Kamala Harris’ Policies Will ‘Pervert’ Girls’ Sport: Riley Gaines

Former college swimmer Riley Gaines believes Kamala Harris’s “radical gender ideology” poses a significant threat to junior female athletes.
In a Thursday column for The Washington Times, former NCAA All-American Gaines said the Harris-Walz ticket would “expand upon” what she considers the Biden-Harris administration’s drive to do away with sex segregation, exemplified by the rewriting of the landmark federal civil rights law Title IX.
Title IX, part of the 1972 amendments to the U.S. Higher Education Act, prohibited sex-based discrimination in academics and sports among all schools and educational programs in receipt of federal funding. In April, the Biden-Harris administration expanded these protections to include discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.
While the implementation of these changes has been blocked in several states, Gaines said that Biden and Harris have “perverted the plain meaning of Title IX by reassigning sex-based protections meant for women and girls to men and boys claiming a female identity.”
Newsweek has contacted the Harris campaign for a response to Gaines’ article.
Gaines said that the administration’s gender “crusade” has also encompassed “indoctrinat[ing] school children in radical gender ideology concepts,” forcing schoolboards to include “sexually explicit” books in their libraries, and demanding that health insurers cover gender reassignment procedures for children.
She said she believes that girls and young women have been “left unprotected” and “risk serious injury” if forced to play sports against biological males, who are “breaking their female opponents’ skulls and faces” in volleyball, field hockey and mixed martial arts.
“Their athletic scholarship opportunities will continue to be stolen by second-rate male athletes,” Gaies added.
Gaines has previously warned that only a vote for Donald Trump in the 2024 election would address her concerns for female athletes, telling Fox News in August that a Harris victory would spell “the erasure of women in women’s sports.”
The inclusion of transgender athletes in women’s sports, and the issue of trans rights more generally, has been promoted as a key issue by the GOP in both the presidential election and the battle for Congress.
According to a recent New York Times analysis of AdImpact data, Republicans have spent more than $65 million in television ads across the country on trans issues.
The Trump-Vance campaign recently ran a series of ads, aired during professional and college football games, ending with the tagline: “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”
The former president has previously claimed that his voters “go crazy” when he talks “about transgender,” but polling reveals a different story.
According to Pew Research Center, gender identity issues don’t feature in voters’ top 10 priorities in this year’s election, and a 64 percent majority of Americans say they would “favour/strongly favor” laws and policies designed to protect transgender people from discrimination.
Lynn Vavreck, Marvin Hoffenberg professor of American politics at the University of California, told Newsweek that this issue is unlikely to convince voters to change sides in this year’s election.
“Most voters know where the parties stand on these identity issues and they know which side they prefer, so focusing on these issues is unlikely to sway a large share of voters,” Vavreck said.
However, she pointed out that “these elections are turning on only a few thousand votes, so even small changes could be pivotal.”
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