Riley Gaines launches center at the Leadership Institute: It will 'fight the movement to erase women'

Former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines announced the launch of "The Riley Gaines Center" at the Leadership Institute in Virginia to help fight the movement to "erase women and destroy women’s sports."

The Leadership Institute (LI), a non-profit conservative organization, said the goal of the Center is to "protect the female identity, affirm the basic biological truth that men are men and women are women and defend freedom of speech."

It will also provide support, training and resources for those who want to defend women’s identity, according to a press release from LI. 

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Former University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines speaks at an event. 

Gaines, a 12-time All-American swimmer, told "Hannity" on Tuesday that she wished there was a similar Center around when she began speaking out against allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports. 

"The Riley Game Center is something that I wish I had when I began to speak up and when I faced the humiliation of the locker room and giving up our trophies for a photo op. The mission is to empower and train and provide resources to students, athletes, parents, coaches, medical professionals, other allies who want to help in the fight to defend women, defend freedom of speech, actually, too. And women's sports, of course," she said. 

"And so it will be a training program, we'll be doing school board training, putting conservative speakers on college campuses, which I think is really important to engage younger people and mobilize them."

Former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines announces the launch of 'The Riley Gaines Center' at the Leadership Institute in Virginia.  ((The Leadership Institute))

Gaines has been an outspoken critic of allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports after she competed against Lia Thomas, a transgender female, who previously swam for the men’s University of Pennsylvania swim team. 

Thomas won first place in the 200-yard freestyle at the 2022 Ivy League Women's Swimming and Diving Championships and first place in the 500-yard freestyle at the 2022 NCAA Championships. 

Gaines, a former University of Kentucky swimmer, also expressed her discomfort with being exposed to Thomas' "male genitalia" in a locker room. 

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"We were not forewarned beforehand that we would be sharing a locker room with Lia. We did not give our consent, they did not ask for our consent, but in that locker room we turned around, and there’s a 6’4" biological man dropping his pants and watching us undress, and we were exposed to male genitalia," she said on "America Reports" in February.

University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas and Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines react after finishing tied for 5th in the 200 Freestyle finals at the NCAA Swimming and Diving Championships on March 18th, 2022 at the McAuley Aquatic Center in Atlanta Georgia. (Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

The five-time SEC Champion and host of OutKick’s "Gaines for Girls" podcast told host Sean Hannity that men shouldn’t be competing against women or changing in their locker rooms under any circumstance. 

"The women's sporting category is not a failed retirement plan for male athletes," Gaines said. "We as women, of course, we are different than men. It's not to say we're inferior, but we're different. We have different physical ceilings, and it's we're unique in our own ways." 

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Ashley Carnahan is a production assistant at Fox News Digital.