Oklahoma Sooners softball coach Patty Gasso defended her gamers after some attended an occasion hosted by ladies’s sports activities advocate Riley Gaines final week.
Gaines has championed equity in ladies’s sports activities since Lia Thomas tied together with her on the NCAA Championships in 2022. Thomas additionally grew to become the primary transgender athlete to win an NCAA ladies’s swimming championship. Since then, present and former feminine athletes have come collectively to maintain organic males out of ladies’s sports activities.
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Oklahoma head softball coach Patty Gasso is pictured through the faculty softball recreation between the College of Oklahoma Sooners and the UCF Knights at Love’s Area in Norman, Oklahoma, on Friday, April 4, 2025. (SARAH PHIPPS/THE OKLAHOMAN / USA TODAY NETWORK through Imagn Pictures)
Sooners pitchers Audrey Lowry and Sam Landry have been in attendance for Gaines’ speech on the Turning Level USA occasion, in keeping with OU Day by day. The ladies have been removed from the one Sooners athletes on the occasion.
Gasso informed the OU Day by day that she didn’t hear Gaines’ reward of her and her group and wouldn’t remark.
“However the truth that our group is there, it’s their proper whether or not they wish to go or not,” she stated. “I help them and no matter they select.”
Peyton McQuillan, a Sooners observe athlete, defended Gaines’ message in an interview with the scholar newspaper.
WOMEN’S DISC GOLFER REFUSES TO FACE TRANSGENDER COMPETITOR, DAYS AFTER FENCER KNEELS IN PROTEST
Riley Gaines speaks at a College of Oklahoma Turning Level USA chapter talking occasion in Norman, Oklahoma, on Wednesday, April 2, 2025. (NATHAN J. FISH/THE OKLAHOMAN / USA TODAY NETWORK through Imagn Pictures)
“She simply needs to verify everybody has a good alternative, and it’s clear that she cares,” she stated. “It’s very straightforward to narrate to it.”
Haley Bergstrom, a rower for Oklahoma, backed protecting organic males out of ladies’ and girls’s sports activities. She pointed to the organic variations between women and men. “Biologically, males simply have a bonus over ladies, it doesn’t matter what,” she stated. “So we’d identical to to maintain that easy, however there is no such thing as a downside in opposition to trans folks basically.”
Gaines did obtain pro-trans protests on the college.
“I’m actually disturbed by the form of panic that I’ve seen growing over the past couple of years — the suggestion that trans individuals are harmful, that they’re harming society, that letting trans folks take part in on a regular basis life is by some means a dangerous factor that must be prevented,” librarian Cynthia Teague informed The Oklahoman.
“Specifically with sports activities, there are so few trans athletes at any sort of elite degree, and taking part in sports activities is one thing that I feel trans teenagers, particularly, ought to have the ability to do.”
Kay Holladay holds an indication protesting at a College of Oklahoma Turning Level USA chapter talking occasion for Riley Gaines in Norman, Oklahoma, on Wednesday, April 2, 2025. (NATHAN J. FISH/THE OKLAHOMAN / USA TODAY NETWORK through Imagn Pictures)
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The NCAA altered its coverage to maintain organic males out of ladies’s sports activities. Nevertheless, ladies’s sports activities advocates have stated the group has left loopholes in its coverage to maintain that door open.
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