WASHINGTON, September 25 — Female athletes and their advocates walked the halls of Congress on Thursday, pressing lawmakers on an issue that has moved from pool decks and locker rooms to the center of American political life: who competes in women’s sports. The Capitol Hill gathering is the latest turn in a debate that has stretched for years, traveling from athletic governing bodies to state legislatures, to Congress and into the federal courts.
And it lands squarely in the middle of a midterm election cycle in which candidates in both parties are using the issue to mobilize voters. Among the most prominent voices in the movement is Riley Gaines, a former University of Kentucky swimmer who competed against transgender swimmer Lia Thomas at the 2022 NCAA Division I Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships.
Since that race, Gaines has become a leading advocate for restricting women’s sports to athletes who are female at birth. She has testified before Congress and before state legislatures, arguing that athletic categories must be defined by biological sex.
How the fight reached Washington
The issue gained national prominence in 2022, when Thomas, a swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania, became the first openly transgender woman to win an NCAA Division I individual swimming title, taking the 500-yard freestyle. The NCAA responded in January 2022 by adopting a sport-by-sport approach to transgender participation, aligning its policy with the standards of the national governing body for each sport. The following year, the NCAA’s Board of Governors voted to require transgender student-athletes to document sport-specific testosterone levels beginning with the 2023-24 academic year.
International federations moved as well. FINA, now known as World Aquatics, voted in June 2022 to restrict women’s elite competition to swimmers who transitioned before age 12.
World Athletics followed in March 2023, banning transgender women who had gone through male puberty from the female category of international track and field events.
The states, the courts, and the campaign trail
In the United States, more than 20 states have enacted laws restricting transgender athletes’ participation in school sports. The wave began with Idaho’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act in 2020. The fight has also reached the federal courts, including challenges to those state laws and disputes over Title IX, the 1972 federal law barring sex discrimination in federally funded education programs.
That is the landscape Gaines and the athletes who joined her on Capitol Hill are now trying to shape. They came to Washington seeking to influence federal policy and, with the midterms approaching, the broader political conversation.
What to watch next is whether that pressure produces movement in Congress, and how the courts resolve the Title IX cases already in front of them. For now, the scene on Capitol Hill made one thing plain — the argument over who competes in women’s sports is no longer confined to athletic conferences.
