Riley Gaines Act Would Create Federal Level Bounty on Trans Athletes
The Riley Gaines Act, currently introduced to the House of Representatives, would encourage cisgender athletes to sue organizations that allow transgender athletes to compete.
Opinion by Aly Gibbs
I regret to inform you all that my arch-nemesis is now annoying me through other people.
On February 4, House Representative John McGuire (R-VA) introduced H.R. 7368, or… The Riley Gaines Act. If you aren’t overly familiar with Gaines’ work, you may be confused about why a legislative act would be named after her, but if you know anything about Gaines you’ve probably already guessed. No, it isn’t a bill about dentistry, the career Gaines once hoped to pursue before she set aside her ambitions to become a full-time professional bigot. It’s a punitive bill crafted to maximally harm transgender women for participating in sports, a human right.
Shocker!
Gaines has appeared in Assigned Media coverage quite a lot over the years, mostly because of me, I’m afraid. That said, I can’t dig in too deep on Gaines herself, here, since this is simply a bit of legislation inspired by her bigotry, and not something she’s actively involved in. That said, I can remind you that Gaines is a liar who has made it her life’s work to define women by their genitalia and inferiority to men, and she’s probably just doing it for the payday.
Anyway. The Riley Gaines Act was designed, it says, to “authorize civil actions against institutions of higher education and athletic associations that negligently or recklessly permit a biologically male student athlete to compete in an athletic competition intended exclusively for female student athletes, resulting in harm.” If you need that boiled down to something more digestible, the crux is: Cis girls would be able to sue schools and organizations that let trans women compete in sports, for any imagined harm they can drum up.
Perhaps this theoretical harm would be physical. As we all know, before trans girls and women began competing in sports against cis girls and women, injuries on the field simply never happened. Or maybe the harm is not measured in damage to the body, but damage to vague future opportunities. If a trans girl received a scholarship that your cis daughter wanted, you would simply be able to sue the scholastic or athletic association that awarded the scholarship for “the value of the loss of a scholarship or professional opportunity.”
How about that? Perhaps you believe your cis daughter was the next Serena or Venus Williams. Maybe you should be able to sue her college for, say, the entire net worth of the Williams twins, because she was forced to compete against a dreaded biological male, a term as dull as it is meaningless. You might be interested to know that a recent study (or, systemic review) out of the University of São Paulo makes it apparent that trans women’s athleticism is largely in line with cis women’s after one to three years of hormone replacement therapy, a cool fact that we seem to have rediscovered every year for the past decade or so without meaningful change occurring. Damn, that’s heartbreaking.
Laws like the Riley Gaines Act function as preventative measures to stop people from supporting the trans community. Academic and athletic institutions that have no moral argument against including us will find themselves compelled to exclude us for fear of discriminatory litigation. We are such a small percentage of the overall population that it will be significantly easier to simply remove us from day to day life than to risk losing capital to protect us. That is the cold, hard math these people will do as it becomes more broadly accepted to discriminate against us. We’ve seen bounty laws like these before in Texas and Arkansas, and at the federal level from child sex abusers’ greatest ally, Pam Bondi.
The bill still has to go before a committee and be voted on (and potentially altered) in both congressional chambers. I can’t tell you whether or not it will pass, though it seems likely to me that congressional Democrats won’t have to fight very hard to kill this one. It is, however, another shameless assault on the rights of trans women and girls everywhere, in an era where our civil rights and personhood are under attack every hour of every day, and that should disgust all of us.
Aly Gibbs (She/They) is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
