Numerous female athletes and coaches are in Washington, D.C. this week for a series of events surrounding the Our Bodies, Our Sports “Take Back Title IX” Summer 2024 Bus Tour organized by a coalition of women’s rights groups, including the Independent Women’s Forum. The coast-to-coast tour is protesting the push for transgender athletes in women’s sports and the Biden administration’s rewriting of Title IX.
“Women’s sports must stay sex-based, which means female. Same goes for sex-based spaces for women, which means educating those people with positions in power that make the rules so they can do better,” tennis legend Martina Navratilova said on Tuesday at a bus tour event in the nation’s capital attended by hundreds of supporters.
Navratilova said that she was attacked when she initially spoke out about men entering women’s sports.
“Now, it’s, ‘Oh, you’re a homophobe.’ Go figure. I’ve been out since ’81; yeah, I’m a homophobe,” she scoffed. “‘You’re a bigot, you’re a transphobe, you’re a Nazi, you’re a fascist, you’re a communist,’ everything and everything in between. And this is coming from the left. I am the left! My people are turning on me. They’re turning on us, women, who speak up for women’s sex-based rights.”
She added, “Women’s rights should not be political!”
Other female athletes in attendance of the bus tour event included former NCAA competitive swimmer Riley Gaines, former 1986 National Champion gymnast Jennifer Sey, former Oberlin College Head Women’s Lacrosse Coach Kim Russell.
Title IX, the landmark federal civil rights law enacted in 1972, prohibits sex-based harassment in any education programs and activities that receive federal funding. The new Biden administration regulations, which take effect Aug. 1, would protect against discrimination based on sex stereotypes, sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics.
“President Biden has taken 37 words and rewrote it entirely,” Gaines said in a radio interview on Wednesday about the Title IX rewrite. “And now it is half a million words. It is 1,577 pages; should tell you everything you need to know.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is hosting a round table discussion on Wednesday afternoon with Gaines, former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, the Independent Women’s Forum’s Heather Higgins, and Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), who is chairwoman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, in honor of this week’s 52nd anniversary of Title IX.
The tour bus was recently vandalized with eggs and profanity written on the vehicle while the athletes were stopping in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.