Saving Women’s Sports for Women: Riley Gaines’s life changed when a biological male tied with her for an NCAA championship swimming title
Independent Women’s Forum is pleased to announce that Riley Gaines, the swimming star who’s become famous for her effort to save the hard-won gains of women’s athletics, is the latest entry in our popular series of Champion Women profiles.
Riley needs no introduction to an IWF audience. Gaines may be the country’s most prominent advocate for limiting women’s sports to women. For Riley, the notion that it’s either fair or safe for men to compete in women’s sports is simply a lie—and part of a larger debate.
“Think about this,” she said to a U.K. newspaper, “in the 1940s, World War II, men lied about their age to enlist. Now, in 2023, we have men lying about their sex to get into women's sports or women's prisons or domestic shelters or sororities or bathrooms, locker rooms.”
Gaines had planned to go to dentistry school, but something snapped when Gaines and Lia Thomas, a man who identifies as a transgender woman, tied for fifth-place in the women's 200-meter NCAA championship match
Gaines was told, “Hey, I just want to let you know, we only have one fifth-place trophy, so yours will be coming in the mail. We went ahead and gave the fifth-place trophy to Lia, but you can pose on the podium with the sixth-place trophy,” according to a swimming magazine.
We loved getting behind the scenes with Riley and finding out about her growing up in a sports-oriented family in Tennessee before she was a University of Kentucky swimming champion, what she felt when protesters trapped her in a small room, and how she is enjoying marriage to Louis Barker, an Englishman who came to the U.S. to swim for Kentucky.
We know you’ll enjoy meeting Riley, and her beloved Springer Spaniels, Lady and Buddy, the same way we did.
