Josh Riley Stands Against Gender Discrimination Under Trump
Welcome to Josh Riley Watch. I’m recording this podcast on the evening of January 20, a few hours after Donald Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States. As he promised, Donald Trump has moved quickly and decisively to impose his racist agenda of purifying the blood of the American nation, and to impose a harsh Christian Nationalist moral vision of what Americans will be allowed to do, and who Americans will be allowed to be.
In just a matter of minutes after Trump took the Oath of Office and became President, a stark new White House web site came online with a sinister background as black as midnight, featuring images of military helicopters flying through the air in pursuit of those who seek to hide from the new fascist government.
In one of the first communications from the new Trump White House, it was announced that in order to “bring back American values,” “The President will establish male and female as biological reality and protect women from radical gender ideology.” The “radical gender ideology” that Trump was referring to is the belief that it is the right of individual Americans, not any church or any government, to decide how to define their own gender identity. That freedom of self-determination is what Donald Trump has declared he will “protect women” from.
As I read this statement, I wondered how it could come to this, that the President of the United States would be allowed to seize such absolute power for himself that he could, on his own whim, define a biological reality that all Americans would be required to comply with? In that dazed moment, it came back to me.
A certain part of America has always been this ugly.
We’re not supposed to say that, of course. We’re supposed to sing praises to America The Beautiful, and pretend that the American people are the most wonderful, wholesome people on the entire planet. Nonetheless, there are parts of the America that have chosen the ugly values of hate and bigotry, doing everything it can to bully everyone else in the country into conforming with their cold and narrow demands.
Ithaca’s new U.S. Representative, Josh Riley, has made it a habit to speak glowingly of “Upstate New York values”. He tells the story you’re supposed to tell, describing the people of Upstate New York as good, honest, hard-working people who just want a fair shake and common sense.
I grew up in Upstate New York, and I’ve lived here most of my life. I was born in Oswego. As a child I lived in small villages along the shore of Lake Ontario. These were deeply Republican towns, and I will never forget the Upstate New York values that they embodied. Those values were terrifying and brutal.
Republicans love to talk about how they’re protecting women by imposing strict restrictions on what women and men are allowed to be. They don’t often talk about protecting men. That’s because in the Christian Nationalist morality at the core of what typically passes for Upstate New York values, men and boys are supposed to be tough and protect themselves. According to Upstate New York values, boys and men must never show weakness. They must never be vulnerable. They must be tough to the point of cruelty. Above all else, Upstate New York values dictate that men and boys can never ever display any qualities that might be considered feminine.
I will never forget the times, as a child, when I watched campaigns of intimidation and physical violence against boys who didn’t fit what Donald Trump today described as the “biological reality” of male gender expectations. Parents condoned it. Churches encouraged it.
When I returned to Upstate New York as an adult, I was relieved to find the cultural refuge of Tompkins County. Ithaca was, it seemed to me, ten square miles of reality, surrounded by a reactionary culture of ignorance and cruelty.
I don’t expect Congressman Josh Riley to talk about this ugly side of Upstate New York values. He’s a politician. He’s expected to act as if everyone who lives in his congressional district is charming, intelligent, and wise. Nonetheless, Josh Riley grew up in Upstate New York, and he’s not an idiot. He knows about the dark side of Upstate New York values, even if he’s not able to talk about them honestly.
Donald Trump is taking his narrow 1.5 percent victory in last year’s presidential election as an opportunity to impose a national version of the ugliness of Upstate New York values. He, and his followers in the United States Congress, are seeking to force all Americans into a confining, medieval model of gender identity. They’re targeting transgender Americans as scapegoats to justify a crackdown on diversity.
Placed on Whitehouse.gov minutes after Donald Trump’s inauguration
Josh Riley, I am relieved to say, is not joining in Donald Trump’s attacks against gender diversity. After some serious mistakes in his first week as a member of Congress, it’s good to see US Representative Josh Riley recover his sense of direction and make a sensible vote that matches the values of his constituents in New York’s 19th district.
The bill in question is H.R. 28, also known as the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025. You may be asking yourself just who women and girls in sports need protection from. Does H.R. 28 protect women and girls in sports from coaches who sexually harass or assault them? No. Does H.R. 28 protect women and girls in sports from high schools and universities that discriminate against their teams by providing less funding than they provide for men’s and boys’ teams? No, H.R. 28 doesn’t do that either.
The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025 forces women and girls on teams at federally-funded schools to be subjected to genetic tests and physical examination of their genitals. If that doesn’t sound like protection to you, then you’re beginning to understand what H.R. 28 is all about.
This legislation doesn’t protect women and girls at all. It creates a new mechanism for authorities from Donald Trump’s fascist government to regulate the gender identities of women and girls - and of men and boys as well. It’s a culturally-extremist bill supported by Christian Nationalists to give them a foot in the door in establishing federal government authority to force Americans into rigid gender roles on the basis of their genetics.
H.R. 28 amends the Education Amendments of 1972 with the following language: “It shall be a violation of subsection (a) for a recipient of Federal financial assistance who operates, sponsors, or facilitates athletic programs or activities to permit a person whose sex is male to participate in an athletic program or activity that is designated for women or girls. For the purposes of this subsection, sex shall be recognized based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.”
The legislation is based on scientifically outdated and culturally anachronistic understandings of the relationship between biological sex and social roles. It presumes that biological sex and gendered social roles are the same thing, and adopts the conservative Christian religious perspective that biological sex should determine social roles.
The facts of life are more complicated than what a simple biological division between girls and boys, or women and men can represent. For one thing, some people are born intersex. Intersex people have a variety of conditions in which their sex chromosomes do not match the appearance of their genitals, or in which their genitals are ambiguous, having some aspects of both male and female attributes.
Another complication is that gender identity and biological sex do not always correlate in a simple way that can be divided clearly into male or female. Gender identity is psychological and social. It’s about the way that a person feels about themselves, and the way that they present themselves within larger society. Gender is complex, and it’s not strictly determined by genetics or other biological factors. There are people with two X chromosomes that consider themselves male, and people with XY chromosomes that consider themselves female. For that matter, there are people with more than two sex chromosomes.
There have always been people whose gender identity is ambiguous, or is counter to social expectations for their biological characteristics. The difference now is that society has become more aware of the presence of these people, and more respectful of them. H.R. 28 is part of a Christian Nationalist backlash against this culture of respect. The legislation is a tool that’s being used to force all Americans to comply with conservative Christian beliefs about gender, whether they are Christian or not.
40 percent of Americans are non-Christian. What’s more, many Christians are not culturally conservative, and do not accept rigid Christian Nationalist beliefs about gender. That makes H.R. 28 an inappropriate attempt to impose one religious identity on all Americans.
Christian Nationalists have created a campaign of fear by spreading rumors that large numbers of boys and men are pretending to be transgender women and girls in order to unfairly obtain sports scholarships or enter into locker rooms to rape women and girls. There is no evidence that any such thing is actually happening.
The fact is that there are a very small number of transgender athletes in the United States. Only 1.4 percent of Americans between the ages of 13 and 17 identify as transgender. Very roughly speaking, about half of those would be transgender teenage girls. That’s 0.7 percent of the nation’s high school population. Then, only a portion of that 0.7 percent might even want to play on a high school sports team. That’s a fraction of a fraction of a percent.
Save Women’s Sports, a Christian Nationalist organization dedicated to banning transgender Americans from playing sports, has only been able to identify FIVE transgender athletes on girls’ sports teams in kindergarten through high school grades in all of the United States. That’s not five percent of athletes on girls’ sports teams. It’s just five people.
Five.
The presence of transgender athletes in collegiate sports is likewise tiny, with fewer than ten college-level transgender athletes in the entire NCAA. Congressman Jerrold Nadler explained:
“I rise to oppose this hateful bill. This bill is a cruel attack on transgender children, already among the most vulnerable in our society, facing high risks of sui- cide, violence, and bullying.
Let’s be clear. This bill isn’t about fairness. The NCAA stated last month there are fewer than 10 transgender athletes in collegiate sports out of 510,000, less than 0.002 of 1 percent of athletes. The rare cases Republicans cite are outliers, not evidence of a systemic issue.
To deal with this 0.002 of 1 percent, the bill opens the door to invasive scrutiny of all girls’ bodies, violating their privacy and dignity. Little girls will be forced to have their biological sex verified through humiliating physical examinations of their genitals by strangers and forced to present documentation about their anatomy.
In States with similar bans, even cisgender girls deemed not feminine enough have faced harassment, humiliation, and have been forced to undergo genital examination. This isn’t fairness. It is cruelty. Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to reject this hateful bill and focus on real issues affecting our schools and communities.”
There is not any large scale issue of transgender athletes, either in America’s high schools or in college sports. Through H.R. 28, however, Christian Nationalist members of Congress are seeking to create a nationwide campaign of intimidation that bullies American children and adults into strict, religiously-approved gender roles, whether they are playing sports or not. The creation of fear is the purpose of this legislation, as part of a larger fascist campaign to establish government control over culture, imposing the cultural preferences of Christian Nationalism.
US Representative Andrea Salinas also spoke out against H.R. 28, stating:
“Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong opposition to H.R. 28. As a mother to a former child athlete, I get the need to keep our daughters safe and ensure our school sports are fair. Sadly, there is nothing in this bill to improve the safety of our daughters or improve fair play. In fact, the bill subjects girls, cisgender and transgender girls, to harm and ridicule, and it strips fairness from players, parents, and school communities.
The bill sets up an unfair playing field where any parent can raise a concern that a transgender girl might be playing on a girls’ team, and we know this is so very rare. It is unfair to the girls who may be targeted because they grow faster, play harder, or simply may be more talented than their teammates. This bill is unfair to the school districts that can’t navigate the threats of lawsuits but also can’t afford to lose Federal funding, leaving students without sports or school meals.
This bill is unfair to the girl athletes who could be subject to genital inspection and subject to humiliation, leaving them with a legacy of trauma rather than the lessons of teamwork and sportsmanship.
Finally, this bill is unfair to the American people, who are demanding that we take their call to address the cost of living seriously. Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to leave these decisions in the hands of parents and local sports authorities and vote ‘‘no’’ on H.R. 28.”
Democrat Suzanne Bonamici, representing the 1st congressional district in Oregon, challenged the Republican narrative on the floor of the US House of Representatives:
“In light of the comment that the gentleman from Michigan who is managing the time on the other side of the aisle made about birth certificates, I want to remind my colleagues that in the discussion on a similar bill, we had a conversation about how millions of birth certificates, there is a considerable number of children in this country who are born either intersex or with ambiguous genitalia. So, if the gentleman would yield for a question of how you plan to enforce this bill, because you’re saying birth certificates, but those aren’t necessarily reliable. Will you yield to a question?”
In response, Republican Congressman Tim Walberg seemed confused. He stammered,
“Certainly. That bill doesn’t deal with this at all. It deals with men in sports!”
Representative Walberg couldn’t grasp that intersex identity isn’t just an issue for newborn babies. Diversity and ambiguity in gender identity is a physical, biological reality that many Americans deal with for their entire lives, through their childhoods and adulthoods.
The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025 is scaremongering legislation that invents a problem that doesn’t exist. It does so in order to create a new method through which Christian Nationalists can bully children into compliance with their religious beliefs. Furthermore, the bill establishes a precedent for the US federal government to police Americans’ expressions of gender identity, telling us how we must behave, and how we must associate with other people, on the basis of genetics and anatomy.
When the time came to cast a vote on H.R. 28, Josh Riley did the right thing. In accordance with the values of Ithaca and Tompkins County, he voted against the legislation.
Unfortunately, Josh Riley’s opposition was not enough to stop the attack against gender freedom in America. H.R. 28 passed the US House of Representatives, and will now be considered by the United States Senate. The Senate is expected to pass the bill, and Donald Trump will sign it into law.
It’s not just going to hurt transgender Americans. Across America, boys who don’t want to follow traditional masculine expectations of cruel hardness will suffer under this law. Men who want to be creative, compassionate, will be less able to express their vulnerabilities without fear of reprisal. Women who seek to live outside the narrow demands of Christian Nationalist morality will be constricted by the federal government’s new imposition of the supposed “biological reality” concocted by Donald Trump. Girls on sports teams will be placed back in the small, soft, cage that’s built around them to keep them separate from the “real sports” that are played by boys and men.
It’s all for their protection, we’re told. Never has a more absurd lie been told.
Thank you, Josh Riley, for taking a stand against the gender police of Donald Trump’s new fascist government.