During a recent hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee that was supposed to be about upholding the basic rights of LGBTQ+ Americans, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and other Republicans on the panel opted to instead use the time to highlight Riley Gaines.
Gaines is a swimmer who has gone far with her account of competing against a transgender woman, accounts that have seemingly often if not entirely failed to meaningfully acknowledge the longstanding guidelines around transgender participation in those sports during a competition she’s highlighted. “Just tell us about your experience, because nobody can question your experience,” Hawley asserted during the gathering. “I don’t think anybody sitting at the table and certainly nobody at this podium has had the experience that you have had. You were talking about just the incredible — surprise shall I say, to put it gently, of finding a biological man, a 6’4″ biological man in your locker room and having to accept that without being asked about it, without being told about it even.”
It was obviously unsurprising for Hawley to be essentially entirely accepting towards Gaines’s narrative, but is he really that ignorant as a person? He’s referring to the participation of transgender athlete Lia Thomas. Gaines spoke in her replies to Hawley about an ostensible possibility of some man out there using the allowances that had been put in place for Thomas to make their way into the locker room she and her team used… but did that actually happen? Gaines and Hawley ran with these inherent assumptions there was some kind of threat beyond anything actually seen in real life, and this perspective essentially betrays those who do experience substantial problems in, say, the safety of athletics. Thomas was not attacking people. She was just there!
The portion of Hawley’s supportive comments that is quoted above was also featured in a press release from the Senator’s office. Watch below:
