Riley Gaines: Trans athletes in sports is 'erasure of what a woman is'
All-American swimmer Riley Gaines weighs in on the debate over transgender athletes in women's sports on 'America Reports.'
In 2021, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) made more than $1.14 billion in revenues, about 87% came from March Madness, mostly from broadcast rights.
No doubt college sports is big business.
Men bring in the money. So, it is no surprise the NCAA has doubled down on discriminating against female athletes by prioritizing males to compete in their sports.
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Female athletes are under attack by an insidious form of sex discrimination driven by identity politics and condoned by the majority of campus administrators and athletic departments unwilling to stand up for the rights of their own female champions. They want the trophies and the dollars that come with it.
University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas swims in the 500 Freestyle finals during the NCAA Swimming and Diving Championships on March 17th, 2022, at the McAuley Aquatic Center in Atlanta Georgia. (Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Last year, Americans were awakened to the real March madness when 6’1" trans-identifying male swimmer Lia Thomas ran away with a national title in women’s swimming. What has the NCAA done to reckon with this blatant injustice that sent a shock wave through the sporting world?
Unless incoming President Charlie Baker, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, makes major changes, the answer is nothing except double down on its "transgender inclusive" agenda while distancing itself from any accountability.
Slick new documents distributed by the NCAA force this agenda on all member schools, further denying safety, privacy and equal protection for female college athletes.
These new guidelines peddle vogue corporate trainings that deny basic facts about human biology and physiology. They continue the same tone-deaf denial of how trans policies are impacting the mental and emotional health of female athletes, including Thomas’ University of Pennsylvania female teammates, who are told to sit down and shut up while forced to dress in front of a male in the locker room.
In doing so the NCAA doubles down on stripping female athletes of their identity and equal rights under Title IX. Never mind that forcing female athletes to forgo the safety and privacy of women’s locker rooms with biological males is a form of sexual and emotional abuse – in violation of Title IX.
The NCAA’s glitzy new Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Review Framework imposes an ideological agenda through college athletic programs. It seeks to do President Joe Biden’s bidding in his quest to reclassify sex under Title IX as a matter of identity, not biological reality.
Coaches care about winning, so under this new framework, recruiting biological men to be in women’s sports will be an advantage. Why not "play by the rules" and recruit males identifying as women?
That will be the trend if we don’t have more courageous leaders at universities stand up for their female athletes. These elite college women athletes have trained their whole lives, had their parents drive them to practice before dawn, and attend all their events only to watch a male steal their trophy or take their scholarship?
President Joe Biden has pushed to reclassify sex under Title IX as a matter of identity, not biological reality. (REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst )
Concerned Women for America filed a civil rights complaint against the University of Pennsylvania, and joined the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, female athletes, and other women’s rights groups at a rally outside NCAA’s annual meeting to petition them to stop discriminating against women.
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Our rally recounted the NCAA’s shameful history of allowing males to displace women in their own sports:
- Exalting males in women’s sports at the expense of female athletes;
- Discriminating against women in favor of men who claim our identity;
- And denying the truth of what a woman is by exploiting and excluding women in our own sports and forcing us to accept naked male bodies in our own locker rooms.
Outgoing NCAA president Mark Emmert bears responsibility for the trans-privileged policies denigrating women’s sports and discriminating against women. Current NCAA Board of Governors’ Chair Linda Livingstone, the President of Baylor University, has adopted the company line and refused to meet with women’s organizations and female athletes facing this discrimination.
The NCAA’s glitzy new Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Review Framework imposes an ideological agenda through college athletic programs. It seeks to do President Joe Biden’s bidding in his quest to reclassify sex under Title IX as a matter of identity, not biological reality.
University of Kentucky champion swimmer Riley Gaines, who was told that she couldn’t stand on the winner’s podium last year because Thomas must hold the trophy and appear in the pictures, encountered Emmert after the rally. As she retells the scene, Emmert claimed "he agreed with us" about women facing inequity in their own sports.
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The NCAA may pride itself on pushing an agenda that strips sex from its policies and promotes gender-bending pronoun use as some form of enlightenment. But this is more than institutional elitism – it is proof that its current leadership has no intention of loosening its grip on a trans-inclusive agenda that sidelines college women from sports and forces female athletes to lose their rights and their dignity at the field house door.
After a dozen years of the NCAA pushing this destructive and malicious trans-inclusive agenda, it’s time for Charlie Baker to lead change by recognizing the dignity of women and particularly female athletes.