Riley Gaines urges Williams sisters to weigh in on transgender athlete controversy
Jenny Goldsberry
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NCAA champion swimmer Riley Gaines began a social media campaign this week to invite Serena and Venus Williams into the debate about transgender women in sports.
Gaines commenced the campaign by tagging the sister tennis stars in a tweet on Monday. The swimmer began the Twitter thread because “the silence is deafening” from other female athletes other than herself.
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“Each day for the next week I’m going to call on well-known female athletes to take a stance on this issue because silence is complicity…we need their voices,” Gaines wrote. “[Serena and Venus,] how do you feel about males competing against women?”
Riley Gaines on Varney & Co.
Neither Venus nor Serena have responded to the tweets. Both sisters boast a Twitter following of roughly 12 million. Gaines suggested on Fox Business’s Varney & Co. on Thursday that the pair are afraid of “cancel culture.”
Her daily tweets have called out superstar wrestler Ronda Rousey, college basketball champions Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark, and, most recently on Thursday, Olympic track star Allyson Felix. In each tweet, Gaines posed the same question but did not receive a public response.
“They have come out before and they have acknowledged the differences between men and women, especially when it comes to tennis,” Gaines said Thursday. “And I think it’s worth noting that both Venus and Serena Williams lost in a blowout to the 203rd-ranked male tennis player.”
Gaines was referring to a moment in 2013 when Serena admitted on Late Night with David Letterman that male tennis player Andy Murray would easily beat her in a match.
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Three-time Olympic cyclist Inga Thompson has also called for the protest of policies allowing transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports.
Gaines similarly called for a boycott when the Biden administration proposed changes to Title IX, making it a violation to ban transgender athletes from sporting competitions of their identified gender. The new regulation is currently in its 30-day public comment period, which ends May 15.