Hey, let’s talk about how great Title IX is!

As Vanessa noted in the What We Missed yesterday, the National Women’s Law Center has filed complaints against 12 school districts for violating Title IX by not providing high school girls with equal opportunities to play sports.

The complaints are part of a larger public education campaign to raise awareness of gender inequity in high school athletics across the country. As NWLC Co-President Marcia Greenberger explains, “Nationwide, only 41 percent of all high school athletes are girls, even though they make up half the student population. That means schools are giving girls 1.3 million fewer opportunities than boys to play sports nationwide.”

So in honor of the Rally for Girls’ Sports campaign, let’s talk about Title IX!

These days, I am a huge Title IX fan. But whenever there is yet another article about how young women take their rights for granted and don’t appreciate the hard work of their feminist foremothers, I think about Title IX. Because, to be honest, for quite awhile I thought Title IX was kind of boring. I mean, it’s got that nondescript name and it’s all about things like “proportionality.” Compared to issues like rape or reproductive freedom or the fact that women make up only 17% of Congress, whether there’s a girls’ swim team at the local high school can seem a little, well, small.

But mostly Title IX didn’t capture my interest because I grew up taking girls athletics completely for granted. Which is truly amazing—and proof that Title IX was one of the most profoundly transformative feminist successes of the last half-century. Within six years of being enacted in 1972, the percentage of high school girls playing team sports had jumped from about 4% to 25%. While my mom played soccer on one of the first women’s club teams when she was in grad school, I strapped on my first pair of shin guards at age eight and played throughout my childhood, in high school, and eventually college too.

There is perhaps no other feminist victory that has influenced the first two decades of my life more than Title IX. And like (goal-scoring, layup-making, relay-winning) fish that don’t even know what they’re swimming in is water, my generation has simply accepted girls playing sports as our reality.

And a whole lot of research suggests we’ve benefited enormously from it—from higher self-confidence to lower teen pregnancy rates to better health. As the New York Times reported last winter, recent studies have even managed to tease out the effects of athletic participation from other confounding variables and provide compelling evidence that playing sports has a direct long-term effect on women’s education, employment, and health.

Hopefully, a time when every girl takes for granted the opportunities I did—to play and compete and learn and bond and lead and be active—is not so very far off.