by Debra Heine
The trans-identified girl’s basketball player who was filmed knocking down a rival player in Massachusetts earlier this year, was allegedly kicked off a rowing team a couple of years ago for leering at, and commenting on a girl’s bare breasts in the locker room.
In addition to basketball and rowing, the 6-foot tall KIPP Academy senior has competed against girls in multiple other high school sports, including volleyball, hurdles, shot put and tae kwon do, predictably shattering records and leading his teams to victory, according to the Australian online magazine Quillette.
Lazuli Clark, the trans-identified student, can be seen in the middle of the volleyball promotional photo below:
Male athlete Lazuli Clark of KIPP Academy excels as a 3-sport athlete in girls' sports:
🏀 Girls' basketball: playoff bound
🏐 Girls' volleyball: League All-Star led the team in kills, aces & digs
👟 Girls' track & field: set meet records in 400m hurdles & shot put at the Lynn… https://t.co/hgA7HG1SrI pic.twitter.com/5QaSBXXSzf— ICONS (@icons_women) February 22, 2024
His gender-bending athletic exploits went viral in February after he injured three opponents during a girls’ basketball game and the opposing team had to forfeit the game after only 16 minutes of play.
A video posted on YouTube by “Inside Lowell” shows a Collegiate Charter School girl being dragged to the ground like a ragdoll while wrestling for a rebound with the much larger biological male player from KIPP Academy.
The girl can be seen grabbing her back and wincing in pain as she tried to get back up off the floor. Sources said the biological male player is “more than 6 feet tall with facial hair.”
KIPP reportedly withdrew from its next game after a backlash.
Clark’s inappropriate locker room behavior was mentioned in a report in the U.S. Senate last month as a “direct case of harassment.”
The incident took place in 2021-22 while he was a member of a private girls rowing club, according to the report submitted by Senator Bill Cassidy (R-La.) to the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee on March 20.
During the course of this investigation, Committee staff discovered a direct case of harassment involving Massachusetts youth in a private, free-standing rowing league whose policies are governed by USA Rowing. In Massachusetts and New England, competitive rowing occurs mainly via private leagues as it is too expensive for high schools to offer. According to a parent who spoke with Committee staff, a male athlete was allowed to join the women’s varsity crew team, which caused many issues for the female athletes.
The male athlete was also allowed to use the women’s locker room in accordance with USA Rowing policy. The female athletes avoided using the locker room, but nonetheless a few months later, the male athlete was caught staring openly at one of the female athletes while she changed her clothes in the women’s locker room and remarked, “oooh [titties]!” When a female athlete nearby asked if it was the first time he had seen female breasts, the male responded, “uhh yeah” with a laugh. The male athlete was suspended for this incident.
Quillette received a copy of an October 12, 2022 letter written by 15 concerned parents to the United States Rowing Association (USRowing), the sport’s national governing body. USRowing reportedly allows men to opt into the women’s categories as a matter of policy.
According to the parents, the club’s 40 female competitors were ‘intimidated’ into silence.
Parents complained in the letter that their daughters were forced to share a room with Clark during team trips.
“The girls spoke to us about quitting rowing because of the intimidation of being forced to be in a hotel room alone with a male,” they said.
“Our daughters have stayed quiet because they are afraid. We tried to speak up for them, and we were shut down,” the letter read.
We tried to speak to leadership at all levels. [But] name-calling and the threat of mental health is being used as emotional blackmail to keep us all quiet while women are harmed and devalued…Our daughters also faced a locker room situation where they were uncomfortable…They stopped changing in the locker room and began to hide away.
These young girls should never have been put through being told they had to face a male body everyday as they undressed…It was a constant thought, a constant threat to submit and a constant awareness. Yet they dared not say anything (except privately to their parents). The rowing team also required the male athlete to room with them on trips. The girls spoke to us about quitting rowing because of the intimidation of being forced to be in a hotel room alone with a male.
One of the signatories told Quillette that Clark joined the female rowing club in 2021, after placing “near the bottom” with the club’s corresponding male team.
Clark “didn’t bother to shave or otherwise maintain the outward aesthetic pretenses of female gender identification, and even continued to wear the male club’s uniform,” Quillette reported.
After the locker room incident, team officials reported Clark to the U.S. Center for SafeSport, a congressionally mandated body dedicated to “ending sexual, physical, and emotional abuse on behalf of athletes everywhere.”
SafeSport took action in late 2022, and Clark “never rowed for the club again—in either gender category.”
A parent told Quillette that they had begun expressing their concerns about Clark to USRowing in the Spring 2022, but were ignored.
“These girls have all been rowing for years, and for many, the main goal is to get recruited to top universities with rowing teams,” a letter signatory said. “As soon as you express concerns about men rowing as women, you risk getting called out as a ‘transphobe.’ No one wants to risk that. These are girls who’ve been training for three hours a day, six days a week, 50 weeks a year. So when you’re told that the team is going out of town, and someone needs to share a hotel room with a [male] rower, they just look around, and it’s basically like, ‘okay, who wants to take one for the team.’”
Clark continues to compete against girls in several other sports however.
He was named a Commonwealth Atlantic Conference All-Star in Volleyball after after leading Kipp’s team in most statistics, including the most “Kills” (unreturnable shots).
He had more kills “than the rest of the team combined, and the most aces and blocks,” according to school statistics.
As a female competitor, Clark also reportedly smashed records in the 400m hurdles and shot put at the Lynn All-City Track Championship last May.
Clark is also a longtime Tae Kwon Do student at the Tiger Institute in Saugus, Massachusetts, where he is a black belt and competes against girls.
He reportedly won second place in 16-17 year old Black Belt Sparring at the Cervizzi’s Spring Invitational Tournament in March 2023, and went on to win the Fall tournament in October.
The Tae Kwon Do gym promoted a fundraiser for Clark to tour Salzburg and Vienna in Austria in June with an opera ensemble.
The “tour of a lifetime” fundraiser included a photo of him dressed in a tuxedo while singing, and resulted in $2,550 in donations.
“It’s sure to be an amazing and life-changing opportunity that will allow me to experience a new culture, enhance my performing skills and become a cultural ambassador through the sharing of music,” the promotion read.
“With the help of my family, friends and other supporters, I know I can make it happen. Please consider supporting my performance and travel dreams with a donation.”
Clark was featured in a Center on Reinventing Public Education report last November titled: “To Be a Student in 2023: 10 Teens Open Up About Mental Health, the Age of AI and the Long Shadow of the Pandemic.”
He told the organization that laws passed by states to protect women made it difficult for him to focus on school.
“Going to school is the least of people’s concerns at this point for a lot of people,” Clark said. “There are days where I’m like, oh yeah, I have to worry about my AP U.S. history project and yesterday another state basically made it so that I can never exist in that state. And it’s like, how’s anyone supposed to think about anything at all when there’s all of that going on? Even if you’re not directly impacted by it. Most people in my generation know somebody who’s impacted in one way or the other.”
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Debra Heine reports for American Greatness.
Photo “Lazuli Clark” by ICONS.
