Anti-transgender activists and conservative groups plan to rally outside the annual NCAA conference this week, demanding that trans athletes be permanently banned from college-level women’s sports leagues.
The rally, entitled “Our Bodies, Our Sports” — evoking the famous feminist text “Our Bodies, Ourselves” — is scheduled for Thursday, January 11, outside the NCAA conference in Phoenix, AZ. It will be the fourth such rally since June 2022, when then-collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines appeared as a featured speaker to denigrate trans swimmer Lia Thomas. Gaines will again appear at this rally, along with Paula Scanlan, a former teammate of Thomas’ at the University of Pennsylvania who told the U.K. tabloid The Daily Mail this week she was “forced to undress in front of a man” on the team, which she alleges caused her “repeat trauma” that was “sponsored” by the NCAA.
“Our Bodies, Our Sports” (OBOS) events are organized by a coalition of anti-trans groups headed by the Independent Women’s Forum, for which Gaines works as an official spokeswoman. The event’s official website claims NCAA policies that allow trans women to compete in women’s leagues “destory [sic] our even playing field.” Organizers are demanding NCAA leadership revoke the Transgender Student-Athlete Participation Policy, which allows trans athletes to compete in leagues matching their gender identity, but also requires extensive documentation of hormone levels and other medical information on a sport-by-sport basis. Trans athletes and advocates largely oppose the updated NCAA rules, arguing they are discriminatory and regress from previous policies that allowed trans students to compete without ongoing examinations.
The OBOS organizing coalition includes such groups as the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), whose members have been heavily involved in anti-trans disinformation and created the “Gender Mapping” project in 2022 to track and allegedly threaten medical centers that provide trans healthcare. Also involved is the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a decades-old anti-LGBTQ+ group that formerly employed current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.
Despite the successful campaign to overturn Roe v Wade — one in which the ADF played a major role over several decades — self-proclaimed women’s groups have accepted ADF financial sponsorship for years over shared anti-trans beliefs. While they claim to be liberation-minded, IWF and its partner organizations profess largely conservative beliefs. WoLF staunchly opposes the Equal Rights Amendment, while Young Women for America, an OBOS partner organization with its parent group Concerned Women for America, exhorts members to “lead your generation of Christian, conservative women to protect and promote Biblical values and conservative principles” on its website. The IWF itself advocates for myriad conservative positions, from supporting Israel’s bombing of Gaza to pushing private charter schools via propaganda against “critical race theory.”
As American Journal News noted ahead of the first OBOS rally in 2022, speakers at that event included several Republican politicians and former members of the Trump administration. Lindsay Schubiner, program director at the progressive nonprofit Western States Center, told AJN at the time that events like OBOS represent attempts by “overtly white nationalist groups” to “exploit […] homophobia and transphobia on the broader right” in order to recruit new members and push an extremist agenda. She also noted that the first rally was supported in part by Turning Point USA, a far-right youth recruitment organization co-founded by Republican pundit Charlie Kirk.
“We are seeing white nationalist groups use anti-LGBTQ bigotry to build political power,” Schubiner explained, adding, “[t]he easier we make it to erode rights for specific groups of people, the easier it is to erode rights for other groups of people and then all of us in general.”
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