Making it clear where he stands on the subject.
Of course a hot topic recently has been the issue of biological men competing in women’s sports. It really seemed to come to the forefront back in 2021, when one of the top collegiate women’s swimmers was a biological male named Lia Thomas, who had transitioned to female after previously competing on the men’s swim team at Penn.
University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines became an outspoken critic of the NCAA for allowing a biological male to compete against women, and received a fair amount of criticism for her position.
Of course in this day and age if you take the common sense position that men shouldn’t be competing in women’s sports you’re labeled “transphobic” or a bigot, but that’s just where we are these days. And it didn’t bother Gaines, who decided to forego dental school after graduation to become an advocate for women’s sports.
And she recently appeared on country legend Tracy Lawrence‘s podcast, TL’s Road House, where the two discussed the insane debate over allowing biological males to compete against – and even change in the locker room with – female athletes.
As Riley explained, the NCAA basically told her to shut up and swim when she first started speaking out on the issue:
“I thought the NCAA would see it how I saw it. I thought they had guidelines in place that would have prevented him from competing with us. But lo and behold the NCAA saw nothing wrong with this…
They announced that his participation in the women’s category was a non-negotiable, meaning there was nothing we could do, there was no questions we could ask, there were no concerns that we could raise. We were quite literally told we had to accept this with a smile on our face.”
Tracy points out the absurdity of it, pointing out that it has nothing to do with someone being gay or transgender or whatever the case may be: It’s simply a matter of fairness and biology.
“You spend all these years and all these hours dedicating yourself to the sport that you love and building relationships and traveling and doing all the things that you do. It’s got to be very disheartening to see.
And I don’t even know how we got here. How do we get to this place where it’s been acceptable for biological males? And this is not a gay, transgender thing. It’s not anything to do with that to me, and I don’t feel like it is with you from our conversations. This is about right and wrong.
Biological men should not be competing against biological women. It’s like we took a step back 30 or 40 years with women’s rights. It’s unbelievable. And this is being accepted across the board. It’s like people are brainwashed. I don’t understand.”
And as Riley says, this is all being done in the name of “progress” – but Tracy points out that it’s actually taking rights away from biological females.
“It’s not like this is a chess match. It’s not like you’re playing chess. This is not a benign sport.”
It’s the same point that’s been made by more and more influential voices in sports lately, from Kirk Herbstreit to Pat McAfee pointing out that it’s simply a matter of biology: Men’s bodies are different than women’s, and it’s unfair to deny women the right to compete without somebody who has an unfair biological advantage.
Of course this is going to continue to be a hot topic until something’s done about it, but Riley seems to be more than willing to lead the charge to fight for what’s right.
You can check out their entire conversation on Tracy’s podcast here:
