With caps covering their hair, goggles over their eyes, and sleek suits down to their knees, the eight swimmers on the pool deck looked indistinguishable from one another. They crouched in identical poses: One foot back, head down, rear up, hands dropped forward on the starting block. Together, they waited for the starting signal.
It was the evening of March 18, 2022, the women’s 200-yard freestyle final at the N.C.A.A. Division I swimming and diving championships. Small and stacked with international talent, the competition is harder to qualify for than the U.S. Olympic trials.
That night, the atmosphere in the arena was charged with a tension distinct from the usual intensity of athletic competition. “I’ve never felt a crowd root against anybody before,” said Dan D’Addona, who covered the meet for Swimming World Magazine.
The target was Lia Thomas, a quiet senior from the University of Pennsylvania. Ms. Thomas swam competitively for years as a member of the men’s team, before beginning estrogen treatment to transition in 2019, and later switching to racing with the women. Over the course of the 2021-22 season, she became national news, an avatar for churning unease about gender, power, safety, sports, politics, feminism and biology.
The commentators calling the 200-yard freestyle final never once mentioned the name of the swimmer in Lane 1, Riley Gaines. A senior at the University of Kentucky who planned to enroll in dental school in the fall, she swam in the middle of the pack. So did Ms. Thomas. In the end, they tied for fifth place.
But as Ms. Thomas has largely dropped from public view in the years since, Ms. Gaines has turned that fateful race into a thriving career as an activist against the participation of transgender women in women’s sports. By turns a roving speaker, indignant influencer and canny provocateur, she has embraced her cause with such zeal that she has become a variation on the target of attention that Ms. Thomas once was.
“All of this campaigning because you lost a race,” the gymnast Simone Biles told her online in June, after Ms. Gaines referred to a transgender high school softball player as a boy.
Ms. Gaines’s views, taboo in liberal spaces only a few years ago, are increasingly mainstream. It is hard to find a politician in either major party to offer a full-throated defense of the idea of transgender women playing women’s sports. And a poll this year by The New York Times found that 79 percent of Americans oppose it.
Meanwhile, the N.C.A.A. has tightened its rules, and Ms. Thomas is now barred from swimming in elite competitions, including the Olympics. On July 1, Penn reached an agreement with the Department of Education stripping transgender competitors, including Ms. Thomas, of credit for past records and titles, and promising to send a “personalized letter of apology to each impacted female swimmer.”
Ms. Gaines, 25, said in an interview that she had been in contact with the Education Department as it shaped the agreement with Penn, and that she considered it “justice being served.”
This spring, Georgia and West Virginia passed versions of bills named for Ms. Gaines aimed at preventing transgender women and girls from competing in women’s sports. Ms. Gaines attended both signings.
“Riley Gaines is a person that I’ve been watching,” President Trump said in February at the White House signing of an executive order with the same goal. “She really has been in the forefront.”
Three years after finishing fifth in Atlanta, she has essentially not stopped talking about a race that lasted less than two minutes. And right now, she feels like she’s finally winning.
‘She Hates to Lose’
Some swimmers talk about knowing they belonged in the water from as early as they can remember. That is not Ms. Gaines’s story. But if she wasn’t necessarily in love with the pool, she was always a deeply competitive person.
“She hated losing more than she loved to win,” her mother, Telisha Gaines, said. “She hates to lose.”
In college, when word began to spread in swimming circles that Ms. Thomas was transgender, Ms. Gaines said, she was confident the competition would remain fair. “This will be taken care of, there’s rules in place,” she recalled thinking.
In fact, Ms. Thomas had followed the N.C.A.A.’s guidelines at the time, which required that she undergo at least a year of hormone therapy, taking testosterone blockers and estrogen, before competing as a woman. (Ms. Thomas and a spokesman did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
By the time of the N.C.A.A. championships in March 2022, it was clear Ms. Thomas would be competing. More than 50 journalists registered to cover the women’s competition, compared with around a dozen for the men’s races. The story intensified when Ms. Thomas won the 500-yard freestyle, becoming the first openly transgender woman to win a national title. (Competing against men in the 2018-19 season, she was ranked No. 65 in the country in the 500-yard freestyle, and No. 554 in the 200 freestyle.)
The next day, she and Ms. Gaines were contenders for the 200 freestyle.
In Ms. Gaines’s telling, her objection initially wasn’t to the race itself, where in theory she would have finished fifth with or without Ms. Thomas. It was about the locker room, for one, where modesty is not possible in contemporary competitive swimming. The new generation of “tech suits” are so tight they take a while to put on or peel off, and often require help from a teammate.
It was also about the hardware. Though Ms. Gaines and Ms. Thomas had finished the race in a tie, Ms. Gaines was handed the sixth-place trophy for photos after the race, while Ms. Thomas got to hold the fifth-place award. The trophies were the same size, and the N.C.A.A. mailed Ms. Gaines a fifth-place trophy within weeks. But to Ms. Gaines, it was a galling slight.
She thought about refusing to get onto the podium with Ms. Thomas, but in the end decided it would serve a purpose for the two to be photographed side by side.
“I think that was the visual so many people truthfully needed, to be able to come to terms with what was actually happening,” she said. The indelible image of the 5-foot-5 Ms. Gaines gazing up at Ms. Thomas, who stares straight ahead, kicked off her career as an activist.
‘I Am in Full Support of Her’
Ms. Gaines’s approach to activism involves a weaponization of names, pronouns, physical descriptions and other language to undermine the legitimacy of transgender people’s mere existence in the world.
In 2022, she used female pronouns for Ms. Thomas and emphasized that she affirmed her gender identity. “I am in full support of her and full support of her transition and her swimming career and everything like that,” she told The Daily Wire days after the race.
Now, offensiveness is a part of her brand. When I met Ms. Gaines this spring, she told me a story about an assistant coach at the University of Kentucky who was raised as a girl but was in the process of transitioning during the 2021-22 season.
At the N.C.A.A. championships, the team gathered for a meeting where the swimmers were abuzz over Ms. Thomas’s participation. Afterward, Ms. Gaines found the transgender coach distraught in the hotel lobby. “Are you OK?” she recalled asking, pointedly calling the coach by the female first name he’d left behind. He asked through tears why no one had asked him how he felt about the turmoil in the competition.
“I lost it on her,” Ms. Gaines said, using the wrong pronoun for the coach. “I was like, ‘Because, quite frankly, no one cares how you feel.’”
(Transgender people and their allies consider it offensive to refer to them by their former name, known as their deadname, without permission.)
Ms. Gaines shared this story with me, unprompted, about 15 minutes after we met. She also said that the coach later reported her to the University of Kentucky for harassment. To Ms. Gaines, it was a story that depicted her speaking harshly — or boldly — to a transgender person, and then in turn being victimized by him.
But the University of Kentucky has no record of any harassment claim made by the coach against Ms. Gaines, for this or any other incident. Through a spokeswoman, the assistant coach said he did not file a complaint and did not recall an incident like the one Ms. Gaines described.
The audiences she speaks to now might welcome it, whether it happened as tidily as she told it or at all. Ms. Gaines is a contributor to the combative Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk’s king-making conservative youth outfit, and she hosts a podcast for OutKick, a punchy Fox Corporation-owned sports and culture site.
She looks back on her early public cautiousness with disdain. “I approached the conversation very apologetically at first, like almost prefacing by saying, ‘I’m sorry I feel this way, but,’” she said.
Ms. Gaines’s version of telling the truth now includes publicly insulting transgender individuals, including teenage athletes whom she calls out by name to her 1.5 million followers on X.
In other words, she often seems to go out of her way to provoke those who are not already fully on board with her mission. But if Ms. Gaines’s rhetoric is alienating, her specific position on transgender women and sports has increasingly widespread support.
In California, where Mr. Trump received less than 40 percent of the vote last year, 71 percent of public school parents say they support his executive order on transgender athletes, according to a statewide survey this spring. Few high-level athletes still active in their sports speak publicly about the issue, but a small study of elite athletes published in 2024 in the Journal of Sports Sciences found that 58 percent favored sports being categorized by biological sex.
Swimming World Magazine editorialized against Ms. Thomas’s participation in the meet in 2022, calling her title in the 500-yard freestyle “an insult to the biological women who raced against her.”
But John Lohn, the magazine’s editor in chief, who wrote the editorial, said he regretted the way the meet has been politicized by the Trump administration, and the ugly nature of the rhetoric on the topic.
“I still don’t believe a transgender woman should compete against biological women,” he said. “But there’s a way to have these conversations with proper discourse.”
For many of Ms. Gaines’s public allies, “proper discourse” is akin to lying.
“I’m on the same path as Riley here,” said Jennifer Sey, a former gymnast whose advocacy for school reopenings during the Covid-19 pandemic made her start questioning a range of liberal commonplaces. As a corporate executive in San Francisco, she had transgender co-workers and had no issue with using their correct pronouns, she said.
Ms. Sey now lives in Colorado, and leads XX-XY Athletics, an apparel brand that calls itself “the only brand standing for women’s sports.” Ms. Gaines is a paid ambassador.
“I now feel that if you use the pronouns, you then enter a false reality,” Ms. Sey said.
This is Ms. Gaines’s intuition as an activist, too: If people accept the premise that transgender women do not belong in women’s sports, then they have conceded that transgender women are not fully, truly women.
As she sees it, more sweeping restrictions of transgender people flow from there, including the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that states can ban gender-affirming care for minors and the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee’s change of its eligibility rules to bar transgender women from competing in Olympic women’s sports.
“The gender ideology movement is a house of cards, and I believe it’s lying on that sports issue,” she said. “This will be the card that makes all of it crumble.”
Her longer-term goals include the restriction of transgender medical treatments for adolescents, and ultimately the legal and cultural dismantling of the belief that transgender people exist. (“A man believes he is a woman — those people exist,” she said. “But men who are women do not exist.”) Eventually, she might run for office, she said.
For her part, Ms. Thomas has spoken about how the seemingly narrow sports question could undermine the broader movement for transgender rights. In a podcast interview in 2023 with Schuyler Bailar, a transgender man who swam on Harvard’s men’s team in the 2010s, Ms. Thomas was critical of people who said they supported her identity but believed she should not be able to compete against other women in sports.
“You can’t really have that sort of half support, where you’re like, ‘Oh, I respect her identity as a woman here, but not here,’” she said. “I think a lot of people in that camp sort of carry an implicit bias against trans people.”
Everything Is Material
Not long ago, many social conservatives were critical of or indifferent to Title IX, the landmark education law that led to the dramatic expansion of athletic opportunities for girls and women. “Title IX has been turned into a tool to punish men,” Phyllis Schlafly, an anti-feminist activist, wrote in 2003. “Men like to play sports far more than women do.”
Now the script has flipped. Ms. Gaines has made Title IX part of her brand, embarking on a “Take Back Title IX” bus tour last year, and selling a Title IX merchandise collaboration with Ms. Sey’s XX-XY brand this summer. Offerings include the Riley Gaines Title IX Boyfriend Tee for $50, with the law’s full text printed on the back.
Ms. Gaines described herself to me as a feminist, and marveled at how, in her view, traditional feminists and liberals had ceded their territory. “To see those same people who burned their bras, who fought for Title IX, self-imploding and destroying that system is almost remarkable to me,” she said.
Critics argue that conservatives are not always advocates of Title IX’s ethos in the broader sense by lobbying for, say, better facilities for women’s teams. The Trump administration moved in June to quietly roll back some Title IX protections for student athletes overseen by the Department of Energy, to little opposition from conservatives.
“It’s not about protecting women and girls, it’s about dehumanizing trans people,” said Shiwali Patel, a senior education director at the National Women’s Law Center, an advocacy organization. The group filed a brief supporting the rights of transgender women in a lawsuit Ms. Gaines and others brought against the N.C.A.A. last year.
Setting up the interview with Ms. Gaines this spring was unusually confusing. Two publicists were involved, representing separate professional projects. They each flew to San Francisco for the interview, which took place in a hotel lobby a few hours before a speaking engagement at San Francisco State University.
After we talked for an hour, Ms. Gaines excused herself to her room to conduct her own interview for her podcast, “Gaines for Girls.” Her guest was Stephanie Turner, a fencer who had recently attracted attention for declining to compete against a transgender opponent. Through XX-XY, Ms. Gaines had offered her a $5,000 award, and now she was encouraging her to continue to speak up.
Ms. Gaines seemed to relish her return to “the belly of the beast,” as she referred to her speaking dates in San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, Ore. Outside the event at San Francisco State, a few dozen protesters played a halfhearted soccer game and chanted slogans like “Keep fascists off our campus!”
Inside, after an introduction by a Turning Point USA campus leader, Ms. Gaines went to the lectern in a T-shirt reading “TRUTH.” She opened by retelling the story of her 2023 visit to the campus, which culminated with Ms. Gaines barricaded in a classroom for hours while protesters chanted and stomped in the hallways outside. Recalling the chaos, Ms. Gaines mocked the protesters as “men in dresses” and criticized the police officers she said failed to protect her. When one young protester disrupted the speech, police carried him out, and the audience jeered.
For Ms. Gaines, everything is material. A few months later, she announced her first pregnancy at a Turning Point USA event for young women in Dallas, wrapping it into a jab at Ms. Biles, who had compared Ms. Gaines’s body to a man’s in the conflict on X. Stepping away from the lectern, Ms. Gaines unfurled a strip of ultrasound images and cupped her belly over a short frilly dress. “How many men do you know,” she asked, “that have this?”
By then, she had already won that particular conflict, with more triumphs on the horizon. Ms. Biles had backed down after conservatives, including Ms. Gaines, called for boycotts of her sponsors. The gymnast apologized for getting personal, and said that she did not want to “compromise fairness in women’s sports.”
“That groveling public apology, backtracking from her pro-trans message, that wouldn’t have happened five or even three years ago,” Ms. Gaines said. “I think she learned very quickly that we are not living in 2020 anymore, and that this is a different world.”
Read by Ruth Graham
Audio produced by Patricia Sulbarán.
Ruth Graham is a national reporter, based in Dallas, covering religion, faith and values for The Times.
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