AOC blasts GOP for subjecting children to genital exams with anti-trans sports bans

At a hearing earlier this week set up by House Republicans to advocate against transgender participation in school sports, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) ripped her GOP colleagues to shreds for failing to think about the consequences anti-trans sports bills will have on women and children.

Ocasio-Cortez opened by saying she has sat through many panels in Congress filled with “men attempting to restrict the rights of women and telling us that it’s for our own good” but that she has long pondered why Republicans are so obsessed with targeting trans people when they make up less than 1% of the population.

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Anna Paulina Luna tried to show how offended she was with a nonsensical joke no one laughed at but her.

“I started to realize that a lot of these proposals here involved invasion of privacy of all women,” she explained, proceeding to ask witness Fatima Goss Graves – president of the National Womens Law Center – what “sex-testing” looks like for kids in states with anti-trans sports bans.

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“It’s terrible,” Goss Graves responded. “In some states, any individual can challenge whether someone is a girl enough to play. In some states, it requires actual genital verification, which is shocking.”

Outraged, Ocasio-Cortez continued, “Under the guise of not only trying to further marginalize trans women and girls, we are talking about opening up all women and girls to genital examinations when they are underage, potentially just because someone can point to someone and say, ‘I don’t think you’re a girl.'”

“And we’re saying this in an environment of a post-Dobbs America, where states are criminalizing access to abortion and want nothing more than data on women… and we’re supposed to believe that this is going to make us better? And safer? I think not.”

This all took place at the House Oversight Committee hearing on “The importance of protecting female athletics and Title IX.” While the title implies that the hearing would be about various ways to help women athletes – like increasing funding for women’s sports, fighting sexist attitudes that keep girls from participating in school sports, and taking sexual harassment and assault against women athletes seriously – it was actually about how to exclude transgender girls and women from school sports.

Anti-trans activist Riley Gaines – a former University of Kentucky swimmer who rose to national notoriety using her story of tying for fifth place at a swim competition with trans University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas – also spoke at the hearing. She even called Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) a “misogynist” to her face in a petulant statement about how she didn’t like her views being referred to as transphobic.