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May 26, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
57:02
Defending the Integrity of Women's Sports | Riley Gaines
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I remember when I testified before the Senate, Senator Cory Booker came up to me before.
He sits down, he says, Hey, I play football at Stanford.
I'm in full agreeance.
You know, this is crazy.
I'm an athlete.
I know what you're talking about here.
And then gets on the other side of the table and starts grilling me.
These people are weak-kneed, morally bankrupt, spineless cowards, is what they are.
That's who we're being governed by.
And whether that's our government, or corporate America, or academia, even seemingly our spiritual leaders, that's the consensus.
And so I've learned a whole lot.
I think we have a lot of people who like to complain.
We have a lot of talking heads, people on, again, social media, Twitter, on both sides of the aisle, who aren't actually willing to do anything about it, which is frustrating.
Riley Gaines is an outstanding athlete and one of the most prominent advocates today for fairness in women's sports.
Born and raised in Tennessee, Riley rose through the world of competitive swimming and excelled on the University of Kentucky's swimming team, earning numerous titles and SEC awards.
Riley's journey took an unexpected turn when she found herself competing against Leah Thomas, a male swimmer, on the University of Pennsylvania's women's team.
Riley's advocacy for the protection of female locker rooms and fairness in women's sports sparked a national debate around gender identity and its dangerous implications.
Today, through her eponymous center at the Leadership Institute, Riley travels around the country to fight for the maintenance of Title IX policies and the protection of single-sex spaces.
Her book, Swimming Against the Current, fighting for common sense in a world that's lost its mind, touches on the very nature of truth and the emergence of a fourth wave of feminism.
In today's episode, we discuss Riley's swim career, her experience competing against Leah Thomas, and the consequences of her speaking out.
We also dive deep into her advocacy work with legislative bodies and the potential legal fallout for women across America.
this and much more in this episode of the Sunday Special.
Riley, thanks so much for stopping by.
I really appreciate it.
No, of course.
Thank you for having me on.
So you obviously have a new book out.
It's coming out May 21st, Swimming Against the Current, about everything that you've gone through over the past few years.
Why don't we start from the beginning?
So first of all, how did you get into swimming and how much training did you have to do to become a world-class swimmer?
Gosh, I grew up in a family of athletes.
So my dad, he played collegiate football.
He went on to play in the league.
My mom, she was a softball player.
My oldest sister, she played softball.
She went to Ole Miss.
My brother, he's in college playing football now.
My youngest sister, she's probably the best athlete of all of us, and I would never ever tell her that, but she's an elite-level gymnast.
So it was really never an option for me to not play sports, to be totally honest with you.
But I did a lot of sports growing up.
Swimming, softball, soccer, basketball, all the things.
Stuck with swimming, though, which really couldn't have been a better option for me.
Went to University of Kentucky, where I very proudly finished my career as a 12-time NCAA All-American, five-time SEC champion, SEC record holder in the 200 butterfly, making me one of the fastest Americans of all time.
Two-time Olympic trial qualifier, SEC Scholar Athlete of the Year, SEC Community Service Leader of the Year, but all of that to just reiterate, it's a lifelong journey.
Upon getting to Kentucky, you mentioned the training and what that kind of looked like.
Oh my gosh, Ben, I thought I worked hard before college.
I was wrong, because upon getting to college, we were in the water six hours every single day, with three of those hours being before 8 a.m.
So you practice from 5 a.m.
to 8 a.m., you go to class, you come back, you practice again from 1.30 to 4.30.
Ate your dinner, did your homework, iced your shoulders, went to bed, woke up, did it all again the next day.
We swam probably 15,000 yards every single day, which is equivalent to about 10 miles every single day.
So to say it was a time commitment and sacrifices were made would be an understatement.
I mean that's an astonishing amount of work and obviously it's not just you, it's also your teammates and all the other women who are competing in the sport in which you were competing.
So why don't you tell us about how you first found out what was going on with Leah Thomas.
How did you find out about that?
So, I'll take you back to my junior year of college.
I ended up placing 7th in the country, which, it wasn't a best time, but I was proud of this.
You're top 8, you're an All-American, it's a pretty high honor.
But it was right then and there that I placed 7th in the nation my junior year, that I set a goal for my senior year to win a national title, which would of course mean becoming the fastest woman in the country in my respective event.
And so senior year rolls around, uh, I'm right on pace to achieve this goal.
About midway through my senior season, I was ranked third in the nation in the 200 freestyle trailing the girl in second, uh, by a few one hundreds of a second, a girl I knew very well.
Uh, because like in most sports, your top tier athletes know of each other, regardless of where you compete, because we had grown up competing against each other.
So I knew the girl in second place very well, but the swimmer who was leading the nation.
By body length, might I add.
Was a swimmer that none of us had ever heard of before.
Not myself, not my coaches, not my teammates, not my family, not my other competitors.
None of us had ever heard of this person.
And this is the first time we became aware of a swimmer named Leah Thomas.
Lots of red flags at the time.
A lot of stuff that didn't make sense.
Keep in mind we hadn't seen a photo of this person or else things would have been a little more clear.
But for all I knew at the time, This was a senior, which no one just comes out of nowhere their senior year, from University of Pennsylvania, which is not a school that has ever or has historically produced that caliber level of swimmers, leading the nation by body lengths, as I said, ranging in events from the 100 freestyle, which is a sprint, and all of the freestyle events in between through the mile, which is, of course, long distance.
To put that piece into perspective.
I mean, think about that in terms of your Olympic runners.
That's like saying your best 200 meter runner is your best marathon runner.
It doesn't happen, but that's what we were seeing in this person.
And so I'm scratching my head.
I'm talking to my coaches.
Who is this?
We had no idea.
And we continued to stay in the dark until an article came out.
And in this article, very briefly disclosed in a blip of a sentence, as if we were really supposed to just read right over it.
It said, word for word, Leah Thomas is formerly Will Thomas and swam three years on the men's team at University of Pennsylvania before deciding to switch to the women's team.
And so when I read this, this is in November of 2021, when I read this, of course I was shocked.
We were all shocked.
I mean, this was so farfetched.
It was never even a realm of possibility of something that I thought could happen.
So of course we were shocked.
But really upon reading it, it was like this overwhelming sense of relief for me, someone who was contending for that top spot.
It was like, oh, well, that makes sense.
He's a man, duh.
And I thought the NCAA would see it that way too.
But lo and behold, they did not.
They did not see it the way that I did, that my parents did, that my teammates, my family, my coaches, anyone with any amount of brain activity would probably see this.
The NCAA saw nothing wrong with this.
And to your point, upon looking up who Will Thomas was, This was a man who, in the same event the year prior, ranked 554th when competing against the men.
As I said, was leading the nation in the 100 freestyle.
He wasn't even top 3,000 when competing against the men the year prior.
Instable saw nothing wrong with it.
So about three weeks before our national championships in March of 2022, they announced that Thomas's participation in the women's category was a non-negotiable, meaning There was nothing that we could do as female athletes.
There was no questions that we could ask or concerns that we could raise.
We were told we had to accept this with a smile on our face.
And so, you know, how exactly did you go about dealing with that?
And then obviously there's all sorts of controversy over Leah Thomas in the locker room, what the behavior looked like in the locker room for the other ladies who are on the team and also at tournaments.
So why don't you explain how sort of the controversy played out for, you know, we all saw it at the 30,000 foot level, we saw some headlines, but obviously you were there and saw it in person.
Of course.
I think going into the meet, and I'm kind of ashamed to admit it, but it almost, I mean, it felt like a circus.
I mean, it felt like an SNL skit, which is objectively meant to be funny.
And I think that's the response a lot of us had.
You know, we kind of laughed about it, like, haha.
Lots of intrigue.
What is this going to look like?
Is he really as tall as his Instagram pictures make him look?
What is the locker room going to look like?
Is he going to sandbag it?
There were so many questions that I don't think we took it very seriously until we got to that meet.
And I'll say leading up to the meet, Uh, we had to go to sensitivity training.
We had to learn how to use she her pronouns.
They brought in an outside professional, whatever that means who sat us down.
It was like this mock interview setting.
She would ask us an interview question.
We had to answer to her standard.
If we didn't, we had to to re, go through the training until our university was satisfied.
We were told explicitly, do not speak about this.
Do not talk to the media.
You will lose any future job.
You will lose the opportunity to go to grad school.
You'll lose your friends.
You'll lose your scholarship and your playing time.
And oh yeah, Riley, speaking of that scholarship, remember you signed that.
And when you signed that scholarship, you gave away your rights to speak in your own personal capacity.
Remember who you represent, whose name is across your chest and across your cap, because it's not yours.
It's ours and understand we have already taken your stance for you.
So there was a lot of fear, really, I mean the threats and the intimidation that they had instilled at the time that to me that seemed real, which now I realize what a bunch of mumbo-jumbo all that stuff was.
That was not based in reality at all.
But nonetheless, upon getting to the meat, Those feelings of intrigue and curiosity and feeling like we were in this circus shifted immediately to feelings of heartbreak.
Really, I mean, I think that's the best way to put it.
I'll never forget that first day.
Of course, you swim prelims in the morning.
You have to qualify top 16.
If you qualify top 16, you'll come back that evening and you'll swim finals, which is where you achieve your overall national ranking.
And so the first session of a week-long meet, I'm sitting there watching and it's the 500 Freestyle, which is the event that Thomas won the national title in that evening.
And so I'm standing next to this girl from Virginia Tech.
She's from Hungary.
She's a fifth year.
I had asked her, you know, we got an extra year of eligibility because of COVID.
And I said, you know, why'd you do your fifth year?
And she said, well, because I want to become an All-American.
And so she had swam in one of the previous heats and we're watching the final heat of the morning.
So after this heat concluded, she would know where she stood in the overall ranking.
And we're watching, this is the heat that Thomas is swimming.
The scoreboard pops up after the heat concludes and Reka was her name.
She realized she placed 17th.
Meaning she missed out on being named an All-American by one place.
And I will never forget because she grabbed my hand.
I knew her.
I didn't know her that well.
She grabbed my hand.
She looked at me with tears running down her face.
And she said, I just got beat by someone who didn't even have to try.
And that is when my feelings shifted.
And from then on, we went to watch Thomas win a national title that evening.
He and I competed against each other.
We tied, which is incredibly embarrassing for a six-foot-four man.
He couldn't even beat me.
What a loser.
But despite tying down to the hundredth of a second, We go behind the awards podium, the NCAA official looks at both Thomas and myself, Thomas towering over me, and the official says, great job, you two, but you tied.
And we only have one trophy, so we're going to give the trophy to Leah.
Sorry, Riley, you don't get one.
And when I asked the dreaded question of why, the question no one dared ask all season, the question that they clearly weren't given a script of how to answer, I actually appreciate his honesty because this official said, Riley, I'm sorry, but we've been advised that when photos are being taken, it's crucial that the trophies in Leah's hands.
That's what the unfair competition looked like.
You mentioned the locker room very briefly.
First of all, we weren't forewarned that we would be sharing this changing space.
There was no prior acknowledgement.
There was no way that we could have made other arrangements for ourselves if this was something we were uncomfortable with.
And I'll set the scene, a swimming locker room is not a place of modesty.
These suits that you put on, they're paper thin, they're skin tight.
It takes about 20 minutes to really poke and prod yourself into these suits, 20 minutes of which you're fully exposed.
And so I had my back turned again, changing into my suit.
And all of a sudden you hear a man's voice in that locker room.
It's awkward.
It's embarrassing.
It's uncomfortable.
I think the best words to describe the locker room atmosphere was, I mean, it felt like betrayal.
It was an utter violation and it was traumatic and not even necessarily traumatic because of what we were forced to see or how we were forcibly and non-consensually exploited.
It was traumatic for me to know just how easy it was for those people who created and enforced these policies to totally dismiss our rights to privacy without even a second thought, without even bare minimum forewarning us that this would be the arrangement.
I mean, this whole thing, obviously, is astonishing to anybody who's got half a brain.
It is totally incredible that you put in all this effort, all this hard work.
One of the kind of lines that's been used by pro-trans feminists has been the idea, well, you know, all of that's a lie.
Women and men, basically the same.
All of these divergences between the sexes, well, sex is a fluid thing, and obviously you have women who are more competitive than other women, so what's What's really the big deal?
Shouldn't you be flattered that you are able to compete against a biological male?
What do you make of all of those statements?
I mean, it's, again, it takes you back to this almost comical reality of it.
Because it is, like, the irony is astounding here.
You have women or people who have claimed to champion women, the rights of women, fighting for equal pay, all of the different things, who are now leading the charge in dismantling sex-based protections.
For example, we have Megan Rapinoe.
No one would know who Megan Rapinoe is if it weren't for women's sports, if it weren't for Title IX, if she weren't granted the opportunity and reap the benefits of playing in women-only sports.
Do we need to remind everyone that her U.S.
women's national team lost like 12 to nothing to a group of 15 and under boys?
Same thing with Serena Williams, right?
Which she's been quoted, I think, on David Letterman back in like 2013 saying, hey, I don't want to play men's tennis.
Oh my gosh, I would lose in a blowout, which she did.
Both her and Venus lost to the 203rd ranked male player who drank in between sets, was smoking in between sets, and played 18 holes of golf before.
It's not bigotry to say that, it's biology.
And so yeah, these so-called feminists, even most recently when I testified before Congress, I was sat next to the president of the National Women's Law Center.
National Women's Law Center.
And in her opening testimony, she said that women should just learn how to lose more gracefully to men.
Astounding.
Astounding.
It's remarkable, really, is how it is.
And so, they do this under the guise of progress, indicating we are moving in the positive, forward direction.
But let's be very clear about what this is, because this is not progress.
This is regressive.
This is taking us back in time.
sports realm here.
I mean, at least half a century.
Title IX was enacted 52 years ago, and now we have a president in the White House who's just rewritten, illegally, an illegal administrative rewrite of Title IX and abolished it as we once knew it, by equating sex and gender identity.
It doesn't make sense, but that's their goal, is to blur the lines of objective truth of biological reality.
So let's talk about your personal journey in terms of speaking out about this.
So you mentioned that the University of Kentucky told you you needed to sit down and shut up, that you should basically just accept the standard.
The NCAA was saying the same thing.
When was the moment where you decided that you'd had enough of this and that you weren't going to sit still for it any longer?
It was that trophy moment because up until this point, I just thought, Someone else would handle it.
Someone else somewhere would be... I guess for someone who was supposed to be protecting us, I naively thought that they would protect us, right?
A coach, someone within the NCAA, someone with political power, some other swimmer, someone's dad, quite honestly, would come down there and yank this man out of our locker rooms.
But it was in that moment, when I'm standing on the podium, Sharing my podium spot with a man towering over me, a man who, you know, had literally just grown out his hair.
That was the only thing he had done.
Holding this trophy.
I know I have to give back and it hit me.
It was this realization, and I remember it vividly, of how in the world... Meanwhile, I'm sitting there smiling, okay?
I'm cheering.
I'm applauding.
And it hit me, what in the world am I applauding?
I'm applauding our own erasure, our own demise.
That's what I'm cheering on right now.
And it hit me, how in the world could we as women, as female athletes, Expect someone to stand up for us if we aren't even willing to stand up for ourselves This has to come from us.
And so that was kind of I think the first defining moment and since then I've only been reassured That the stand that I have taken Unapologetically and firmly is in fact the right stand.
I never questioned this but the vitriol that I face, the anger, the violence in many instances that I face for merely saying that there are two sexes and that you can't change your sex and that each sex is deserving of equal opportunity, privacy and safety.
All of the angst that comes with that It kind of just reassures me that I'm right over the target, right?
You don't waste ammunition on targets that you don't want to hit.
So, many defining moments since that first one, but I think the podium moment was when I really realized the severity, the trajectory, and what's at stake if we don't speak out.
So what were your first steps into the public arena politically?
Because it became a political hot button, obviously.
What were those first steps like?
How did you deal with that?
Because obviously it's a completely different arena.
I mean, the sporting arena, you get criticized for performing in one way or another.
The political arena is, as you know, I've been doing it for a long time.
It's very dirty.
It's incredibly rough.
People go after you personally.
People are incredibly nasty, particularly on a lot of the social media sites.
What were those first steps like?
What did you do to speak out?
And what was the blowback like?
The Daily Wire was my first step, to be totally honest with you.
There were many reporters who were at that meet, which we all know swimming is not a sport that garners media attention, but this meet was different.
There was left-leaning reporters, right-leaning reporters, everything in between, and they were desperately Reaching out, they would find your name on the heat sheet.
This was not unique to just me.
Everyone, all the different swimmers who had competed against Thomas, they would find your name, find your social media, reach out to you.
They would find your email.
They found my parents email.
And again, this was me and all my teammates.
But we had all been instructed, do not speak to the media.
And so my inbox was flooded with all kinds of reporters.
And so I thought to myself, I'm going to send this to our sports information director, see what she says about speaking to them, which she was very clear when she responded and said, thanks for sending me these.
I've declined them for you.
And that irritated me.
I said, I didn't ask you to decline them for me.
And that's when I took it upon myself.
I had a bunch of reporters to pick from as to who I would share my experience with, the locker room stories, the silencing, all the different aspects, pieces of the pie here.
And I talked to Mary Margaret Olahan at the Daily Wire, and she was instrumental in helping me feel confident and comfortable enough to share our lived experience.
Again, nothing even opinionated about it.
That was the first step.
And since then, it's been an onslaught of different opportunities.
I had mentioned how our university told us we would never get a job.
Since taking this stand, I haven't lost a single opportunity.
I haven't lost a single friend.
My grad school, I was in dental school after college.
When I approached the dental school and told them, hey, you know, something else in my life has come up.
I'm going to have to put a hold on dental school at the moment.
They said, Riley, we know who you are.
We know what you do.
And we love what you do.
They said, dentists are a dime a dozen.
Go out there, fight for what you're fighting for, because it's far more important.
But that's what they don't want you to know.
They want you to think that you will be ostracized.
But again, not what I faced.
So what did the university actually do?
I mean, you came out, you said all this stuff, and the university, as you say, had threatened you a lot.
Did they actually try to take action against you, pull your scholarship, or did they basically back down in the face of all of it?
No, they backed down, which I figured.
And I figured this because I had dealt with my university during COVID.
And the parallels, it was the same scenario that we were dealing with.
COVID hit the end of my sophomore year.
They told me, Riley, well, first of all, I'd already had COVID at the time.
I thought to myself, no, I wasn't some sort of pathologist or anything, but I thought to myself, okay, I'd already had COVID.
I've got the natural antibodies.
Isn't that the best form of immunity?
I'm young, I'm healthy.
I don't need the vaccine.
To which they said, Riley, it's mandatory.
You have to get the vaccine.
To which, again, I said, no, I don't.
They said, Riley, you're the team captain.
You're going to be hurting your team if you don't do it.
And you don't want to hurt your team, do you?
You're supposed to be the leader.
The same emotional blackmail that they played in my senior year.
But it was in my sophomore, junior year, dealing with all this COVID stuff that I learned to stand up for myself.
And I kept saying no.
They said, Riley, you're not going to be able to go to University of Alabama and travel with your team.
Me being the best swimmer on my team, one of the best.
I said, okay.
I called BS.
No, I didn't get the vaccine.
And yes, I got to travel to University of Alabama.
So that's when I first learned that they're, first of all, mandatory doesn't mean law.
It doesn't mean required.
It means suggestion is what it meant in that case.
And so having that experience with COVID, I knew our universities weren't going to do anything.
There was no legal grounds for them to be able to do anything.
So, I called them on their bluff, which not a lot of people were willing to do.
So, when you look at the reaction, what's so weird about this particular issue is that if you poll Americans as to whether they believe that men should be able to compete in women's sports, this is like an 80-20 issue.
The vast, vast, vast, it's hard to find an issue in American life that unites left and right and center in such a way as to say, should biological men be able to compete With women, because everybody understands the innate absurdity of the proposition.
But this has become insanely politically divisive at the top levels, in terms of sort of the elites of our society.
Not the common man who votes Democrat who thinks it's an idiotic idea, and the common man Republican who thinks it's an idiotic idea, but the people who are elected officials.
You've been going around talking about this issue obviously for a while now, and you've talked to Democrats, you've talked to Republicans.
What's been the political breakdown?
Have you been received by the various parties?
I will tell you, I mean, you hit the nail on the head.
The way the media portrays this issue, the way our elected officials are voting on this issue is not representative at all of society as a whole.
I think this is the worst thing that they could do for their party.
We mentioned Title IX and what the Biden administration has done.
Let's call this what it is, the most anti-woman, anti-reality pursuit we have seen from this administration thus far.
This will only hurt him.
I can't imagine who in the world is advising him that this is a good idea, that this is something they should pursue, because in my experience, and talking with people, people of all different backgrounds all over the country, really all over the world, There's a lot more common sense people than what Twitter or our media shows.
I've talked to so many Democrats, people who call themselves lifelong liberals, people who are a part of this LGBT community, who say this is way too far.
People with daughters, right?
That's what it boils down to.
People who have kids, who have young girls, who want their girls to be able to have opportunities, who intuitively know, common sense people who intuitively know that men and women are different.
And that's still the majority of society, despite what we see, despite the negative stories.
I certainly believe that the tide is turning.
I mean, truth and sanity, they always prevail.
It's kind of just a matter of how long do we have to endure this?
How many girls have to lose out?
How many girls have to be injured?
How many girls have to be exploited in locker rooms before People find it necessary and worthwhile and urgent, quite frankly, to take action.
But I think we're reaching there.
There's just been too many stories up until this point.
And so I think this is the worst thing that the Democrats could do to themselves, is pigeonhole themselves as anti-reality, anti-woman.
We'll get to more on this in just a moment.
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One of the things that I've been pointing out for a long time is that there are particular issues that are very radical that the left has decided to embrace, that certain people have decided to embrace, that no one actually believes, but they do it as a virtue signal to the rest of the group.
That if you're willing to even humor the stupidity that a man can be a woman, well then you're willing to do anything.
You've shown true fealty to the ideology if you're willing to go to a campus and yell at Riley Gaines for pointing out that men are not women. And it does feel as though the sort of apotheosis
of that are these protest movements where it's the same people, they're just putting on
different hats. I mean the same people who are in the quad at Columbia yelling about Israel are exactly
the same people who are showing up to your speeches and screaming at you and physically threatening
you.
you and it's the same administrators who are pooh-poohing that.
Why don't you talk about what's happening on some of these college campuses because
obviously I've had some of this over the years but you've gotten it in extraordinary ways
as well and the media were bound and determined to pretend that none of it ever happened.
Of course, yes, and you know better than anyone but yeah, to your point, there have been several
I spoke on 25 different college campuses this past semester, so a fairly large amount.
And I think on these 25 different college campuses, there's probably 10, 12 people arrested for trying to attack me, hurl themselves at me, throwing things at me, all the different things.
One of those, I mentioned the kind of defining moments for me, one of those was speaking at San Francisco State University last year.
I was naive to think that the student body, the community members would come with an open mind and the willingness to have their hearts softened because they did not.
They came with pitchforks and fire.
And upon delivering my message, In a classroom setting, right, there's like a podium at the front.
Hundreds of protesters entered in to the back of the room.
They turned the lights off.
They rushed to the front, flickering the lights, ultimately turned them off.
That's when they, I mean, I'm ambushed.
I'm being pushed.
I'm being shoved.
I'm being punched by these men wearing dresses, which fortunately for me, their punches really don't hurt that bad.
But anyways, these protesters They ended up barricading me in a room and holding me for ransom for four or five hours through the middle of the night.
Now you might be wondering, okay, well, where are the police?
Ben, it's San Francisco.
The police were being held for ransom with me.
I'm looking at the officers as we're in this room, probably six of them, and I'm like, Pretty sure we're being held against our will.
Pretty sure we call that kidnapping.
Isn't there something you can do?
To which they said, no, there's nothing we can do.
We're not allowed to do anything because we're not allowed to be seen as anything other than an ally to that community or else we'll lose our jobs.
And keep in mind, this is the same community who's on the other side of the door calling these officers racist pigs for protecting a white girl like me.
So anyways, we're in this room.
The Dean of Students shows up, again, the middle of the night, it's probably midnight, and starts negotiating with these students how much I owe each of them to be able to leave, to which the price they agreed upon was $10 each, which makes me mad, because I think I'm worth more than $10.
You couldn't even get me out of bed for $10.
I'm like, you guys are like, whatever.
So anyways, eventually, we're able to get out of there.
But the next day, And I think this really speaks to...
Just how, I mean, it's like a Frankenstein story to me, how these universities have created these monsters, which now, because of everything going on in the Middle East and the protests and different things we're seeing, we are seeing how these hideous creatures that these universities have created are ultimately, they'll be the demise of the creator.
But anyways, the university, it was the Vice President of Student Affairs at San Francisco State University.
Her name is Dr. Jamila Moore.
She sent out a university-wide email to the professors, the faculty, the entire student body, and in this email she said, we are so proud of our brave students for handling Riley Gaines in the manner that they did.
We know how deeply traumatic her presence is on this campus, and so here are some counseling resources for you guys.
Take the day off of school.
Just know that we see you, we love you, we hear you, and we stand with you.
Nowhere in this email did it say we condemn violence, violence against women for that matter.
Nowhere in this email did it say we uphold our First Amendment rights and the freedom of speech.
And actually, just recently, the police department, the same officers who were locked in the room with me, the same officer, She sent me an email and she said there's no evidence anywhere to charge anyone with anything.
She couldn't charge the individual students, she couldn't charge the university, she couldn't charge the police department for failing at their most basic duties in ensuring my safety.
So there's no evidence, despite what a quick Google search would show her.
There's an ample amount of audio, video, eyewitness testimony Of course, she knows because she was in the room.
But nonetheless, all that to say, we certainly have a two-tiered justice system, and universities are beyond, beyond a scam.
So, obviously, you're a very successful woman.
You're looking at dental school.
Do you still plan on doing that, or has your career path shifted now, and this is sort of the permanent fight?
I would love to go back to dental school.
Who in their right minds would want to do what I have spent my time doing?
Absolutely not me.
Let's be very transparent here.
I'm not trying to climb some sort of ladder.
I certainly don't want a role in the political sphere.
I am still sane, I think.
This isn't what I want to spend my time doing.
I want to spend my time on my farm with all my dogs and my horses, and that's what I want to do.
Eventually get back to... I was set to specialize in endodontics, which is root canals, which now, I don't know, that kind of seems miserable now that... But maybe not as miserable as what we're doing now, so perspective.
So I would love to get back to the plans that I had made for myself, but I've realized that the quickest way to make God laugh in your face is to make plans for yourself.
So I want to get your take on sort of the hot controversy of the day in both the sporting world and in the sort of gender world.
And that is this Kansas City Chiefs kicker, Harrison Butker, who has now come under severe fire for saying Catholic things at a Catholic university.
He was speaking at a Catholic university and he mentioned that men and women are different, that men cannot in fact become women.
And he also suggested that actually the happiest and most fulfilling part of a woman's life is being a wife.
And a mother who's immediately called sexist and horrifying for all of this.
And I couldn't help but think of you in this context because, again, so much of what's going on with regard to the entire trans debate has nothing to do with biology.
It's really about exploding the very notions of masculinity and femininity as concepts.
The idea is that everyone is inherently sort of androgynous.
There's no such thing as masculinity or femininity.
It's very hard to kind of separate off The biological sex issue from the gender issue.
The left has successfully done this in some ways by kind of saying these are two separate, completely different things, and only gender identity matters.
Plus, gender identity is entirely malleable.
But, obviously, the sort of more traditional argument is that these things absolutely do matter, that people do have roles in society.
Obviously, you're a successful woman.
You're a competitive person.
You're incredibly outstanding in your field.
What did you make of the controversy surrounding Harrison Butker?
I mean, it is mind-blowing to me.
I thought, okay, at first when I saw the clips on social media, on Twitter, whatever, I figured it was just the left being the left, the media being the media, hating God, hating religion, hating morality and reality, and it would very quickly blow over and kind of move on.
But it has been on my feed for what?
A week almost at this point, it's been the only thing on my feed and it is so, it's a telltale sign of where we are in society when you have people trying to root, not even just Denouncing his stance, people trying to ruin his life, ruin his livelihood, sending around petitions to get him kicked off the Chiefs, finding out where his mom works, putting out all of that information.
The Kansas City Twitter releasing the city that he lives in, obviously in some weird evil call for threats or for violence, doxing him entirely.
Oh my gosh, this is insane.
And so I went back and watched the full, I hadn't seen the full 20-minute commencement speech.
I had only seen clips.
I went back and watched the full clip expecting to see something worse than these little sound bites, but that was not what I saw.
This was truly a speech Of love.
This was a fantastic commencement speech.
And like you said, it's a Catholic university, a deeply Catholic university, and he is a staunch Catholic speaking, called, invited to speak on his Catholic faith and to be of encouragement and an inspiration to these students, which he was because the students gave him a standing ovation.
So clearly he did a phenomenal job at what he was invited there to do.
So all of that to say, It's insane that you have people who, again, are willing to go the lengths at which they're going to, to cancel him, whatever you want to call it, yet won't denounce the men in the NFL who beat their wives, who do drugs, all the awful things that we see relatively often as a result of the money and the fame and the power.
That they have been enshrined being football players.
So, and again, yeah, these same people are the same people who aren't, who I guess applaud when these terrorist sympathizers on college campuses won't let Jewish students Obviously what he's saying ties into a broader critique that you've made as well with regard to the excesses of feminism.
So in your book you talk about the progression of feminism from first to fourth wave and can talk a little bit About where that went wrong, where the original critique, which was women aren't being treated equally in society, they're not having the opportunities they deserve, how that went so wrong to the point where men can now be women?
Yeah, well, it's been a, over the past, I think, 50, 60 years, what we have seen from this feminist movement is, I mean, ultimately we have the feminist movement to blame for where we are now.
The feminist movement, you look at second, third wave feminism, These were women who were telling men, we don't need you.
You don't get to have an opinion.
No uterus, no opinion.
We've effeminated men.
We've emasculated men, which is very clear in the way that we're governed by these weak men.
All of that led us to where we are now, which this battle, as it pertains to the gender ideology movement, especially as it pertains to sports, given that women are most adversely affected in this scenario, it's fallen on our shoulders.
Why?
Why does it have to be up to, you know, you look at what happened in West Virginia to these five 13 year old girls who track and field championship meet.
They're throwing shot, but shot put, they have to throw against a boy.
They say, they reached out to me.
They said, Riley, why do we have to compete for second place?
Are we not worthy of being called champions?
And my heart broke.
And so they decided they weren't going to throw.
Which is incredibly commendable.
I am so proud of those girls for conceding in that way.
I hate to even say that.
But it is.
It's an inspiring and really brave act on their behalf.
But why do they have to do that?
Why do they have to be the adults in the room?
But they do.
So much of this battle has fallen on girls and women.
And I think that's because men for so long were told, oh, it's a woman's issue.
We don't need you.
Let's say what needs to be said.
We do need men.
We need strong men.
We need strong women.
We just need people who are willing to defend reality, defend morality, and we are so far off the beaten path.
So to sort of steel man the far left position on this sort of thing, it seems to me a case of what we would say in law school, hard cases make bad law.
Let's assume for a second good faith on the part of some of the people who are participating in this sort of activity.
The left looks at those people and says, what do we do for those people?
And so they say, well they can't compete with the girls because, you're saying they can't compete with the girls because they're not women.
And they can't really compete with the men because they're undergoing hormone treatment or surgeries or whatever it is that they want to undergo.
So what do you think is the solution for those people?
Should there be a third league for people who are gender non-specific?
I have debated this internally for a while, you know, do we create a third league?
And ultimately what I've decided here is no.
I think creating a third category, well first of all, Sports is where you go to abandon all identity factors.
We don't look at religion.
We don't look at race.
We don't look at your sexual orientation.
Why would we look at gender identity?
What a silly concept.
And then I think if the premise of this, what we're advocating for here is safety and fairness.
If you create a third category, you're still very much going to have males competing against females.
And are trans people, people who identify as trans, still worthy of fairness and safety?
Yes, I certainly believe so.
The finances, the resources, garnering enough people to play in these divisions, garnering enough people to watch these divisions, I don't think it's realistic.
And ultimately, it's still pandering.
I think the solution is what we have had in front of us.
There are two sexes, and there are two categories for those sexes.
It's not difficult to understand.
So you mentioned, okay, what if a girl starts taking testosterone?
That's a decision with consequences, just like any decision.
If I don't get out of bed in the morning, there are consequences for that.
And so one of the consequences might be you have to give up your sport.
That's just part of it.
Again, every decision has consequences.
It's not hateful to say that.
It's just the reality of it.
We'll get to more on this in just a moment.
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So one of the things I'm curious about on sort of a personal level is what it's been like moving from athletics to politics.
Obviously, I've been in this since I was 16, 17 years old, and I remember a time when a more innocent version of me, I will say, I thought that a lot of politics was about the pure ideology of it, just trying to get to solutions that work, trying to get to victory, trying to work with coalitions in order to achieve all of that, believing that everybody who's sort of in that business was in that business.
And over the course of, you know, 24 years doing this, one of the things that I've learned is that there are a lot of people who are really good-hearted trying to get things done.
There are also a lot of people who are trying to make celebrities of themselves.
A lot of people who are trying to make a name for themselves by attacking.
What's been your experience in politics, and what's the good, what's the bad?
I have been so eye-opened.
I'll be honest, I had no understanding of civics at all, to be totally frank with you, which is kind of embarrassing to say, but I mean, I never had to take a government course.
I never had to take history.
I didn't know anything.
I knew we had three branches of government.
I didn't know what they did.
I still don't know what they do.
I don't even think they know what they do, to be honest with you.
I have no understanding.
And so I kind of naively jumped into this sphere and had to learn, and I have learned from my surroundings, and you said it perfectly.
We have so many characters, and I call them characters because that's what they are, who I don't want to say they don't actually care about the well-being and safety of this country, because I don't think that's fair, but they have other priorities, things that are more pressing at this point in time for them, and that is their own career, that is making money, whatever it might be.
We have people in Congress who you would never know, you would never expect it, but people who have never passed a bill.
And they've been there for years.
They've never really done anything to advance conservative or, on the other side, liberal policies.
So it's sad to see.
I do think there are good characters.
I do think there are good people.
But we are living in this clown world right now, unfortunately, where we're seeing the controlled destruction of this country.
And it's sad, it really is.
I've even had You mentioned kind of this virtue signaling aspect.
I remember when I testified before the Senate, Senator Cory Booker came up to me before.
He sits down, he says, Hey, I play football at Stanford.
I'm in full agreeance.
You know, this is crazy.
I'm an athlete.
I know what you're talking about here.
And then gets on the other side of the table and starts grilling me.
These people are weak-kneed, morally bankrupt, spineless cowards, is what they are.
That's who we're being governed by.
And whether that's our government or corporate America or academia, even seemingly our spiritual leaders, that's the consensus.
And so I've learned a whole lot.
I think we have a lot of people who like to complain.
We have a lot of talking heads, people on, again, social media, Twitter.
on both sides of the aisle, but who aren't actually willing to do anything about it, which is frustrating.
And so I was hesitant for a while to call myself an activist, right?
When you think of an activist, you probably picture someone with blue hair who's like screeching, and that's certainly not what I wanted to be.
But I'm a proud activist.
I really am.
And I know not everyone can spend their time traveling state to state, testifying in front of state legislatures, I know not everyone can do that.
I'm not saying that's what we should expect.
But we all do have a role somewhere.
And so many people are abandoning that because they don't think it's their role or they have other more pressing matters.
You know, one of the things you mentioned there was social media, which is absolutely toxic and poisonous and I'm firmly convinced largely separated from reality.
And it is a weird sort of echo chamber that you get sucked into because it's constantly, especially if you're at your level of notoriety, it's constantly talking about you.
You're gonna trend every three weeks or so for saying or doing something,
and then you're gonna get hit with a wave of attention.
And the normal human response to all of that, having been through it myself, is to doom scroll.
Is to say, well, what are people saying about me?
Because that's a normal human response in any situation from high school on.
If people are talking about you, it's both interesting but also very uncomfortable.
And in a social media landscape where you have tons of people
who are talking about you constantly, it can really wreck your life.
It can make your life much more difficult.
It's very difficult to deal with emotionally, obviously.
Have you dealt with going from a relatively low level of notoriety
to being an extremely famous person in the United States in the social media era?
How do you deal with that on a personal level?
To be totally honest with you, easily.
Because I'm confident in my stance.
I'm not looking for someone else to affirm me using kind of their language here.
I'm not looking for that.
I don't need that to know that I'm right, both objectively and what I'm fighting for, and biblically what I'm fighting for.
So, I won't say it's always been that way.
Of course, at first, it was hard to read the things that were being said, people who Who didn't know a single thing about me.
Who read the headlines and immediately label you as anti-trans, transphobic, domestic terrorist, fascist, racist, white supremacist, whatever they'll call you.
It was hard to read that.
And I wanted to always message back and justify myself, defend myself.
But there's no point in doing that because the people who are willing to go out of their way to comment on, at the time, what, like a 20-year-old girl's Instagram picture, Twitter picture, and so I don't spend time looking at it.
I honestly, like, I'm pretty lousy at Uh, the whole social media thing.
I'll get on a couple times a day.
I'll say something.
I'll tweet.
I'll get off.
I'm, I'm just, it's not something again that, that overly, um, enthuses me.
So I easily, I can handle it easily.
And again, perspective, there's so much more support than there is negative.
Yes, the negative white might weigh heavier, but the support tenfold, tenfold.
And I remind myself of that.
So now you've spent an awful lot of time in the media.
You've had some pretty bizarre media experiences.
You talked about the college experience at SFSU, but you've obviously been on a wide variety of shows.
What's been the most shocking media experience for you?
Like the most bizarre media experience?
Oh, gosh.
Yeah, it's been... I've put myself in some hostile environments, which the beauty of it is this topic is so easy to... There's really not...
Something that I don't feel like I can rebut adequately.
I got to go on Joe Rogan recently, which was, you know, great given the fact that it wasn't speaking into this echo chamber, which I know that we tend to be used to preaching to the choir.
This was different than that because his audience is so broad.
I would say his audience, they're people with common sense, so majority of them agreed with me, but it's not because they were staunch conservatives or Republicans or what have you.
So that was a great experience.
To be on with Jordan Peterson on Daily Wire Plus, that was really cool for me.
It was crazy, though, because he, I think, was in Portugal or Spain or something at the time, and so we had to do it on his time.
I woke up at 2 a.m.
I'm getting interviewed by like I was so intimidated I'm like oh my gosh I don't want to get analyzed by Jordan Peterson on my best day at the best time and here I am at 2 a.m.
I'd gotten pulled over on the way there by a police for speeding I'm like so frazzled that I'm getting analyzed by Jordan Peterson.
So that was really cool.
That was a cool experience for me.
He's become someone who I look to for advice.
He's wonderful.
So the friends that you make, the relationships you develop, the places you get to go, the impact that has been had is really remarkable.
And again, fulfilling.
So your path has changed radically here, obviously.
You now have a podcast, Games for Girls.
You're now doing a lot more media, politics, certainly a far cry from where you were.
You're newly married.
What do the next five years look like for you?
Oh gosh, I really try not to look ahead like that because every time I do, those plans combust.
They just like implode on themselves.
So day by day, this is certainly a fight that I'm going to stick out, willing and ready to fight.
Hopefully we get a new administration in the White House that will reverse, I think, do a lot of damage control to not just women's sports, but to a lot of the different policies and things that have been implemented that have put this nation in a decline.
So we'll see.
Again, I'm not vying for some political Spot or anything like that.
I just want to live my life, be the Riley that I was, still am, prior to all of the notoriety and exposure that this experience has seemed to give me.
So we'll see.
I am Being married, newlywed, lots of things going on in my life that I just want to take time to enjoy those things.
So we'll see.
So as a female athlete, what is your message to female athletes who are rising right now and facing these challenges on a real-time basis?
Well, first and foremost, I encourage every single person to play sports.
If you don't play sports, you should.
Playing sports, it gave me my best friends, it gave me my husband, it taught me how to be a leader, it taught me how to set goals and work to achieve those goals, it taught me time management, how to be persistent and resilient, all kinds of great things that I'm using in my life now that I don't think I would have been afforded or benefited from without playing sports.
So everyone should play sports.
But my message to those young girls who are, who might face this or who fear facing this, is to be bold, be brave, be courageous.
Don't be scared to talk about it.
I was, but when I finally got the courage to not really walk on eggshells anymore, to have the conversation with people around me, my teammates, what have you, I realize they all agreed with me.
That's not to say that I only surrounded myself with people who did, but you will be surprised in the people who agree that women deserve to compete fairly.
The message to parents is to defend your kids, defend your daughters, teach your sons how to be strong men.
If you're a parent, your daughter has to face this, show up wearing a shirt.
I mean, as simple as save women's sports or what have you.
Those things matter.
It matters in terms of public opinion, public outrage.
If you're a girl, I hate to say it, but I urge you to not compete.
Don't participate in the farce.
I did.
At the time, I didn't understand the trajectory or where this was going or the severity of this issue.
But if I was faced with this again, I would not compete against a guy.
I think that's the quickest, most effective way to say no.
Rolling up our sleeves, saying enough is enough.
I know it's easier said than done, but it's a sacrifice someone somewhere has to be willing to make.
Well, Riley, really appreciate the time, really appreciate what you're doing, and congratulations on the book.
Thank you, Ben.
I appreciate you.
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