The “Protect College Sports Act" has a fatal flaw: It doesn’t protect women | Riley Gaines
I’ve stood on the starting block knowing the race was already rigged. I’ve touched the wall at the same time as a male competitor and been told to smile for the cameras. So when Congress names a bill the "Protect College Sports Act," I pay attention.
The Protect College Sports Act sounds great. Who wouldn’t want to protect college sports? But buried in dozens of pages about athlete compensation and coaching transitions is language that threatens existing state laws, including laws that protect fairness in women's sports.
As someone who knows firsthand the devastation of watching the trophy you spent years training to win be handed to a physically dominant male competitor, and then experiencing the shock of seeing that same male expose himself to other girls as he undresses in the locker room, I have a personal stake in making sure no other young woman goes through that. I’ve spent years traveling across the country with other athletes, sharing our experiences with state lawmakers and Congress, urging them to pass common-sense laws that keep men off the girls’ playing field and out of girls’ locker rooms.
A total of 27 states now have these laws. President Trump signed an executive order recognizing that men are men, women are women, and guys don't belong in girls' sports. Because of this work, countless young women have been guaranteed that males will not invade their sports.
But the Protect College Sports Act puts all of those laws and all of the work to pass them at risk. The same trans-activists who screamed at me in legislatures and harassed me at colleges could misuse the Protect College Sports Act to challenge every single state law defending women’s athletic competition…all 27 of them. That’s not protecting college sports for young women. It’s protecting the NCAA.
One of the critical flaws with the bill is that it limits the ability of states to enact or enforce sports eligibility rules. It's easy to envision a male who insists he belongs on a women's team misusing the bill to argue that a state women's sports law (which says males are not eligible to be on women's teams) is no longer valid.
The bill has another critical problem: It trusts the national athletic associations—namely the NCAA—to enforce state women’s sports laws.
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Let’s be honest about who we’d be trusting to get this right. The NCAA has never been a friend to women’s sports. It sure wasn't a friend to me or my teammates and competitors as we watched William (Lia) Thomas stand on that podium at the NCAA Swimming Championships. The NCAA opposed state-level protections early on and only changed course after massive public outcry forced its hand.
And don’t forget how the Democrats still don’t know how to define the word "woman". Thank God President Trump does, but we have no reason to believe the next Democrat President won’t undo all of President Trump’s executive orders that have yet to be codified by Congress just as quickly as he signed them.
The bill’s supporters will tell you I’m reading it wrong. They say limitations on state laws governing eligibility should be read narrowly—that it only blocks a few specific eligibility rules, not state laws protecting women’s sports. But here’s my question: if that’s what they meant, why didn’t they just write it that way? They could fix this with a simple amendment. The fact that they haven’t tells you everything you need to know. The Democrats see the Protect College Sports Act as a Trojan Horse to appease the trans rights activists.
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We spent four years under the Biden Administration as it pushed radical gender ideology every chance it got and punished the people who spoke against it. All that time, deserving young women were losing their spots on the team or their places atop the podium. Young girls were horrified walking into their locker rooms to find a male gawking at them as they undressed.
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Let's not re-live that nightmare. Why pass a bill that would put any young girl at risk of going through that same heartache and trauma? As a mom to a baby girl, I say no.
I’m not asking for anything radical. I’m asking for what girls in this country were promised 50 years ago: a fair shot.
No bill should pass that leaves women’s sports laws or our hard-fought Title IX protections open to being gutted. Women’s sports are not a bargaining chip.