Not only are female athletes having to compete against biological men, they’re also compelled to share a locker room with biological males with intact anatomy!
Female swimmer Riley Gaines refuses to be silenced on the issue. The former University of Kentucky swimmer continues to speak out against biological male athletes competing in women’s sports, saying “We are not moving forward. This is actually quite the opposite. We’re going back 50 years in time”
“We have to let people know that a majority of us female athletes — or females in general — are not okay with this,” she said after racing against transgender swimmer Lia Thomas in the women’s 200-meter NCAA championship.
“If we as female athletes aren’t willing to stick up for ourselves, we shouldn’t expect someone else to stand up for us,” Gaines told The Post. “Someone has to speak out truthfully. So I did.”
Gaines said the battle to let trans athletes born biologically male, like Lia Thomas, compete in women’s sports is “the opposite of progressive.”
“You really have to dedicate your entire four years of college to excelling,” she said of swimming. “It’s a major time commitment, and it’s definitely a lifelong journey.”
All the hard work paid off when Gaines became a 12-time NCAA All-American swimmer and a five-time SEC champion. But last year, the integrity of her sport — and female sports as a whole — was called into question when University of Pennsylvania swimmer Thomas, who had formerly competed on the school’s men’s team, began shattering records in the women’s category.
Gaines said the experience of competing against Thomas in the NCAA championship last March “felt like I was going into the race with my hands tied behind my back.”
“Whether they have different lung capacities, their height, testosterone levels whether they’ve used testosterone blockers or not — it doesn’t suppress going through puberty as a male. Especially Lia, who swam for three years as a male,” Gaines told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.
Although Lia Thomas has undergone hormone replacement therapy, many are still concerned about physical athletic advantages transgender competitors could have over biological female competitors.
Gaines said Thomas’s participation in women’s collegiate swimming is a symptom of a larger societal shift she finds problematic.
“We’re watching the denial of the most basic of truths. When you can’t acknowledge what a woman is, there’s a huge problem,” she added. “This is deeper than just sports. This is a systematic erasure of what a woman is.”
Gaines found herself back in the headlines for advocating against NCAA rules that compel female athletes to share a locker room with biological males with intact anatomy, as she had to with Thomas. (Thomas was then transitioning with hormone replacement therapy, but still has fully male genitalia)
Although she’s accustomed to changing in front of fellow athletes, Gaines said that sharing a locker room with Thomas was an entirely different experience.
“There’s a 6-foot-4 biological man dropping his pants and watching us undress, and we were exposed to male genitalia,” she recalled on Fox News’ “America Reports.” “Not even probably a year, two years ago, this would have been considered some form of sexual assault, voyeurism.
“You could just feel the discomfort in the room,” Gaines told The Post. “We were not warned. And the NCAA is not protecting us.”
Original article published in nypost.com
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