“All I could do was hug her.” That’s what Rita Larsen remembered about last month’s track meet. As a mom, she was powerless. Like so many parents who’ve suffered through this new era of biological men in girls’ sports, she watched her daughter lose to a boy who had no business competing. “She was just bawling,” Larsen (who’s using a pseudonym to talk to reporters) said later. “I could cry right now just thinking about it.”

Larsen’s daughter was bumped from the Washington State championships in the 400-meter race because a trans-identifying runner knocked her off the second-place podium she needed to move on. The teenage boy, who’s entered races as Davina Brown, Donovan Brown, and now Veronica Garcia, wouldn’t have qualified for men’s varsity with his time, Rita points out — and yet the tournament rules allowed him to rob girls of a trip to state. “He wouldn’t have even made it to districts,” Rita told the Independent Women’s Forum’s Ashley McClure.

And the problem, Larsen wanted people to know, isn’t that he’s identifying as transgender. The problem is that he’s stealing opportunities, records, and trophies that belong to legitimate women. “He can do whatever he wants with his life,” Rita said, “but he’s jeopardizing what these girls work so hard for. My daughter goes to practice every day, runs in the off-season, lifts weights — she never stops running.”

Adding insult to injury, Garcia’s first-place finish didn’t just help him, it gave his high school the extra points they needed to take first place overall. In the crowd, spectators booed when they realized who had won. “It’s hard because you don’t want to make a kid feel bad, but at the same time,” Rita insisted, “this is wrong and needs to stop happening.”

That’s what a busload of women is trying to tell Americans as they travel coast to coast. To mark the 52-year anniversary of Title IX, the policy that should protect girls like Rita Larsen’s, a group of famous athletes, activists, Olympians, and high schoolers is hitting the road to fight for fairness against a Biden administration determined to strip it from them. Paula Scanlon, who had the unfortunate experience of competing with Lia Thomas at the University of Pennsylvania, is one of the voices on the bus.

“The university told us that our feelings didn’t matter,” she remembers of having Lia as a teammate. “They said that if we objected to undressing with Lia Thomas in the locker room that we needed psychological services. And by the way,” Paula pointed out, “this is not something they made us do once or twice. They made us undress in the locker room with a six-foot-four tall man 18 times every single week. … [T]hey continually told us if we objected to it, we were the problem. We were hateful. We were bigoted. They told us we were on the wrong side of history. They said we’d never be able to find a job.”

Scanlon told “Washington Watch” guest host and former Congressman Jody Hice on Monday that she struggled to take a public stand. But eventually, she says, “my turning point was … Peyton McNabb. She was a high school volleyball player, and she was knocked unconscious by a volleyball that was spiked by a male who identified as a girl on the opposing team, spiked the ball into her head, knocked her unconscious. She’s partially paralyzed in her face,” Paula said. “Can’t play sports in college now. And I saw that and I said to myself, ‘If I continue to stay quiet while people like Peyton are being permanently injured for life, I am part of the problem.’ And it was really at that point, I knew I had to speak up about it …”

Now, she and the others are visiting “a lot of cities just raising awareness,” she told Hice. The Take Back Title IX Summer 2024 Tour is meant to coincide with the White House’s unrelenting push to rewrite the rule in favor of trans-identifying students. Hice thought back to 1972 when Richard Nixon signed the act into law, “and I am confident, absolutely confident, that he at that time never could have anticipated a day when a future sitting president would use … Title IX to push for biological males to compete in girls’ and women’s sports.”

But here we are, a half-century later, watching the accomplishments of America’s daughters literally wiped off the face of sports and erased by the opposite sex. And fortunately for families like the Larsens, most people are appalled by it. “We’ve had great turnouts in a lot of our events already happening,” Paula explained. “I mean, our bus was also vandalized in North Carolina at the end of last week, so that was definitely a little bit shocking — but not surprising because the other side is relentless.” In response, she insisted, “We fight harder and stronger. So it didn’t stop us. It didn’t make us change our ways at all.”

Celebrities like tennis great Martina Navratilova is taking plenty of hits for joining the tour, which some liberals see as a betrayal of her lesbian identity. One New York Times sports writer, Ben Rothenberg, even accused her of “turning this anti-trans crusade into her life’s obsession.” Her “transphobic vitriol” is “nasty and cruel and dehumanizing,” he posted bitterly. “Boo.”

Navratilova took it in stride, dishing it right back at him. “Yet another man telling women what they should care about. And who are you exactly? … Good to know you care about women’s sports and women’s sex-based spaces. I care.”

From Washington, D.C., the group heads to Virginia Beach and Nashville for rallies, their 12th and 13th stops. The Biden administration wants “sex to be equivalent to gender identity,” Scanlon warned, “meaning any man who identifies as a woman can take away a woman’s athletic or academic scholarship, can be housed in a female only dorm, can use women’s bathrooms and locker rooms. [Every] woman should care about this issue. And this is not just colleges. This is all federally-funded education institutions. So this could happen to your children in elementary school and middle school…”

The women did get to celebrate a string of good news on the road, including a series of court rulings that have put a hold on Biden’s radical rewrite of Title IX in 10 states. “This is a huge victory is what this is,” Riley Gaines said on Fox News’s “Varney & Company.” “Now these six states … Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, and Indiana [have] joined Montana, Idaho, Mississippi, and Louisiana in ultimately saying, ‘We will not comply with Joe Biden’s illegal administrative rewrite of Title IX,’ set to take effect in August. … I mean, that’s 20% of the states. … It’s great news. It’s a victory — not just for women and girls,” she pointed out, “but really for humanity here.”