Women’s sports are on the ballot this November.
It’s a political fight many of us never imagined we would need to take on. But the past few years have confirmed that the future of women’s sports and the rights of girls to compete and win safely and fairly are under assault.
Let’s start with a few basic facts. Men have larger hearts and lungs than women, pumping and distributing more oxygen to their muscles. Their bones are denser, and they have substantially more muscle mass, even accounting for size differences. Men jump higher, throw farther, run faster, and punch harder than women.
It should not even be necessary to list these obvious biological realities, which make co-ed competition and spaces unfair and dangerous for women and girls. We all instinctively know these sex differences are real and relevant, which is why the whole world knew immediately that Angela Carini, the Italian boxer who had to tap out after 46 seconds in the Olympics ring against an opponent who failed sex-based eligibility tests, had been put in a situation in which it was impossible for her to win and the best decision after years of training was to bow out before she got seriously injured.
Despite that, and despite the fact that a growing majority, 7 in 10, of people reject the ideological lie that men and women are interchangeable even in the physical realm of competitive sports, males keep entering female competition. And the institutions charged with protecting fair play, along with women and girls’ privacy, opportunities, and safety, keep folding.
In Rep. Anthony D’Esposito’s (R-NY) district, for example, a Nassau County law that recognizes biological reality and reserves women’s sports for women only is under attack by New York Attorney General Letitia James and the New York Civil Liberties Union. They are dragging the county to court under New York’s antidiscrimination laws, despite the fact that those same laws are supposed to guarantee women’s and girls’ rights.
These groups are also trying to shut down any future dissent. Proposal 1 in New York would amend the state constitution to include broad privileges for self-asserted “gender identity,” and if it passes, the right of biological men to enter women’s spaces, from the locker room to the swim meet, will be all but guaranteed in the state.
Luckily, the tides are shifting, and women are no longer accepting the invasion of their competitions and single-sex spaces in the name of “tolerance.”
According to a poll conducted earlier this year, two-thirds of New York voters support requiring high school athletes to compete in their biological sex categories, including a majority of Democrats.
Republican or Democrat, elected officials in New York and across the country do not have the support of their voters when they erase women from athletics. That’s why I launched the Riley Gaines Stand with Women Scorecard with Independent Women’s Voice to do a simple task: inform voters about where politicians stand on women’s sports. D’Esposito is “Riley Gaines Approved” on the scorecard because he voted not once, but twice this year to protect female-only sports.
Activists who gaslight and silence women who speak out about their experiences of being forced to compete and undress alongside males are relying on the fact that so much of policy and law gets done behind the scenes, via private deals or quiet institutional changes. But on this issue, voters are waking up and demanding their representatives do the same.
Riley Gaines is an ambassador with Independent Women’s Voice and a former 12-time All-American swimmer at the University of Kentucky. She is the host of Gaines for Girls on OutKick and author of Swimming Against the Current: Fighting for Common Sense in a World That’s Lost its Mind. Anthony D’Esposito is a U.S. representative for New York.