mumm should play baseball. It's whether a society that won't defend the category "women" can defend women's sports at all.
