Abortion rights, women of color, and LGBTQIA+ people are under attack. Pledge to join us in fighting for gender justice.
Fatima Goss Graves Testifying Before the DOGE Subcommittee in Defense of Trans Athletes
Oral Testimony of Fatima Goss Graves, President and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center
Good afternoon, Chair Greene, Ranking Member Stansbury, and other Members of the subcommittee.
My name is Fatima Goss Graves, and I am President and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center.
We have been around since 1972, when Title IX was enacted. And we’ve been working on creating equal opportunities for women and girls in sports and in society ever since.
Women and girls face many obstacles to equal opportunity in sports.
Fewer financial resources than men’s programs. Worse facilities. Endemic sexual abuse.
And student athletes facing these persistent inequities are among the more than 12,000 people who have complained about discrimination in school but who can’t pursue justice because the Trump administration laid off half the staff whose jobs were to respond to their complaints.
Students, including disabled kids and campus rape survivors, whose discrimination complaints are now basically being warehoused.
So for over 50 years, the National Women’s Law Center has been fighting for equality. And we’ll continue to fight until every girl has the same chance to play as everyone else.
As an expert on women’s rights in sports and in society, let me be clear: transgender women pose no threat to women’s sports. Trans women belong in sports.
I’m here because I care about women and girls in sports. And I know that bullying trans kids and creating a panic about the existence of trans people won’t make us safer. It won’t solve any of the problems of inequity in sports.
This fixation on harming trans kids also won’t fix the problems of the American people.
Because at the National Women’s Law Center, we hear from people about those real problems every day.
They’re concerned about their reproductive freedom. They’re struggling to put food on the table. They’re agonizing about care for aging loved ones.
Hardworking folks across the country – from Texas to Georgia, from California to Tennessee – are worried there’s a budget in Congress that would demolish programs like SNAP, Head Start, and Medicaid and make their lives harder.
They are looking for an end to attacks on schools, on health care, on reproductive freedom, on child care, and on workplace safety.
Instead, over the last few years, there has been a nonstop effort to convince the public that including transgender women in sports harms cisgender women.
But anti-trans sports bans actually harm all women.
A few examples:
- Denying trans kids the chance to find teammates who have their backs.
- Harassing Black and brown women and girls for not being quote-unquote feminine enough.
- School officials secretly investigating girls’ gender to make sure they’re “feminine” enough to play. Now that is harmful…and dangerous.
- And yes, all those things are already happening.
For example, after Utah passed a trans sports ban, a state school board member posted a picture of a high school student athlete on social media suggesting she was transgender. She was not. But she faced such intense cyber bullying and threats to her and her family that she required police protection.
As president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, it couldn’t be more clear to me:
Anti-trans bans hurt all women.
They’re wrong.
And we won’t let them be enacted in the name of “protecting women.”
Because they don’t protect women. They harm us all, and it is discrimination, period.
If this subcommittee wants to defend women, the National Women’s Law Center has some ideas. Ideas that will actually help us. Ideas that will combat the real threats to women and girls’ safety and equality today.
Trans women in sports just isn’t one of them.
Thank you.