“If we as female athletes aren’t willing to stick up for ourselves, we shouldn’t expect someone else to stand up for us,” Gaines told The Post. “Someone has to speak out truthfully. So I did.”
A daughter of two athletes, the Nashville native started swimming at the age of 4. In 2018, Gaines was recruited by the University of Kentucky where, in addition to studying human health services and health law, she spent six hours a day in the water practicing.
Former University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines said the battle to let trans athletes born biologically male, like Lia Thomas, compete in women’s sports is “the opposite” of “progressive.”
“Someone has to speak out truthfully. So I did,” Gaines said of her advocacy.
“You really have to dedicate your entire four years of college to excelling,” she said of swimming. “It’s a major time commitment, and it’s definitely a lifelong journey.”
All the hard work paid off when Gaines became a 12-time NCAA All-American swimmer and a five-time SEC champion. But last year, the integrity of her sport — and female sports as a whole — was called into question when University of Pennsylvania swimmer Thomas, who had competed on the school’s men’s team her freshman, sophomore and junior years, began shattering records in the women’s category.
Gaines said the experience of competing against Thomas in the NCAA championship last March “felt like I was going into the race with my hands tied behind my back.”
Thomas was undergoing hormone replacement therapy when she competed at the University of Pennsylvania but had competed on the men’s team for her first three years at the school.
AP
Although Thomas has undergone hormone replacement therapy, many are still concerned about physical athletic advantages transgender competitors could have over cisgender female competitors.
“Whether they have different lung capacities, their height, testosterone levels whether they’ve used testosterone blockers or not — it doesn’t suppress going through puberty as a male. Especially Lia, who swam for three years as a male,” Gaines told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson in April of 2022.
Her decision to speak out came after NCAA officials decided that, since there was only one fifth-place trophy, Gaines would get hers later.
Thomas and Gaines tied for fifth place in the 2022 NCAA 200-meter race.
USA TODAY Sports
“Up until that point, I’d been waiting for someone else to say something, but that interaction was the final straw,” Gaines recalled. “Lia Thomas has shown extreme selfishness and a major lack of awareness — and just an utter disregard for women.”
Gaines said Thomas’s participation in women’s collegiate swimming is a symptom of a larger societal shift she finds problematic.
“We’re watching the denial of the most basic of truths. When you can’t acknowledge what a woman is, there’s a huge problem,” she added. “This is deeper than just sports. This is a systematic erasure of what a woman is.”
You could just feel the discomfort in the room,” Gaines said of sharing a locker room with Thomas.
Elliott Hess
Gaines found herself back in the headlines for advocating against NCAA rules that compel female athletes to share a locker room with biological males with intact anatomy, as she had to with Thomas. (Thomas was then transitioning with hormone replacement therapy.)
Although she’s accustomed to changing in front of fellow athletes, Gaines said that sharing a locker room with Thomas was an entirely different experience.
