Earlier this year, United States women’s national team star Megan Rapinoe and WNBA legend Sue Bird were among the athletes to sign a letter voicing their opposition to H.R. 734, a federal bill that would ban transgender and intersex girls and women from participating in girls’ and women’s school sports.
Both of them caught major backlash for their actions.
During an appearance on “Fox & Friends” this week, former Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines brought up that conversation when calling out USWNT stars Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe.
“It’s disingenuous and it’s virtue signaling,” Gaines said. “They want to be seen as kind. They want to be seen as inclusive, but they know in their hearts, every single person knows they wouldn’t have had the opportunities and the success they had without the women’s sport and category.
“Now they’ve achieved what they’ve achieved. They’ve accomplished what they wanted to accomplish, so they don’t care. They would rather give girls up, give away our opportunities to be seen as kind and inclusive when in reality this isn’t inclusive, it’s exclusive.”
Morgan has also expressed her support of transgender kids in sports.
“The inclusion of trans kids in sports is the inclusion of kids in sports. Everyone should have the ability to play sport. And the fact that it’s being taken into politics so big is really sad. And I think it’s at the cost of trans kids’ lives. It’s really sad, and I feel like what Becky said was great. And for this team, we’ve always been very vocal with where we stand and I think we’ll continue to do that,” Morgan said.
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Because she has been so outspoken, Gaines found herself being attacked in April on the campus of San Francisco State University.
Gaines was at the school to speak about her views opposing the inclusion of transgender athletes in women’s sports when a video showed her moving quickly by security as opposers of her stalked and yelled at her.
Gaines tied transgender swimmer Lia Thomas for fifth place in the women’s 200-meter freestyle final at the 2022 NCAA swimming and diving championships and has been vocal about her opposition to the inclusion of trans women in women’s swimming.
Proponents of banning transgender women and girls from competing in girls’ and women’s sports have pointed to their possible competitive advantages
In March, World Athletics announced transgender women would need to meet certain testosterone thresholds in order to compete.
