In Maine, where the transgender issue is playing out in dramatic form before the public eye, Portland public schools superintendent Ryan Scallon claimed that preventing transgender athletes from participating in women’s and girls’ sports is the modern equivalent of the crusades for women’s suffrage and racial equality.

This is an outrageous misappropriation of our history and an appalling display of just how extreme and out-of-touch with reality the Left’s gender ideology truly is.

By attempting to justify their radical agenda and frame themselves as being on the right side of history, Maine Democrats have fully divorced themselves from both historical accuracy and biological reality in a shocking affront to American women and girls.

Allowing men to infiltrate women’s spaces and sports is not a laudable civil rights crusade. The Left’s re-spun historical narrative and projection onto today’s transgender craze is more an insult to those who fought for women’s equal rights and is a disturbing redefinition of the foundational American principles of equality, justice, and human dignity.

It’s tragically ironic that the women’s rights movement, which inspired so much change in a deeply unequal, dehumanizing system, is being appropriated to undermine its own cause – freedom of women from male oppression – in a deceptive, manipulative agenda.

The fact of the matter is the transgender movement is anything but pro-woman, and although it seeks common ground with past social justice campaigns, it is a startling perversion of the privileges these campaigns sought to guarantee for all citizens.

Contrary to their distorted accounting, the Maine Democrats’ agenda in fact strikes at the heart of equal opportunity itself, since it sacrifices women’s fair opportunity to compete on a level playing field and excel against their biological counterparts. It targets women for unfair discrimination by undermining Title IX and privileging the rights of biological men.

This isn’t the preservation of equal opportunity in the slightest, since inclusion that can only be achieved at the expense of excluding another group is not inclusion at all.

Additionally, the comparison of biological male athletes competing in female sports to America’s civil rights movement is both absurd and profoundly disturbing. The exclusion of African Americans from equal opportunity and treatment in American society was based purely upon prejudice, malice, and cruelty.

Their exclusion was unjust because they are inherently equal citizens and have an equal claim upon the rights and privileges of American citizenship, just as today’s women also have a claim that must be honored.

Opposition to transgender athletes competing in female sports is not hateful, unjust, or arbitrarily exclusionary. Acknowledging that biological men should not engage in physical competition with biological women is a fact based upon the undeniable reality that men have an inherent physical advantage over women.

Allowing men into women’s sports arenas destroys any chance for women to excel. The movement to protect female sports is not rooted in the fearmongering, hatred, and ostracism that characterized past civil rights abuses – it’s rooted in scientific reality and the basic principles of fairness and equity.

Ultimately, the position of the Maine Democrats is one divorced from every form of reality: from the reality of our civil rights and suffragist history, from biological reality, and from the reality that most American voters don’t want men in women’s sports.

By framing this as an issue comparable to suffrage and civil rights, the Left is seeking to manipulate Americans into believing their common-sense instinct about preserving women’s sports for biological females is wrong.

In some sense, Scallon is right, though not in the way he intended. Civil rights are indeed being violated, but “female identifying” biological male athletes are the perpetrators of this discrimination and injustice, not the victims. The Maine Democrats’ campaign against female-only sports is an attack upon the very definition of femininity, a dismantling of the sacred virtue of equal opportunity, and a reversal of women’s rights and status in this country.

We cannot cave to the demands of the radical gender ideology mob and accept their alternate reality. We must stand for truth, for justice, for reality – such is the debt of gratitude we owe to the civil rights pioneers who came before us and our duty to the future generations of American girls and women.

Mr. Blackwell is the first African American to be elected statewide office in Ohio – both as State Treasurer and Secretary of State; former mayor of Cincinnati and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.