World-class Olympic swimmer, winner of no fewer than three gold medals and one silver medal, Nancy Hogshead has fought this battle before.
Nancy was a leader in the movement to prevent Olympic athletes from gaining an unfair advantage through doping. She compares this to the advocacy needed to prevent men and boys, however they identify, from competing in women’s sports. Like the dopers, they’re cheating when they compete in the wrong sport category. An athlete who is found to have no fault for having a performance-enhancing drug in their body is still disqualified. Why? Even if the positive test wasn’t their fault, they are still disqualified because the drug made the competition unfair to the other athletes. “It was not fair when I raced against doped-up East Germans and it is not fair for women to compete against trans-identified male swimmer Lia Thomas,” Hogshead once explained.
“I’ve lived through this kind of unfairness before,” Nancy tells IWF. “And guess what? When we were dealing with the doping issue, nobody of my stature stood up for us. Nobody. I’m never going to let this happen to girls and women today. People say, ‘Oh, women should just not compete if it bothers them.’ No, they’re 18 to 22-year-olds. Some are younger, in high school. And you’re asking them to take all the risks?”
“The adults in the room, the policymakers, the heads of all these national governing bodies and international sport federations, they have the responsibility to make sure that sport is fair and safe,” she says. She especially admires the younger women—such as IWF Ambassador Riley Gaines, a fellow swimmer—who are taking risks and speaking out to save women’s sports.
Nancy’s latest focus was participating in the highly successful Our Bodies, Our Sports “Take Back Title IX” Summer 2024 Bus Tour to save women’s sports, stop the war on women, and restore Title IX. The tour was spearheaded by IWF on behalf of Our Bodies, Our Sports, a coalition of diverse women’s advocacy organizations. It lasted 30 days and covered 30 states, featuring more than 50 speakers, including Olympians, current and former NCAA athletes, coaches, and civil rights lawyers. Among the featured speakers were tennis great Martina Navratilova, former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, former U.S. Representative from Hawaii and original sponsor of the Protect Women’s Sports Act Tulsi Gabbard, two-time Olympic gold medalist swimmer Donna de Varona, former UNC-Chapel Hill head coach Sylvia Hatchell, Independent Women’s Law Center Director May Mailman, and Nancy herself.
Throughout the tour, the speakers were impressive. Navratilova, for example, said allowing men who identify as trans women on women’s teams is “not possible.” She added, “By allowing trans-identified males in women’s sports, you’re excluding women.” Paula Scanlan, a swimmer who had been required to undress in the locker room with teammate Lia Thomas, told the audience, “The [Biden] administration is turning back the clock on women’s rights and declaring us unworthy of protection and opportunity.”
Nancy said that women “are still the ‘have-nots’ in high school and college sports. Colleges and universities need to provide women with 71% more athletic opportunities to equal the opportunities they’re providing to men and 52.4% additional athletic scholarship dollars. These are life-changing opportunities: we cannot ask women to sacrifice even one.”
While the tour was greeted with enthusiasm and clearly generated support for women’s sports, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the bus, which featured several photos of prominent female athletes, including Nancy, was vandalized. When the riders returned to the bus in the morning, they found written on their bus slogans such as “Trans Women are Women,” “Protect Trans Kids,” “Hate Group,” and “Bigots on Board.” “Transphobic Bus” was written on a poster nearby, along with a pink blue-and-white transgender flag. To top it off, eggs had been hurled at the bus. While no one was hurt, the episode led to more media coverage and demonstrated the vitriol coming from transgender activists.
While the tour was greeted with enthusiasm and clearly generated support for women’s sports, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the bus, which featured several photos of prominent female athletes, including Nancy, was vandalized.
The “transphobic” slur rankles Hogshead. “Our idea was for us to have a speaking tour,” Nancy says, “where we could talk about how important it is to have women’s sports. We aren’t using it to trash gays, lesbians, or transgender people. We have lesbians who are members of the coalition on Our Bodies, Our Sports. We have people like Martina Navratilova who is a long-time leader for gay rights. We’ve had the support of transgender athletes, including my 1980 Olympic teammate, as well as Caitlyn Jenner, Corinna Cohn, Renee Richards, and Jessica Gill.”
“I was a very big proponent of making sure that people of different sexual orientations had opportunities that were protected, and couldn’t be kicked out of housing, or be discriminated in banking, or family law, right? So, I was in an advertising campaign called ‘We Are Straight Allies.’ It featured business leaders, musicians, members of the ministry, feminists, sports stars, and actors to say, ‘We are straight people and we are supportive of the LGBT community having equal opportunities.’ If you had told me that that movement would morph into one that would champion men in women’s sports, or men in women’s changing rooms, or men in women’s prisons…I would have laughed at you. I never in a million years thought that when I dedicated my professional life to advocating for girls and women in sports that I would have to expend any time or resources on the issue of keeping women’s sports for women, keeping men out of women’s sports. I would have thought you were crazy.
“Yet here we are, trying to get across a message about the importance of women’s sports. Our message can’t be dismissed by falsely saying ‘Oh, you’re a bunch of transphobes.’ What we are for is gender equity for girls and women in sports.”
Nancy founded Champion Women (we like the name, too), a nonprofit that provides legal advocacy for girls and women in sports, in 2014. In addition to her Olympic credentials, Nancy is an honors graduate of Duke University and went on to earn a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center. She practiced law at the firm of Holland & Knight, in both their litigation and public law departments, and was a tenured Professor of Law at the Florida Coastal School of Law, where she taught Torts, Sports Law, and Gender Equity in Athletics courses for twelve years. Hogshead wrote “Equal Pay: Title IX and Social Change,” with coauthor and economics professor Andrew Zimbalist, in 2007.
She is a recognized expert on Title IX, the 1972 statute to guarantee equality in education for women, which is credited for providing a boost to women’s athletics. Title IX originally stated that educational institutions that received our federal tax dollars could not discriminate on the basis of sex, and this included athletic programs. Unfortunately, the Biden administration has recently rewritten the Title IX guidelines to equate “sex” with “gender” which effectively means that men who say they are women must be accepted in women’s competitions and women’s changing spaces, and that referring to a transgender person’s sex is hate speech and sex discrimination.
The issue with women’s sports isn’t just about the athletic competitions themselves, but sports can play a crucial role in shaping the futures of young athletes. Scholarship money is at stake, as Hogshead knows from her own experience.
“When I was in high school, I was on a hyper-elite team. There were always going to be Olympians coming from this team, and the size doubled over the summer as guys from college came home. But women were not coming back from college to swim. And I just thought it was because women’s bodies didn’t get any better after high school. No, no, no, it was because there were no teams, no scholarships for women. But around 1978, it was like somebody lit a blowtorch to the country, and, all of a sudden, I could have gone anywhere I wanted to go on full scholarship. I was the number one recruit, and I picked Duke University. I was the first woman on a full scholarship, and it was that scholarship that kept me swimming so that I got to swim in the 1984 Olympics.
The issue with women’s sports isn’t just about the athletic competitions themselves, but sports can play a crucial role in shaping the futures of young athletes. Scholarship money is at stake, as Hogshead knows from her own experience.
“But for Title IX, not in a million years was I going to get a college scholarship, period. No. It didn’t matter how talented I was. I was number one in the world when I was 14 years old. I was a 1980 Olympian. I had a great record. But it was not going to happen no matter how talented I was, how hard I worked, or what my accomplishments were. It wasn’t going to happen without Title IX.”
“People talk about Miss America being such a big scholarship program,” Nancy says. “Athletics dwarfs Miss America. Athletics is one of the largest scholarship programs in the country, and well worth it because we have amazing research showing how sports make better kids. Sports are an excellent investment in our tax dollars for people’s future, who will get more education, stay in the workforce, who are healthier, and who are productive members of society. It’s hard to learn how to win and how to lose on a blackboard. You have to have repetitive experiences of winning and losing. I’ve written many amicus briefs to courts to explain why they’re not just talking about hitting a ball over a net or swimming back and forth, but we are talking about something as integral to life as other subjects. Denying somebody the opportunity afforded by sports is like denying somebody math class.”
Nancy has three kids, a son and twin daughters. They enjoy traveling together around the world. Nancy interrupted her honeymoon to testify about doping before the U.S. Senate. She is a big fan of Riley Gaines, who is just about the age Nancy was for her first Senate testimony in 1985.
“I’ve lived through this kind of unfairness before,” Nancy tells IWF. “And guess what? When we were dealing with the doping issue, nobody of my stature stood up for us. Nobody. I’m never going to let this happen to girls and women today.”
When Riley was ambushed and physically hit at a speaking engagement in San Francisco, “Kim Jones, who runs ICONS, and I reached out to her. We were trying to be motherly and tell her she would be okay. Riley’s attitude was ‘Bring it on.’ She did not need comforting. She just needed an attaboy. We gave it to her.”
We at IWF would like to extend a heartfelt attaboy to Nancy, who has done so much for women’s sports over the years and most recently helped make the Our Bodies, Our Sports “Take Back Title IX” bus tour a huge success. Or maybe attagirl, Nancy.