The New York Times devoted nearly 3,000 words Wednesday to a hostile profile of collegiate swimmer-turned-women’s sports activist Riley Gaines, painting her as rude and ruthless in her vengeance tour against transgender males competing in women’s sports.
Reporter Ruth Graham declared off the top in her headline and subhead: “Riley Gaines Finished 5th. Now She Believes Victory Is in Her Grasp; The former college swimmer has used her race against Lia Thomas, a trans athlete, to propel her career as an influential, and unsparing, activist.”
Graham set the scene of the tension-charged women’s swimming championship meet in 2022, where biological male Thomas and a then-unknown University of Kentucky swimmer named Riley Gaines tied for fifth place in the 200-yard freestyle, though the male swimmer was the one who posed with the fifth place trophy:
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….
Graham admitted Gaines’s views were “taboo in liberal spaces only a few years ago,” but “are increasingly mainstream” and “[i]t 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.”
Without emphasis, Graham noted Lia Thomas (“she”) won the 500-yard freestyle championship in the woman’s division. That was after Thomas had been ranked No. 65 when competing against his fellow males. Fascinating.
Graham noted Gaines’s concerns about lack of privacy in the locker room and the slight she suffered when Thomas, the male swimmer, had the privilege of holding the fifth-place trophy.
Then it got personal against Gaines, with Graham portraying her as aiming to wipe men who claim they are women out of existence. The Times reporter also proved she has a very loose view of “offensiveness”:
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.
Graham huffily described a disputed confrontation between Gaines and a transgender coach.
“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’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.
After pushing trans-friendly propaganda ("deadname") as normal, Graham pushed more emotional hot buttons to paint Riley’s common-sense stand for women as cruel.
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.
The Times attached one of its occasional “Reporter commentary” audio clips to the article; at the 3:30 mark Graham lamented how Gaines’ rhetoric had become “more extreme over the years and a lot harsher.”
Speaking of “extreme,” Graham has a history of extreme-style labeling of religious movements, finding the 2021 meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention filled with “ultraconservatives” and “hard-right” labels.
Gaines responded to the hit piece on X:
Lots of dishonesty & false depictions in this NYT piece written by @publicroad (as expected) that essentially paints me as Satan himself. But normal, sane people understand men can't be women and vice versa. Keep doubling down, @nytimes, and we'll keep winning.
