photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

Protesters gathered outside of Budig Hall on April 9, 2025 before a speech by pundit Riley Gaines, an opponent of transgender women competing in female sports leagues.

A national pundit and former NCAA athlete was on the University of Kansas campus Wednesday to argue against transgender women participating in female sports leagues, but organizers restricted attendance to the speech.

Riley Gaines, a former NCAA Division I swimmer who now hosts the Fox Nation podcast “Gaines for Girls,” spoke at Budig Hall at the invitation of the KU chapter of Turning Point USA, which was founded by conservative political activist Charlie Kirk.

An organizer for Turning Point USA denied a Journal-World reporter entry into the university building to cover the speech. Makaylee Purdin, a Kansas City-based field representative for Turning Point USA, said the denial wasn’t based on a capacity issue, but rather that the organization wasn’t aware the Journal-World planned to cover the event, and hadn’t evaluated the newspaper’s intentions.

“We have already established who is going to come inside,” Purdin said.

The event attracted a few dozen protesters to the sidewalk area outside of Budig Hall before the speech’s 7 p.m. start, and organizers of the protest had said they planned to protest through the duration of the event.

“We don’t stand for transphobia here, and we don’t stand for someone coming here to talk about transphobia and excluding women from sports because trans women are women,” Lily Webb, one of the protesters, told the Journal-World in a brief interview.

photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

A crowd lined up outside of Budig Hall on April 9, 2025 to hear a speech by pundit Riley Gaines, an opponent of transgender women competing in female sports leagues.

The issue of whether transgender athletes should be allowed to participate in various sports leagues has become a divisive cultural topic and was a significant issue in the last presidential election, with a number of Democratic leaders speculating the issue helped Trump with voters.

Katherine Goodwin, a KU student who was protesting before the event, told the Journal-World that she thought there was much work to be done to bring the country together on the issue. She said the issue would benefit from more people actually getting to know transgender individuals.

“I think not having a culture around trans rights because a lot of people don’t know trans people, especially in our campus community,” Goodwin said of what needs to change. “This is a rich, white-dominated university. When we don’t talk about trans rights and we don’t talk about trans issues, then nothing happens. We need to start speaking up for people who aren’t like us.”

When Purdin, the Turning Point representative, was asked whether limiting media attendance at the event was a lost opportunity for more people to hear Gaines’ message as someone who has competed against a trans athlete, she said the organization had determined that it didn’t want to have an event that non-vetted members of the media could attend.

“The only media that we are letting in are ones that are already pre-approved, already reached out to us and we already are comfortable with them coming inside,” she said.

When asked what made the Turning Point organization comfortable with some media, Purdin said, “because we know who they are, they already made clear what their intentions are.” When asked what she meant by intentions, she said, “just the fact of what they are going to report on.”

Purdin did acknowledge that the Turning Point group didn’t provide any advance communication about the vetting process to the Journal-World or other media that were turned away from the event. A university spokesman did confirm that university policy does generally allow student organizations using KU buildings to set the ticketing and attendance policies for their events.

Gaines is a former swimmer for the University of Kentucky’s women’s swim team. In 2022, Gaines tied for fifth place in the 200-yard freestyle with transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, of the University of Pennsylvania. Thomas went on to win the 500-yard freestyle at the same event, becoming the first openly trans woman champion in the NCAA women’s division.

Thomas’ victory ultimately sparked an outcry among some fans and athletes, who argued that a transgender woman — who was born a biological male — is likely to have an unfair competitive advantage over females, pointing to years of swim times where males have consistently posted faster swim times than females. The competitive fairness issue also has been raised in other sports, such as track and field, where a long historical record of times and distances have shown significant differences between males and females.

When asked whether there was a way to address those competitive balance concerns raised by opponents, several protesters said they were dubious that opponents were actually concerned about that issue. They said that argument is weakened when opponents also call for transgender women to be excluded from a host of non-agility based sports.

“It is not about fairness,” Webb said. “It is about keeping trans women out of sports because it makes them uncomfortable.”