7 times Megan Rapinoe won more than a soccer game during her long career

Rapinoe dedicated her speech at the Time Women of the Year Gala to thanking the trans community earlier this year.

“I am only here because of them,” Rapinoe declared, blasting the “attempted genocide” and “erasure” of trans people currently taking place in state legislatures across the country.

She has stood up for transgender athletes repeatedly. Including in a TIME Magazine cover story published this week.

“We as a country are trying to legislate away people’s full humanity,” she said. “It’s particularly frustrating when women’s sports is weaponized…Oh, now we care about fairness? Now we care about women’s sports?… And show me all the trans people who are nefariously taking advantage of being trans in sports. It’s just not happening…We’re putting this all through the lens of competition and winning. But we’re talking about people’s lives. That’s where we have to start.” 

She pushed (and won) equal pay for women’s and men’s soccer teams. The disparities not only in pay, but also in facilities and support, were striking.

“She’s demanded that women’s sports no longer be treated as a sideshow to men’s sports,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), pointed out. “It echoes everywhere. When Megan stood up and exposed what was going on in women’s soccer with unequal pay, she told 13-year-old girls all around the world that they didn’t have to accept second-class citizenship.”   

She took a knee during the national anthem for racial justice in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick as rightwingers raged. She was the first white professional athlete to join the gesture, leading other athletes across sports to do it too.

Asked why she did it, she blew off the question, insisting that she not be centered in his story. “It felt like this is what Colin was asking for,” she simply said.

She testified before Congress about gender pay inequality and how even world-famous athletes still experience it.

“One cannot simply outperform inequality or be excellent enough to escape discrimination of any kind,” she said.

Rapinoe and her wife, Olympic gold medaling basketball player Sue Bird, were among a group of professional athletes who signed on to a brief filed in Jackson Women’s Health Organization v. Dobbs, the Supreme Court case challenging Mississippi’s new ban on abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy, well before the 24-week line established in Roe v. Wade. The subsequent ruling ended women’s right to choose in many states.

“Athletic prowess depends on bodily integrity,” the brief stated. Women in sports “depend on the right to control their bodies and reproductive lives in order to reach their athletic potential” and “the physical tolls of forced pregnancy and childbirth would undermine athletes’ ability to actualize their full human potential.”