Former University of Kentucky swimming champ and women in sports advocate Riley Gaines believes we should stop using the qualifier “biological” in front of male and female, but she hasn’t changed her stance on the issue of defining men and women.
Rather, she said in an interview this week, her way of thinking on the matter has evolved somewhat.
“Look, I’ll be the first to say I adhered to this for a long time, too. I thought I had to make the distinction that I am, in fact, a biological woman,” Gaines said Friday on Fox Busines Network’s “Varney & Co.” “But it hit me a few weeks ago, really, what we were doing when we added that prefix of ‘biological’ because we’re admitting there’s an un-biological alternative, and there is not.”
“There is man, there is woman, there’s male, there’s female, mother, father, boy, girl,” she continued. “This idea of ‘biological woman’ is crazy.”
The outlet noted further:
Gaines has been an outspoken activist against bending to cultural gender norms after she tied for fifth place in the 2022 NCAA Swim Championships with transgender athlete Lia Thomas. Since then, Gaines has aimed to protect women’s sports integrity by lobbying for legislation that prohibits biological males from competing in women’s sports in colleges and universities.
The Kentucky swim alum clarified Friday that she made the decision to drop the “biological” prefix when describing herself as a “woman” upon looking at it through the opposing side’s lens.
“I don’t think we realize how much language matters, how important it is, because when we use these words, we put emphasis behind them,” Gaines told host Stuart Varney.
“It dictates our well-being. It dictates what these words mean,” she added. “And so I think God created the only distinction we’ll ever need when He created man and woman.”
According to Gaines, the governing bodies of professional sports competitions, such as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC), are “total cowards” when it comes to acknowledging physical advantages between males and females.
“They have said that there is no presumptive advantage between the two sexes. And they’ve now taken all hands off deck. They’re leaving each specific sport governing bodies to make the decision for their own sport,” Gaines told the host.
She further explained that “the international governing body of swimming has created guidelines that say if you’ve gone through male puberty, you can’t compete with women. But there are other sports, like soccer, like weightlifting, that have not created those guidelines. So some sports are protected, some sports are not.”
In advance of the 2024 Summer Olympics Games to be held next year in Paris, France, Gaines predicted the Olympic governing bodies will further cave and allow athletes who were born one sex at birth to be allowed to compete in events for the opposite sex.
“As I said, they’re spineless. They’re following the money. They don’t want lawsuits. They don’t want to lose federal funding. None of that,” Gaines said. “And so they choose to leave all hands off deck, which is a very unfortunate response because it means that we as women, we as female athletes, are becoming collateral damage. We’re being exploited in locker rooms where we have to risk our safety, especially in physical contact sports.”
