From the article: There's nothing like monetary grift (the article mentions $25,000 speaking fees, podcasts, supplements, a clothing line, etc.) combined with charismatic "victimhood" and a moral...
From the article:
At a White House ceremony last February, before President Donald Trump signed an executive order to defund schools if they permit transgender girls to play girls’ sports, he turned and looked over his shoulder. Behind him stood former college swimmer Riley Gaines, wearing suffragette white in a crowd of young female athletes and conservative activists. “You’ve been waiting a long time for this,” Trump told the 24-year-old.
Almost three years, to be exact. Since tying for fifth place in a March 2022 championship race against transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, Gaines has used the story of their matchup to leap to the vanguard of the anti-trans movement, campaigning not just to ban trans women from women’s sports, but to end public acceptance of transgender people.
Gaines joined the political fray just as 14 states had already enacted restrictions on trans athletes and four more were on the verge of doing the same. With backing from GOP donors like the Amway billionaire DeVos family, she has crisscrossed the country with a simple message: Women’s sports need “saving” from “men”—that is, transgender girls and women.
No matter that the NCAA president said in 2024 that less than 0.002 percent of college athletes at the time were openly transgender (the percentage of Olympians is about the same). Gaines and her allies argue that trans athletes are stealing opportunities from every woman and girl who competes with them. Alongside other athletes, she filed a federal lawsuit against the NCAA seeking to ban trans girls from girls’ school sports nationwide, arguing that trans-inclusive policies are a form of discrimination against women.
“She’s a perfect message,” says Ronnee Schreiber, a political science professor at San Diego State University who studies women in the conservative movement. Even voters who generally support transgender people, Schreiber adds, are “still a little anxious about the trans athlete thing.”
There's nothing like monetary grift (the article mentions $25,000 speaking fees, podcasts, supplements, a clothing line, etc.) combined with charismatic "victimhood" and a moral crusade.
Personally, I think sports should be segregated into bands of competitors by attributes that are required in the competition - muscle mass, height, overall weight, reach, etc., and not by gender. I've spent enough time around MMA folks to watch more muscular women throwing men of the same weight easily, tall skinny people with longer reach tying more muscular people in knots, and so on, to realize that most sports are far more complicated than gender alone can determine. Too bad Riley Gaines had to compete in swimming against someone with a longer stroke, but she's given "sore loser" a new and darker TERF-y meaning.
I echo the sentiment that there’s something missing in the way we categorize people for sports. Personally, I can attest to having an innate emotional reaction at the thought of trans women...
I echo the sentiment that there’s something missing in the way we categorize people for sports.
Personally, I can attest to having an innate emotional reaction at the thought of trans women competing in women’s sports. It feels unfair. It’s not a surprise that right-wing research found that it would be such an effective wedge issue.
And yet, sports as a whole are unfair. Society has separated men’s and women’s sports in an attempt to address one area of unfairness, but, like you said, we have height, weight, muscle mass, testosterone levels, etc. Someday soon we may have gene-editing or similar wild stuff.
This article gave me a bit of empathy for Gaines that I did not have previously. It seems like collegiate sports can be quite a toxic enviornment. And Gaines, having persisted in that environment, felt like something was stolen from her, and she dived headfirst into a seething whirlpool of hatred and let it consume her. Like, fuck her, she contributed to the shitty situation the United States found itself in, but one can also see where her trajectory turned and her opportunity to lead an enriching life fell away.
If trans women were in fact dominating women's sports I think it would make sense to look at the system for changes but that just hasn't been the case. Most sports had some method for saying you...
If trans women were in fact dominating women's sports I think it would make sense to look at the system for changes but that just hasn't been the case. Most sports had some method for saying you had to be on hormones for a length of time. (As it stands hormones are used to disqualify cis women and intersex folks regularly, which isn't ideal) And before the recent bannings of trans women competing at all... There was still no evidence of trans women dominating.
And none of this will make either a trans girl in school sports feel safer while also leading to the harassment of cis girls who grow tall early, or have a square jaw, or a flatter chest and an athletic figure, or who are black and read as "masculine" to white PTA Karens. So yay, we have allegedly "fairer" girls and women's sports, something people can hardly manage to care about or fund otherwise on the back of harassment and hate with no statistical evidence of a problem. How many deaths by suicide will this lead to as a "side effect"
There are probably different ways to separate different sports. Gender is so baked into our culture I doubt we can ditch it but given the flawed system, we don't have to exclude trans folks to get competitive and fair sports
This is kinda personal for me and my spouse - I've got non-classical adrenal hyperplasia, he's got a mild androgen insensitivity variant. We both normally have blood levels of androgens that would...
This is kinda personal for me and my spouse - I've got non-classical adrenal hyperplasia, he's got a mild androgen insensitivity variant. We both normally have blood levels of androgens that would get us kicked out of competitions for doping.
We're not drastically and notably intersex, but we're on that spectrum. You do not want to know what a girl's locker room is like if you have visible chest hair and broad shoulders. You do not want to be the girl who's good at shot put and weightlifting. You do not want to be the boy with a feminine body fat distribution and little body hair.
Spouse works out like a madman to maintain any muscle definition; I can still bench bodyweight in spite of years of slacking. We're within the 99th percentile of normal human variation. We're not in need of any particular medical treatment for our conditions, and infertility was a bonus as far as we're concerned. There are tens of millions of "cis" people like us, but we're all likely to be excluded as the gender red lines proliferate.
Gender essentialism should be an absolute deal breaker in a free society - any one of us or our kids could be unable to conform to stereotyped and inflexible gender norms. Forced medicalization of variations that people are satisfied with is an ethical and legal minefield, just as denying people their true gender and its full expression is incredibly cruel and dehumanizing.
Fully agreed. And if everyone was being genetically tested so many more people would find out their chromosomes and assumed sex/gender didn't align. I would fully support a more equitable system...
Fully agreed. And if everyone was being genetically tested so many more people would find out their chromosomes and assumed sex/gender didn't align.
I would fully support a more equitable system for sports than gender, I just despair of that being a reality in a world where women's sports are already an afterthought until it became a handy excuse for the demonization of trans people.
In the meantime, now all the locker room harassment has expanded to come from parents, school officials and TV personalities. Instead of treating Riley Gaines like the sore loser she is, they've applauded her bigotry and bad sportsmanship and fed it. I hope it consumes her quickly and we can move on. Sigh
From the article:
There's nothing like monetary grift (the article mentions $25,000 speaking fees, podcasts, supplements, a clothing line, etc.) combined with charismatic "victimhood" and a moral crusade.
Personally, I think sports should be segregated into bands of competitors by attributes that are required in the competition - muscle mass, height, overall weight, reach, etc., and not by gender. I've spent enough time around MMA folks to watch more muscular women throwing men of the same weight easily, tall skinny people with longer reach tying more muscular people in knots, and so on, to realize that most sports are far more complicated than gender alone can determine. Too bad Riley Gaines had to compete in swimming against someone with a longer stroke, but she's given "sore loser" a new and darker TERF-y meaning.
I echo the sentiment that there’s something missing in the way we categorize people for sports.
Personally, I can attest to having an innate emotional reaction at the thought of trans women competing in women’s sports. It feels unfair. It’s not a surprise that right-wing research found that it would be such an effective wedge issue.
And yet, sports as a whole are unfair. Society has separated men’s and women’s sports in an attempt to address one area of unfairness, but, like you said, we have height, weight, muscle mass, testosterone levels, etc. Someday soon we may have gene-editing or similar wild stuff.
This article gave me a bit of empathy for Gaines that I did not have previously. It seems like collegiate sports can be quite a toxic enviornment. And Gaines, having persisted in that environment, felt like something was stolen from her, and she dived headfirst into a seething whirlpool of hatred and let it consume her. Like, fuck her, she contributed to the shitty situation the United States found itself in, but one can also see where her trajectory turned and her opportunity to lead an enriching life fell away.
All for what? Having to share fifth place?
If trans women were in fact dominating women's sports I think it would make sense to look at the system for changes but that just hasn't been the case. Most sports had some method for saying you had to be on hormones for a length of time. (As it stands hormones are used to disqualify cis women and intersex folks regularly, which isn't ideal) And before the recent bannings of trans women competing at all... There was still no evidence of trans women dominating.
And none of this will make either a trans girl in school sports feel safer while also leading to the harassment of cis girls who grow tall early, or have a square jaw, or a flatter chest and an athletic figure, or who are black and read as "masculine" to white PTA Karens. So yay, we have allegedly "fairer" girls and women's sports, something people can hardly manage to care about or fund otherwise on the back of harassment and hate with no statistical evidence of a problem. How many deaths by suicide will this lead to as a "side effect"
There are probably different ways to separate different sports. Gender is so baked into our culture I doubt we can ditch it but given the flawed system, we don't have to exclude trans folks to get competitive and fair sports
This is kinda personal for me and my spouse - I've got non-classical adrenal hyperplasia, he's got a mild androgen insensitivity variant. We both normally have blood levels of androgens that would get us kicked out of competitions for doping.
We're not drastically and notably intersex, but we're on that spectrum. You do not want to know what a girl's locker room is like if you have visible chest hair and broad shoulders. You do not want to be the girl who's good at shot put and weightlifting. You do not want to be the boy with a feminine body fat distribution and little body hair.
Spouse works out like a madman to maintain any muscle definition; I can still bench bodyweight in spite of years of slacking. We're within the 99th percentile of normal human variation. We're not in need of any particular medical treatment for our conditions, and infertility was a bonus as far as we're concerned. There are tens of millions of "cis" people like us, but we're all likely to be excluded as the gender red lines proliferate.
Gender essentialism should be an absolute deal breaker in a free society - any one of us or our kids could be unable to conform to stereotyped and inflexible gender norms. Forced medicalization of variations that people are satisfied with is an ethical and legal minefield, just as denying people their true gender and its full expression is incredibly cruel and dehumanizing.
Fully agreed. And if everyone was being genetically tested so many more people would find out their chromosomes and assumed sex/gender didn't align.
I would fully support a more equitable system for sports than gender, I just despair of that being a reality in a world where women's sports are already an afterthought until it became a handy excuse for the demonization of trans people.
In the meantime, now all the locker room harassment has expanded to come from parents, school officials and TV personalities. Instead of treating Riley Gaines like the sore loser she is, they've applauded her bigotry and bad sportsmanship and fed it. I hope it consumes her quickly and we can move on. Sigh