During a congressional hearing Tuesday on “the Importance of Protecting Female Athletics and Title IX,” Democrat witness Fatima Goss Graves unwittingly suggested that the organization she runs is predicated on a false distinction.
Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, noted in her prepared remarks to the House Oversight Committee’s Subcommittee on Health Care and Financial Services that she has “devoted [her] career to advancing opportunities for all women and girls.”
However, in her exchanges with lawmakers, she demonstrated an unwillingness to admit a scientific difference between the sexes and expressed contempt for those female athletes who would.
Republican lawmakers and other feminists have blasted Graves for her “shameful” remarks, noting she has used her incredible platform and power to “sell out all the future generations of women.”
Remarkable remarks
The NWLC historically alleged it was concerned not just with ensuring Americans could legally exterminate their offspring but that “vulnerable women” would be protected from discrimination and sexual harassment. While the organization remains keen on promoting abortion, its director, whose husband, Matthew Graves, is leading the political prosecution of Jan. 6 protesters, intimated “vulnerable women” is a category that now includes predacious men.
Graves indicated that “the thrust of today’s hearing concerns whether a class of women and girls who have historically suffered violence and persecution have any place in school athletics, as many seek to categorically exclude trans and intersex women and girls from school sports programs.”
Graves stressed that keeping boys out of girls’ school sports constitutes sex discrimination; that transvestites and other reality-averse students “must be able to fully access education as their full selves; Title IX guarantees no less.”
Graves claimed in her prepared remarks, “Policies excluding trans girls and women from school sports programs threaten all women and girls who excel in athletics.”
Graves underscored this claim in her oral testimony, just feet away from All-American, all-female swim star Riley Gaines, whose athletics career was impacted by William Thomas, a middling male athlete who grew out his hair and began competing in women’s college swimming, crushing records set by accomplished female athletes.
Graves suggested that efforts to keep men out of women’s sports “place burdens on women to prove they are ‘real’ women and creat[e]s risk of intrusive and harmful sex verification practices.”
The NWLC president went on to intimate that black and brown female athletes were manly, suggesting restrictions against transvestites would impact minority women as they are “often viewed as ‘nonconforming’ with white-centric standards of femininity.”
After slighting black and brown women, Graves — who later admitted ignorance regarding basic matters of biology — claimed that recognition of men’s scientifically established physiological advantage in sports “harms all women and girls.”
Graves later reiterated that it “is deeply wrong and misleading to claim that if trans women and girls get to play, cisgender women lose.”
There have been myriad cases of women losing in recent months on account of the inclusion of reality-averse men in their once-sex-segregated sports.
Blaze News reported Tuesday that two men claiming to be female took and second place in a women’s bike race in Illinois over the weekend.
Last month, a hulking transvestite playing on a girls’ lacrosse team in Massachusetts reportedly knocked out a girl’s teeth during a playoff match between Dighton-Rehoboth Regional High School and Swampscott High School.
The Justice Jackson defense
During the hearing, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) asked Graves whether the “genetic composition of a transgender versus a woman [were] the same.”
“Well, I’m not a scientist,” responded Graves. “I mean if your question is, um, ‘How do you define women?’ and woman is an adult female, but there’s a lot of variation that go beyond my level of high school biology.”
After Gosar informed Graves that the distinction between men and women is actually quite clear, she said, “I guess what I would say is that is — I’m not a scientist or a doctor — but is my understanding that it is more complex than what you are saying in that there is variation among men and among women, and sometimes more variation among than there is between.”
Graves’ response appears to be common among leftists captive to a social constructivist misunderstanding of sex and gender.
When asked by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) to define “woman” during her 2022 Supreme Court confirmation hearings, then-Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson replied, “I can’t. … I’m not a biologist.”
Blackburn responded, “The meaning of the word woman is so unclear and controversial that you can’t give me a definition?”
Jackson, whose nomination by President Joe Biden was based on an acknowledgement of her sex and race, answered, “Senator, in my work as a judge, what I do is I address disputes. If there’s a dispute about a definition, people make arguments and I look at the law and I decide.”
Graceful surrender
“Trans students participate in sports for the same reasons as [other] kids,” Graves told lawmakers Tuesday. “Because it is fun, because it creates belonging and community; because it teaches so much about persistence and leadership and discipline.”
While stressing the need to include transvestites in women’s sports, the activist appeared to suggest that female athletes should learn how to “lose gracefully, hopefully.”
Republican Rep. James Comer (Ky.) later noted, “As a Kentuckian, when I think of great Kentucky athletes, our witness, Riley Gaines, is the first name that pops out.”
Responding to Graves’ earlier comment, Comer told Gaines, “I don’t think you should lose gracefully [to men]. I think you should do exactly what you’ve been doing. You’re a class act and you’ve been a leader; you told your story.”
Backlash
Kim Shasby Jones, the co-founder of the feminist Independent Council on Women’s Sports, said of Graves’ apparent suggestion that women should learn to lose gracefully to transvestites, “From the freaking NATIONAL WOMEN’S LAW CENTER. Never did I dream this. Unbelievable to watch women who have been given power sell out all the future generations of women. So sad.”
Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt (R) wrote on X, “As a father to two wonderful daughters this is extremely disheartening. For someone who is the National Women’s Law Center President, this is nuts.”
Former ESPN anchor and women’s sports defender Sage Steele called Graves’ suggestion “shameful.”
Townhall editor Katie Pavlich wrote, “Men taking titles, scholarships and the dignity of women in sport isn’t ‘winning’ so women ‘lose gracefully.’ It’s cheating and it’s theft.”
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) tweeted, “There you have it, ladies. When female athletes lose to a biological male who identifies as a transgender woman, just think of it as an opportunity to ‘learn to lose gracefully.'”
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