Riley Gaines and Others Launch Lawsuit Against NCAA as Woke Policies Spread
Militant transgenderism and its deluded-yet-self-righteous enablers have met bold resistance from the courageous defenders of women’s sports.
According to Fox News, a group of current and former collegiate athletes led by former University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia on Thursday.
Gaines, former Virginia Tech University swimmer Reka Gyorgy and 14 other plaintiffs charged the NCAA, University System of Georgia, Georgia Tech University, University of Georgia, University of North Georgia and members of the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia with civil rights violations under Title IX, the landmark 1972 amendment that prohibits sex-based discrimination in federally-funded education programs or activities.
More specifically, according to Francesca Block of The Free Press, the lawsuit “seeks to change the rules, rendering any biological males ineligible to compete against female athletes.”
Furthermore, according to the report, it “demands the NCAA revoke all awards given to trans athletes in women’s competitions and ‘reassign’ them to their female contenders.”
Gaines announced the lawsuit Thursday on the social media platform X.
“[I]t’s official! I’m suing the NCAA along with 15 other collegiate athletes who have lost out on titles, records, & roster spots to men posing as women,” Gaines wrote.
“The NCAA continues to explicitly violate the federal civil rights law of Title IX. About time someone did something about it,” she added.
?it’s official!?
I’m suing the NCAA along with 15 other collegiate athletes who have lost out on titles, records, & roster spots to men posing as women
The NCAA continues to explicitly violate the federal civil rights law of Title IX. About time someone did something about…
— Riley Gaines (@Riley_Gaines_) March 14, 2024
According to her bio on the UK athletics website, Gaines “[e]nded her Wildcat career as one of the most decorated swimmers in program history.” She also earned the 2022 SEC Female Scholar-Athlete of the Year award.
Those accolades, however, did not protect her or her fellow elite competitors from woke militancy.
In March 2022, the University of Pennsylvania’s Lia Thomas, a man pretending to be a woman, competed at the Women’s NCAA Division I Swimming Championships.
As one would expect from a man with physical advantages, Thomas placed first in the 500 freestyle.
The championships took place on the campus of Georgia Tech University in Atlanta, Georgia — hence the multiple Georgia-based educational institutions named as defendants in the lawsuit.
The Hungarian-born Gyorgy, then a fifth-year senior at Virginia Tech University, placed 17th in the 500 freestyle. As she explained several days later in a letter posted to X, that placement left her one spot short of a return to the finals.
“This is my last college meet ever and I feel frustrated,” she wrote. “It feels like that final spot was taken away from me because of the NCAA’s decision to let someone who is not a biological female compete.”
Readers may view the full letter below.
Here’s the letter from Virginia Tech swimmer Reka Gyorgy critiquing Lia Thomas’ eligibility to swim against biological women. pic.twitter.com/ozOp6lc9Km
— Andrew Chapados (@AndrewSaysTV) March 22, 2022
On Thursday, Gaines and Gyorgy spoke with Block.
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The former Kentucky swimmer, who now hosts the “Gaines for Girls” podcast on Outkick and has become both the face and voice of the national fight to protect women’s sports, credited Gyorgy for writing that letter and thereby giving others the courage to speak the truth.
“Had Reka not done that — she was really the first athlete at that national championships to take a stand — had she not done that, and had I not seen that, I certainly would not have taken the stand that I did,” Gaines said in a video posted to YouTube on Thursday.
Of course, the female swimmers did more than compete against Thomas. The NCAA also forced them to share a locker room with him.
Gaines and Gyorgy described that experience in terms that everyone but the virtue-signaling woke monsters could understand.
“The first time we found out that this would be the case was when we were actually undressing next to this 6-foot-4 man who was also simultaneously undressing, fully exposing himself and his male genitalia,” Gaines recalled.
“It wasn’t even necessarily traumatizing because of what we were forced to see, or how we, as women, were forcibly exploited without our consent,” she later added. “It was traumatic for me to know just how easy it was for those — those people who created and enforced these policies [to] totally dismiss our rights to privacy, without even a second thought, without even bare minimum forewarning us.”
Gyorgy remembered the general impression Thomas left on her.
“It was just scary. I was scared. I felt uncomfortable. And I had the question in myself that, ‘Am I in the right — am I at the right place?”
The transgender movement’s authoritarian demands also came in for criticism.
“This movement has infringed upon our First Amendment rights,” Gaines said.
And the NCAA, in addition to trampling Title IX, has aided and abetted that infringement, the former Kentucky swimmer alleged.
“Our promises to — endowed by the Constitution — of free speech were entirely violated,” Gaines said.
“At my school, we had to go to training to learn how to use ‘she/her’ pronouns, where they brought in an ‘outside professional’ — whatever that means — who sat me down, as a 21-year-old senior in college, and taught me how to use pronouns. And if I didn’t — if I didn’t adhere to the training to their standard — I had to re-go through it.”
Readers may view the entire 20-minute interview below.
Universities and other institutions have pushed this demonic lie for long enough.
God bless Gaines, Gyorgy and the other plaintiffs for pushing back.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
