With her support, we developed competence and confidence in our very bodies, where we live.
After a long struggle with boundary violations, The Private, Almost Sacred Arena for Sister Sport succumbed to unnatural causes and passed away, surrounded by loved ones, last month in Puyallup, Washington. She was taken from us far too soon. She was only 130 years old.
Affectionately known as Arena, The Private, Almost Sacred Arena for Sister Sport was a dream, a reality, and the only home that truly felt like ours: a place composed of all-female gymnasiums, all-female pools, and all-female fields. She fought bravely until the end, valiantly participating in her final Save Women’s Sports rally the day before her death.
Her Early Years
Born on April 4, 1896, during the first intercollegiate women’s basketball game, Arena was a precocious child. Immediately, she understood that for girls and women, athletic training and competition are synonymous with liberation – and must be protected from male intrusions.
During that all-female contest between Stanford University1 and the University of California at Berkeley…
“the fighting was hard and the playing was good. The girls jumped, scrambled, and fell over one another on the floor, but they didn’t mind it. They were up quick as a flash, chasing after the ball again.” – San Francisco Examiner2
Five hundred boisterous fans packed San Francisco’s Armory Hall for the game – and they, too, were all women. Why no men? Organizers barred them, knowing they would have mocked and jeered at the players.
The Only Home That Truly Felt Like Ours
Later, while presiding over decades of women’s sports advocacy before and after Title IX, The Arena for Sister Sport permitted men to watch, but almost never to play, except in consensual coed contests. The prospect that men would one day feel entitled to watch women undress in their own locker rooms never entered her mind.
Arena became our sanctuary, a nearly sacred space where, as children, we swam in lanes that were clearly reserved for us girls. Where, as teens, we looked up to fierce female coaches who demonstrated athletic skills with an intense determination we’d never witnessed before. Where, as adults, we kept competing, and kept winning, now in recreational women’s softball or soccer leagues. Where, as old women, we called on decades of muscle memory and competitive training to succeed at masters-level, female-only contests.
“We Can Do It!” Arena had told us via posters plastered to our high school locker room walls. We believed her. With her support, we developed competence and confidence in our very bodies, where we live.
A Pernicious Environmental Disease: Male Entitlement Syndrome
But then, having fought bravely to defend her borders, our beloved sister fell ill due to prolonged exposure to Male Entitlement Syndrome.3 This is a progressive, environmental pathology characterized by the belief that no door marked WOMEN may be closed to men.
“We are winning!” Arena, ever the optimist, used to say, to encourage others. But she watched with mounting fatigue and dismay as girls and women worldwide suffered boundary invasions she could not prevent.
“Sport governing bodies keep hedging,” Arena confided to her friend Mariah Burton Nelson just days before her death. “Many now pledge to keep boys out of the female category, but then won’t check for altered birth certificates or they allow males with genetic disorders to sneak in.
“The International Olympic Committee is dragging its feet, almost two years after humiliating itself by giving gold medals to male boxers who had flunked sex tests but were ‘female on their passports.’
“How hard can it be to require sex-testing? The only way to explain this is behind-the-scenes pressure from entitled men.”
Death Blows: Fraud, Public Sexual Assault, Failure on the Part of School Officials to Report for Two Months
Arena’s health took a turn for the worse during a wrestling meet in Puyallup, Washington, on December 6, 2025.
Kallie Keeler, a 16-year-old sophomore at Rogers High School, was allegedly sexually assaulted by a male wrestler pretending to be a girl. Neither Kallie nor her coach noticed the fraud beforehand. If they had, Kallie would have forfeited. This would have been her only recourse, since Male Entitlement Syndrome has so polluted the culture that Washington and 22 other states allow boys to opt in to girls’ teams and locker rooms based on their beliefs.
When the assault happened – when, mid-wrestling match, Kallie felt her opponent’s fingers “very forcefully for several seconds” pushing into her vagina, as she told Brandi Kruse, who broke the story – she called out to her mother, aghast, then surrendered the match. Keeler came forward publicly after learning that thirteen female athletes at Emerald Ridge High School had already complained about the same boy, who, along with another boy, had developed a habit of standing and watching the girls as they changed clothes. Instead of banishing the boys, a school official gave the girls indoctrination materials about gender.
Two independent wrestling experts who reviewed the video found “no legitimate reason for Keeler’s opponent to place his arm between her legs during that sequence.”
Despite a legal requirement to report such allegations, the school waited almost two months, until reporter Brandi Kruse called. Last week, the county sheriff found probable cause for a felony rape charge.
Too Little, Too Late
For our beloved Arena, it was too little, too late. Too heartbreaking. Too infuriating.
“Will Washington change its state law now? I doubt it,” Arena told Mariah on her deathbed. “Remember how Virginia did not ban men even after a man on the sex-offender registry repeatedly disrobed in your high school/community pool’s locker room? And all they do now is check swimmers’ IDs, including yours, against a registered sex-offender database? It’s killing me that they’re still fine with other boys and men in women’s locker rooms.”
Arena leaves a legacy of women who first found their strength and courage within her buildings, fields, and pools. She is preceded in death by countless feminists.
Survivors include her wife, Gina, and millions of grateful fans.
In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to nonprofits working to revive female-only sports and spaces. These include Champion Women, ICONS, the International Consortium on Female Sport, Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender, LGB Courage Coalition, or Sex Matters.
Services will be private, in gyms and locker rooms where girls still get to close the door.
As always, I welcome your thoughts — and appreciate your subscriptions and shares. With love and courage, Mariah
You might also like:
Stanford won, 2-1.
The San Francisco Examiner, as quoted by Lynne Emery, “The First Intercollegiate Contest for Women: Basketball, April 4, 1896,” in Reet Howell, ed., Her Story in Sport: A Historical Anthology of Women in Sports (West Point, NJ: Leisure Press 1982), p. 420.
Initially, Arena’s disease presented as Gender Ideology Disorder: the mystical belief in a human capacity to “transition” from one sex to another and back again as often as one pleases, or to become no sex at all, or both sexes at once. Upon further examination, doctors determined that male entitlement, not gender, was the culprit.
Thank you for illuminating "Male Entitlement Syndrome," a progressive, environmental pathology characterized by the belief that no door marked WOMEN may be closed to men.
Go, Mariah! Great round-up. Touché, indeed!
Have restacked several times.
(and especially love Footnote #3)