Standing for women

Riley Gaines is host of "Gaines for Girls" (OutKick) and director of the Riley Gaines Center at the Leadership Institute

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: protecting women’s sports and private spaces.

Earlier this year, a young woman posted a video to Facebook in which she confronted a man who was using the women’s restroom. The man was wearing women’s clothing and identified himself as a woman – but he was clearly a man.

MCNABB: I pay a lot of money to be safe in the bathroom.

PERSON: Me too. Excuse me.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Since then, Facebook’s oversight board has announced it is reviewing the company’s content policy. It’s asking the public to comment on whether the woman was wrong for calling the man out and if the video should be classified as hate speech and removed.

Here with more on the story and the ongoing debate about men in women’s spaces is WORLD reporter Travis Kircher.

TRAVIS KIRCHER: When athlete Riley Gaines saw Facebook’s response to the video posted by college student Payton McNabb, she was discouraged, but not surprised.

GAINES: I can't even tell you how, how much that messes with your head as a young I mean, 18, 19, 20 year old girl, but it's effective, and they know that.

Gaines is a former member of the University of Kentucky NCAA swim team. In 2022, she was forced to compete against a male swimmer who identified as female. She also had to share a changing room with him.

GAINES: I mean that used to be correctly described as as sexual harassment, but now, not only is it, does it go unchecked, it's it's seemingly celebrated. It's celebrated by the NCAA. It's celebrated by the Biden Harris administration. It's celebrated oftentimes in the corporate world, we were told that we were the problems if we oppose this. We were the ones who, who were told to seek counseling services or to re-educate ourselves and learn how to be kind and learn how to be inclusive.

I spoke with Gaines after Facebook announced the policy review. She says while many accuse college student Payton McNabb of bullying the man in the bathroom by filming him, there’s more to McNabb’s story.

GAINES: …something that a lot of people don't know about this video is that Payton McNabb is the same young girl who, just two years ago in a volleyball game, was severely and permanently injured by a male player posing as a woman who jumped over the net, spikes the ball, hits Payton in the face. She's immediately knocked unconscious, before coming back around. Even still to this day, she is partially paralyzed from that hit. Her vision is impaired, her memory is impaired, and then to be faced with a male in her bathroom, a different male entirely on her college campus. I mean, it breaks my heart, and people have the audacity to say that this isn't really happening.

The Meta Oversight Board’s announcement about the public review says the company selected McNabb’s case and another one about an athlete in order to—in their words—“assess whether Meta’s approach to moderating discussions around gender identity respects users’ freedom of expression and the rights of transgender and non-binary people.” Elsewhere, the board has said it seeks to remove obstacles to “Women, non-binary, and trans people…exercising their freedom of expression on social media.” But what about when members of those groups disagree about what counts as hate speech?

GAINES: To be very clear, hate speech is not just speech you hate. It seems to be that the other side of this debate is labeling stances that I have taken, stances that Peyton McNabb has taken as hateful, as bigoted, as transphobic, but but to be very, very clear. Rather than being against something, we are standing for something, and what we are standing for is women. Again, it's for privacy, it's for safety, it's for equal opportunity. We are standing for biological reality, for truth. That, that is not hate speech.

And the conversation isn’t limited to so-called “misgendering,” or when someone describes a person according to their biological sex when that person is claiming to be something else. Gaines says the language matters.

GAINES: I won't use the phrase trans woman, because I think it implies that I would believe that that these males who identify as women are, in some part, actually women. No, they are just males. They are men. They are boys, but, but they cannot be women. Even biological woman, I have a problem with because, again, I think it's admit, admittance that that there's an unbiological alternative to being a woman.

Right now, much of the debate is focused on new rules from the Education Department that guide how schools implement Title IX.

GAINES: Your speech is compelled under this new rewrite, and so you would be forced, if you're a student or you're a teacher or professor or a coach, you would be forced to use biologically incorrect pronouns. They took a policy enacted, implemented 52 years ago, 37 words in its in its original implementation, again, very, brief, short paragraph, and they created this new policy that's now 1500 over 1550 pages long. That should tell you everything that you need to know over, I mean, almost half a million words from 37. Clearly, there's something they're trying to hide and get away with in there.

The new rules are currently blocked in 26 states while courts review legal challenges. But female students in other states will likely continue to face competition from males in their sports. Gaines says it’s one thing for former athletes like her to speak up, but it’s another thing for parents and their daughters to take a stand.

GAINES: I think the most effective way to say, “No, enough is enough. We won't comply. We're not going to allow you to continue to discriminate against us, our daughters on the basis of their sex,” is by not participating in the farce at all, which I know is easier said than done, but again, that's how you send the message. So if you know you have to compete against a boy, whether that's a team sport, whether that's track and field or swimming, what have you, get on get on the block. But when the gun blows, don't jump in the pool, don't don't jump off the starting block. That's, I think, and especially if you can do it in unity, have other girls who are willing to participate in what I would effectively call a boycott, which is kind of funny, given that the word boy is literally in the name, I think that's how you say, No, we won't allow this to continue happening.

The public comment period set by Facebook’s Oversight Board ends at midnight Pacific time tonight. After that, the company will consider changes to its content moderation policy that until now has allowed posts like McNabb’s to stay online.

But in the meantime, Gaines says now is the time for soul searching and action.

GAINES: We got here because we've done nothing. We've allowed ourselves to get here. So there's lots of fingers to point. As I’ve said, you can point a finger at the Biden administration. You can point a finger at these, these corporations who have allowed this, or at the courts who seemingly have activists as judges. But there's more fingers than that to be pointed. We can point a finger at ourselves.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Travis Kircher.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.