It was a crisp day in January when Riley Gaines stood in front of a divided crowd on the Supreme Court steps.
Right in front of her were her supporters, mostly women dressed in casual or formal clothing, clapping as she spoke. But just to their left stood a horde of pro-transgender activists, some wearing costumes and others partially unclothed, shouting curse words.
“They’re so angry,” Gaines told Fox News Digital of the crowd that day.
“On our side … you saw people smiling and embracing and hugging each other … but you look across the bike racks that were there separating us, and you saw anger, and you saw negativity, and you saw screaming, and you saw vitriol, and you saw colored hair, and you saw colored hair, and you saw piercings, and you saw what I would describe, honestly, just visually looking at it, was island of the misfit toys. Not to be like, mean, but just speaking pretty objectively here.”
Nearly six months after Gaines stood on those steps, the pro-transgender activists now sit on the losing side of the court’s decision. Gaines and her “Save Women’s Sports” activists can look back on that rally, and the obscenities hurled at them while they spoke, as obstacles in a winning fight, after the Supreme Court justices ruled Tuesday to uphold state laws that ban trans athletes from girls’ and women’s sports.
Six years before Gaines stood on those steps â and almost three years before her infamous tie with Lia Thomas â Idaho State cross-country runner Mary Kate Marshall was put in a position that would change her life. In 2019, she and teammate Madison Kenyon competed against a biological male from the University of Montana. The following year, they joined the lawsuit that would reach the Supreme Court.
“I lost every race I ran against this male, and so did a lot of my teammates. And then at a championship, I watched my teammate pushed off the podium,” Marshall told Fox News Digital.
It was 2020. The issue of trans athletes in women’s sports hadn’t become the cultural lightning rod it is today. There was less of a support system for women like Marshall. But she took a leap of faith, signing on as a voluntary defendant to a lawsuit against her state. The lawsuit, filed by former Boise State trans athlete Lindsay Hecox, blocked the state’s law to keep males out of women’s sports.
“Seeing that no parents were standing up, no coaches were saying anything, like, we knew we had to,” Marshall said.
She was joined by her teammate Madison Kenyan. Together with their state, they would suffer a series of courtroom losses over the course of multiple years.
All the while, they dealt with the sacrifices that Gaines and all the other “Save Women’s Sports” activists would have to deal with in a heated political climate.
“It was difficult at first because we were afraid of some of the backlash that we might get, but we had to do the right thing,” Marshall said, adding that interactions with people they were close to became “scary.”
“Teammates that we had on the team just disappointed in us for putting our school’s name out there…
“We had some teammates who were just afraid, um, afraid of going against the norm, and at the time, back in 2020, there, this wasn’t talked about a lot. So people were just scared about what would come of it or getting in trouble.”
Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador, who was just working as a legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) at the time, says their decision to join the lawsuit as defendants was essential to getting the case to the Supreme Court years later.
“I think it made all the difference in the world,” Labrador, who became AG in 2023, told Fox News Digital.
“Their courage and their conviction and their ability and desire to make very unpopular decisions at the time, and to make p
