FFS Friday: Lily Mullens

August 29, 2025

FFS (Female Free Speech) Friday honors women and girls who are speaking out about the harms that “gender identity” poses to women and girls as a sex class. FFS Friday posts are free and shareable. A paid subscription gets you regular access to much more content and the ability to comment and engage in conversation with other thoughtful people.

Today’s FFS Friday celebrates Lily Mullens, who once swam on the women’s swimming team at Roanoke College, and stood with her teammates in opposition to allowing a male athlete to compete with them.

(Thanks to ICONS for the photo.)

In 2023, the entire women’s swimming team at Roanoke College took a stand and said NO to men competing on their team. There was an entire press conference about it. I was there. Riley Gaines was there. The swimmers’ parents were there. It was exhilarating to stand with a group of young women who had found their voices and were saying NO.

At around 4:40 of this video, the entire team took to the stage wearing t-shirts that read, “EQUALITY ISN’T A GAME.”

Lily spoke first. She said:

Good afternoon. My name is Lily and I swim for Roanoke College.

Common sense should have prevented us from needing to stand in front of all of you today. But, instead of being silent, we are courageously sharing our story.

The women of the Roanoke women’s swim team, myself included, came back to school this year, hoping for a season that would be our best one yet. After a second-place finish at our conference meet last year, we were motivated to work hard through the summer, so we could win this year.

However, that motivation quickly dissipated when we learned about the situation that would soon consume us, mentally and emotionally. We were told that a biologically male swimmer would be joining our women’s team.

As the school year began, we were left in the dark. It felt like no matter what we said, no matter what legitimate concerns we brought forward, we were met with the [unclear] to “remain patient.” There were conversations being had by the people at the top, who were going to control what would happen to us. I sat in meeting after meeting with my fellow team captains, discussing every possible unknown without getting concrete answers. Some of these meetings lasted for two hours, leaving me drained and unable to focus on the things that I needed to get done for school. I spent hours, staring at blank sheets of paper, hoping that the math I needed to turn in the next day would write itself. Most nights, I gave up on homework and went to bed, or at least I tried to. My lights were off and my curtains were closed, but my mind would not let me sleep.

I tried listening to meditations to see if that would calm my nerves, but the feelings of angst never disappeared.

I questioned my purpose in swimming, a sport that I’ve competed in for fifteen years now. The reason why I spent all that time in the water became unclear. Why would I even try to swim if I was going to have to race against a biological man? My defeat was written in biology at that point. There was no heart or grit that could overcome the loss of nature.

I [unclear] that I was not the only one who felt this way. In private conversations with my teammates, I found that we were all experiencing the same anxiety, heartache, and overall fear. When we finally worked up the guts to explain how we felt to the higher-ups at our school, we were told that we had support. But not once was that support exhibited to us in practical terms.

We sent emails that got ignored. We had conversations that ended without any advice or solutions given to us, and not a single administrator came to us to ask us how we felt or how we were holding up after the integrity of our sport was ripped away from us.

We needed to have advocates—adults and leaders defending that we deserved to be treated fairly. We needed to know that our sports and our hard work were not meaningless to everyone. But instead, we were left to sit with our thoughts, alone and unheard.

It should be noted that the school was following policy, the NCAA policy, which tosses women like us to the side, as an afterthought. Throughout this entire experience, people in power with positions to make change, did nothing. Nobody wants to stand up for women. The rule-makers have allowed my team to be manipulated, blind-sided, and pressured to be silently accepting unfair treatment and unfair competition as we head into our competitive season. We were emotionally blackmailed and asked to carry the responsibility of other people’s health and well-being at the expense of our own. This has been too great a burden to bear for many of our teammates, who have lost hours of sleep and the will to train, to raise a swimmer who has an advantage in the water that our bodies will never possess. Many of us have shut down from fear and anxiety under the weight of the load that we have been forced to carry, as women.

The NCAA has had an opportunity to make sure that girls never go through what Riley, Paula, Kailey, and so many other girls have gone through.

…

These organizations have chosen to ignore and discriminate against women and girls. They have chosen a policy that is meant to be “more inclusive,” while they actively exclude women and girls. This issue has gone on way longer than it should. Let our story be the final one told. I am calling on the NCAA and all lawmakers everywhere to stop the suffering and emotional turmoil that is being placed on girls.

My name is Lily Mullens, the captain of the Roanoke College women’s swim team, and I stand with female athletes everywhere.

On August 25, 2025, it was announced that the Attorney General of Virginia, Jason Miyares, had entered an official finding that Roanoke College discriminated against these female athletes by allowing a man to compete on the women’s swimming team, and Lily is finding herself in the news again.

Talking to a reporter named Jackson Thompson a few days ago, she revealed that the manipulation, blind-siding, pressure, and emotional blackmail she had referred to back in 2023 was that the women were told that if they did not go along with the charade, the male swimmer in question would kill himself. They were told that his mental health was their responsibility. Several of her teammates had caved during an initial meeting, before finding their voices in time for the press conference.

She says, “Having my teammates call me afterwards [after the earlier meeting], hearing the stress, the tears, the frantic panic, all of that … we were all 19 to 20 years old.” If you watch that short interview with the reporter, you’ll see that she still can’t quite get her mind around what happened to her and her teammates.

Young women should never have been put in this position, and I may not ever not be angry that they were (and still are). There were adults at the college who could have said no. They could have stood up to the NCAA at any time. But they didn’t. They chose instead to manipulate, blind-side, pressure, and emotionally blackmail a group of young female athletes. It’s totally unacceptable.

Lily, you never should have had to shoulder this burden. School administrators should have had your back. You and your teammates should not have been put in this position. But I’m glad you stood up, and I will never forget being at that press conference, sharing a stage with you, on that day in 2023. Today’s FFS Friday is for you.