The fight to protect women's sports is not over

Trump's Presidency will not end this. We need to change the cultural conversation.

This ran in the NY Post last week. By Riley Gaines and me.

---

Americans hoping to preserve women’s sports for women mustn’t be complacent about Donald Trump’s electoral victory. Though he vowed to ban males from facing women in athletic competitions, Democrats are pushing back.

The battle is just beginning.

In Riverside, Calif., two high-school students are suing their school district after being told they couldn’t wear t-shirts that said “Save Women’s Sports” and “It’s common sense. XX≠XY.”

School officials rebuked the girls and likened their clothing to touting Nazi-ism and wearing a swastika in front of Jewish students.

The plaintiffs, 9th-grader Kaitlyn Slavin and 11th-grader Taylor Starling, wore the t-shirts in response to a trans-identified male athlete who, per their lawsuit, did not meet the eligibility requirements to be on the varsity team but was placed on it anyway, displacing Taylor.

“Why am I getting displaced when I worked so hard and gone to all of the practices, and this student has only attended a few of the practices?” asked Taylor. Good question.

Even some on the left knows this is nuts.

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass), who voted against the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, admitted recently that he didn’t want his daughters “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.”

But then his staff resigned in protest and his words provoked calls for him to step down.

Former Obama spokesperson Jen Psaki says Moulton drew the wrong conclusion from the election. She claimed there’s that “no evidence that these [trans-identified boys] are a threat to safety or fairness.”

Psaki needs to tell that to Payton McNabb, the high-school volleyball player who suffered a traumatic brain injury in 2022 from having the ball slammed in her face by a male player.

And to the United Nations, which recently found that over 900 medals were lost by girls and women to male athletes.

And to Taylor, who lost her spot on her track team to a trans-identified male athlete who failed to attend practices consistently.

This fight is not over until every person who knows that women’s sports are for females only is willing to stand up and say so, without fear of backlash.

We are the majority. But it doesn’t feel like it yet.

And Trump can only do so much to fix the radicals’ tricks.

Trump can rescind the Biden administration’s rewrite of Title IX and restore women’s and girls’ sex-based rights in the education system.

But many sports teams and organization are beyond the reach of Title IX.

The US Olympic movement reports to Congress but receives the majority of its funding from private companies and takes its direction from corporate America.

Private club sports, often the feeders of athletes into the Olympic system, take their lead from it.

The International Olympic Committee, also funded privately, sets its own rules. And as we saw at the Paris Olympics, the IOC is just fine with males beating women up in the boxing ring and awarding them gold medals for it.

What’s more, 24 states have already adopted Biden’s Title IX rewrite, and schools are implementing its assault on equal opportunity and free speech. That will need to be clawed back as deep-blue states are vowing to continue implementation.

Most significantly, no single person, not even the president, can change the hearts and minds of the people.

Politics is downstream from culture, and we need to change the culture if we want to win back free speech and fairness for girls and women.

And so, if you are thinking we’ve won this fight, think again.

That’s why we are taking a page out of the Democrats’ playbook to change the cultural conversation.

Woke companies have partnered with woke advocacy organizations like the Human Rights Campaign to embed woke policies in corporations and schools, and further them through products and advertising.

These crazy ideas have been smuggled into the culture and it’s somehow become “cool” to say that biology is bigotry and that truth is harmful.

The Riley Gaines Center at the Leadership Institute and XX-XY Athletics will join together to normalize — make it cool, even! — to say XX chromosomes are real, and women and girls deserve equality of opportunity, safety and privacy.

Through advocacy, branded product and the elevation of female athletes in the fight, our organizations are stronger together.

Together, we are standing behind these female athletes in Riverside. For their right to express themselves freely and to compete on an even playing field.

We must not sit back. We need to win the cultural battle for truth, free speech and sanity.

Until the culture changes, males presenting themselves as females will continue to take wins and opportunities from hard working female athletes.

Women’s history is on the line.