Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., appeared astonished over South Carolina coach Dawn Staley’s comments about transgender athletes in women’s sports over the weekend.
Tuberville, who has pushed to bar transgender athletes from competing on the U.S. Olympic team, among other measures, appeared on OutKick’s “Hot Mic” to talk about Staley’s remarks before the Gamecocks won the national championship over the Iowa Hawkeyes.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., speaks during the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the fiscal year 2025 defense budget in Hart building April 9, 2024. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“If someone wants to really get out there and really challenge her on this, get ‘em a head coaching job in girls basketball and start recruiting men to play and see what she says about that,” he said. “They would be totally dominated if they went and got backups from some of these college basketball teams and let them play against women.
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“I can’t even believe we’re talking about this. People have lost their minds even thinking about men playing in women’s sports. Title IX is the best thing to ever happen to this place up here. One of the few bills they have passed that’s really made a difference in the last 52 years. And it’s equalized women’s sports and really given them an opportunity to compete and earn the right to be champions in any sport.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., attends the House and Senate committee markup of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024 in Dirksen Building Nov. 29, 2023. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
COLLEGE ATHLETICS ORGANIZATION BANS TRANS ATHLETES FROM PARTICIPATING IN WOMEN’S SPORTS
“She just followed the line. She didn’t want to disrupt people’s thoughts about her. She’s obviously an activist along with being a coach because there’s no earthly way she could believe, ‘OK, I want to coach girls against men.’ There’s no way she could believe that, but she said it for that reason. Just don’t understand the direction a lot of these people are going. Stand up.
“She should be standing up for all those young girls, those young women she was coaching. She just won a national championship and talk about the good things. We’ll take anybody on, but it’s really not right for men to come over and say they want to play in women’s sports. It’s not right. And it’s unfair, and it’s unsafe.”
During a press conference, OutKick’s Dan Zaksheske asked Staley her thoughts on the issue in the U.S.
“I’m of the opinion of, if you’re a woman, you should play. If you consider yourself a woman, and you want to play sports or vice versa, you should be able to play. That’s my opinion. You want me to go deeper?” she said.
South Carolina Gamecocks head coach Dawn Staley speaks at a press conference after defeating the Iowa Hawkeyes in the 2024 NCAA national championship at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse in Cleveland April 7, 2024. (Kirby Lee/USA Today Sports)
When asked whether she thought “transgender women should be able to participate in women’s college basketball,” Staley responded, “Yes.”
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“That’s the question you want to ask, I’ll give you that. Yes, yes. So, now the barnstormer people are going to flood my timeline and be a distraction to me on one of the biggest days of our game, and I’m OK with that. I really am,” she added.
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