EXCLUSIVE — Young female athletes, led by former NCAA champion swimmer Riley Gaines, descended on Capitol Hill this week to oppose federal efforts to include transgender athletes in women’s sports.
The visit came the same week as the anniversary of the passage of Title IX, the landmark law that ensures equal athletic opportunities for women, and Gaines’s testimony at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on LGBT civil rights.
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It also comes after a year of vitriolic sparring from both sides of the aisle on an issue Gaines says should not be partisan.
Critics have blasted the women as transphobic for going public with their discomfort over sharing a locker room with a transgender teammate and argue they want to exclude LGBT people from public spaces.
But Gaines says her advocacy is about protecting women, citing those injured competing against transgender athletes. Speaking to the Washington Examiner on Capitol Hill Wednesday, she brought up the case of Payton McNabb, the female high school volleyball player from North Carolina who suffered a concussion and neck injury last September when a transgender competitor spiked the ball in her face.
Gaines believes the public quietly sides with activists like her but lamented the issue may not become truly bipartisan until more women are injured.
“Unfortunately, I think it's going to take more girls getting injured like Payton McNabb for them to stand up, and they know it's wrong,” Gaines said of Democrats.
“It’s the same thing we're seeing, whether that's ESPN or the NCAA, they know it's wrong because, especially in regards to the people who cover sports, they see the difference between men and women," she added. "And they're choosing to throw that out of the window and not acknowledge it in the guise of being inclusive again.”
Gaines rose to prominence when she tied last spring with Lia Thomas, her transgender competitor whose victory sparked a nationwide debate over fairness and inclusion in competitive sports. But she has drawn the ire of liberals even as the Right has rushed to her cause.
In his opening statement at Wednesday’s hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) accused Gaines and conservatives of pushing “hateful rhetoric” against transgender people.
"Transgender youth are among the most at risk of homelessness, depression, and death by suicide," Durbin said. "So, when these young people who are already struggling hear politicians amplify hateful rhetoric that denies their very existence, what message does it send?"
“What message does this send to women, to young girls, who are denied of these opportunities?” Gaines later replied to the No. 2 Senate Democrat. “So easily, their rights to privacy and safety [are] thrown out of the window to protect a small population, protect one group as long as they're happy."
Asked about that exchange and how she thought the hearing went, Gaines said she was pleasantly surprised.
“For some reason, I had anticipated it being much worse,” she said of the civility she experienced in the Senate.
It’s not far-fetched to expect fireworks from members of Congress, especially on such a charged matter. Most of the coverage Gaines and her fellow athletes have received has been from conservative media. The minimal legacy press attention the girls have received, meanwhile, has been framed around protecting LGBT rights.
Gaines argued that the national conversation on the issue has been stripped of any nuance, saying, “It's about virtue signaling. It's about being seen as kind, being seen as this figure that embraces diversity and is welcoming and accepting and tolerant.”
“But it's not actually inclusive to allow a man onto our podium taking our scholarships and our titles,” she added.
She and Paula Scanlan, one of her competitors who has since become a fellow advocate, penned an op-ed for the Washington Examiner on Thursday calling for an end to women being silenced on the issue due to “fear and bullying.”
Gaines had planned to go to dental school after college, though she has put that on pause to focus on her advocacy work, now serving as an adviser for Independent Women’s Voice. She says she’s working on the federal, state, and local levels to enact change, including advocating candidates who “acknowledge the value of women's sports” and lobbying Congress and legislatures across the country to pass legislation that establishes gender-based rules for athletes.
“There's a lot of different realms of what this looks like,” she explained of her work. “But I think another thing I'm kind of advocating for here, which seems to be remiss, is unity amongst the political spectrum. I think this issue very easily and naturally gets labeled as a political issue that right-wing extremists want to fight for, but that's not how the general public feels.”
Gaines hopes to unite “this coalition of groups," she said. "This coalition of women who feel strongly that women are capable, we are strong. That being said, we're created different, we're created equal to men, but we're different. We have different capabilities, but we honor those differences.”
The House of Representatives passed the Protecting Women and Girls in Sports Act in April with no Democratic support. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said at the time that his GOP colleagues were trying to “sensationalize an issue that doesn't really exist in the way they are falsely portraying.”
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Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), a centrist who helped lead the effort to pass the bill, told the Washington Examiner on Thursday that she wasn’t sure if there was a bipartisan path forward on the issue.
“I just don't see that happening,” she said of finding national unity on this matter. “I think it's going to be very partisan, which is insane to me.”