Last Wednesday, during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, former college swimmer Riley Gaines sparred with Human Rights Campaign president Kelley Robinson over “trans” athletes playing in women’s sports, Fox News reported.
During the Judiciary Committee’s hearing on “Protecting Pride: Defending the Civil Rights of LGBTQ+ Americans,” Robinson claimed without evidence that tennis star Serena Williams would be able to beat any man in tennis, arguing that Williams “is stronger than them.”
However, Gaines immediately fact-checked Robinson’s claim, noting that both Serena and her sister Venus Williams were defeated by a man who ranked 203rd in men’s tennis.
During the 1998 Australian Open, after the Williams sisters claimed they could beat any of the world’s top 200 male tennis players, 203rd-ranked Karsten Braasch challenged the sisters and defeated them both.
In a 2013 interview on David Letterman’s show, Serena Williams admitted that male tennis players are “faster,” “serve harder,” and “hit harder.” Calling men’s tennis a “completely different game,” Williams said she only plays women because she does not “want to be embarrassed.”
When called out on her false claim, Robinson told Louisiana Republican Senator John Kennedy that she would not say “definitively” if men have an athletic advantage over women.
Also appearing at the hearing was pediatric endocrinologist Ximena Lopez who has been providing so-called transgender treatments to children for more than a decade.
When asked by South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham if men have a physical advantage over women, she refused to answer, arguing that she does not specialize in sports medicine.
Appearing on Fox News Wednesday evening, Senator Kennedy summed up the hearing succinctly, telling host Martha MacCallum that the hearing was full of “a sort of Alice in Wonderland weirdness” including a claim by one witness that there are “three biological sexes and an infinite number of genders.”
Kennedy quipped, “I’ve heard better answers on ‘The Dating Game.'”
Kennedy added that if men are allowed to compete against women, the man is going to win “every time.”
