Ex-NCAA captain 100% worried about how elections could reshape women’s sports in Virginia

A former Virginia NCAA swimming captain, who alleged retaliation by university officials after she objected to a transgender student joining her team, said she is “100 percent” concerned about the results of the upcoming statewide election and the impact it could have on women in sports.

Former Roanoke College swimmer Lily Mullens spoke with Fox News Digital ahead of Virginia’s upcoming election about her experience raising concerns with her university about a transgender classmate, born biological male, joining the school’s women’s collegiate swim team.

Concerns about this fell on deaf ears and were brushed aside by university administrators, Mullens said, but she noted that state Republican officials came to her and her teammates’ defense.

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Former NCAA swimming captain Lily Mullens (center) says she’s “100 percent” concerned about what Virginia’s upcoming statewide elections could mean for women’s sports. (Kristen Zeis/Anna Moneymaker via Getty Images; ICONS)

“Governor Youngkin had reached out to the captains and myself personally to ask how we were doing and how things were going. And it was such a huge thing because even the president of my school wasn’t able to do it,” Mullens told Fox News Digital. “To see someone who runs an entire state do that and not have the president of my school, who only oversees 2,000 people… it’s hard to describe. I was so shocked and I was grateful at the same time.”

The state of Virginia is gearing up for several important statewide elections later this year, including a race for governor and attorney general. Outgoing Gov. Glenn Youngkin has reached his term limit, so Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears has been handed the baton to keep the governor’s mansion Republican.

She is facing former Rep. Abigail Spanberger.

Current Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares is also up for re-election and is being challenged by Democrat Jay Jones, who is facing fallout from resurfaced text messages showing him wishing for the death of a fellow Republican.

Earlier this year, Miyares said she found reasonable cause to determine that Roanoke College discriminated against Mullens and her teammates on the basis of gender and retaliated after the girls spoke out. It’s a finding the college later disputed, calling the allegations “unsubstantiated” in a press release issued at the time by the school and sent to Fox News Digital.

The issue stemmed from a transgender student who previously swam on the school’s all-male swim team but wanted to transition to the all-female team after hormone treatment and other transition measures in fall 2023.

A meeting of the swim team and its members to discuss the new swimmer’s upcoming participation was a moment when Mullens saw first-hand that her college administrators were unlikely to support her objections.

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“The purpose of the meeting was to bring all of us together with this individual to, in one way or another, express our feelings or opinions regarding this individual with the administrators in the room,” Mullens recalled to Fox News Digital in August.

“At one point it was discussed that this person, without transition, had thought about and planned suicide. So that was something that was said to all of us.”

Mullens, who describes herself as a religious person, said the first reaction from her and her teammates was confusion after the swimmer shared specific details about planning to commit suicide.

“We all felt emotionally confused. We didn’t know what to do,” Mullens previously told Fox News Digital.

Lily Mullens, former Roanoke girls swimming captain. (Courtesy of ICONS)

Meanwhile, school administrators at the meeting “didn’t say anything,” according to Mullen’s recollection of the event. And mental health professionals on campus were only made aware of the situation after Mullens and others made the matter public at a news conference. After the press conference, Mullens and her teammates were denied the opportunity to study abroad in countries of their choice despite good academic standing and a history of extensive extracurricular activities, according to Miyares’ findings.

Mullens told Fox News Digital the explanations she and other swimmers got for their refusals only added more confusion to the whole affair.

“Basically, he was saying, ‘The professor is not only responsible for the student’s academic performance, but also for his behavior,’” Mullens said. “I had no idea what that meant. I never had any disciplinary action taken against me.”

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In other conversations with Fox News Digital ahead of Virginia’s November election, Mullens said she felt like the university simply brushed aside all of her concerns, while taking steps that suggested support for the transgender swimmer.

“Every email that has been sent in response to our speaking, the girls of Roanoke – I remember our original press conference, as well as when we spoke at the Trump rally in Salem that he had last year – our president has sent emails in which he said, ‘We love and support our LGBTQ students.’ So it was like, “Well, if you preach inclusion and diversity that includes ideals. » So when people brush over that and don’t say anything else about it, it’s so hypocritical to me and I don’t… I’ve never understood how we can have one without the other.

“We need leaders who can say, ‘Absolutely not, we’re just not going to allow this to happen,'” Mullens said.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Winsome Earle-Sears, left, and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger, right. (Pool/Getty Images)

About a week ago, Youngkin issued Executive Directive 14, which directed the state board of health to begin drafting new policies requiring that private spaces, such as locker rooms and bathrooms, and sports teams remain segregated by students’ sex assigned at birth.

Mullens said she fears that just as a new president could reverse President Donald Trump’s plethora of executive orders, a new Democratic governor could do the same in her state. During a gubernatorial debate Thursday night, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic Party candidate, did not definitively answer whether she would rescind Youngkin’s Executive Directive 14, but she said she did not think politicians should determine the rules for school districts.

Her Republican opponent, Earle-Sears, has stated unequivocally that she will not rescind the directive.

Mullens also expressed concern in his interview about the upcoming attorney general race in the state, pitting Miyares and Jones against each other. Recently, Jones came under fire after text messages from 2022 surfaced in which he said then-Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert should be shot “two times in the head.”

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“I think it’s insane that someone who wants to be the best law person in the state can say that there are people that he wishes death for and things like that. That could very well turn into me. That could turn into my teammates,” Mullens said. “The chief law officer in a state should be someone who you know will defend every citizen, no matter what.”

Democratic Party candidate for Virginia attorney general Jay Jones, left, and Republican candidate Jason Miyares (Getty Images)

Mullens, meanwhile, called Miyares “instrumental” in supporting her and her teammates, including helping to bring their story to the general public.

“We were bullied. I mean, I got death threats in my direct messages on my personal account. social networks accounts. I’ve had anonymous messages sent to me from people I could have sat next to in class, and it’s things like that that are so hard to deal with,” Mullens said.

“When Attorney General Miyares came out and said, ‘Look, we’re going to investigate what the school did to these girls,’ we were very grateful.”