Rex Murphy: The Attack on Riley Gaines Shows Just How Far Things Have Sunk

Former University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines speaks at a rally outside of the NCAA Convention in San Antonio on Jan. 12, 2023. Darren Abate/AP Photo

Commentary 

Women are women.

How’s that for a sentence? A declaration.

To say a woman is a woman requires no prefix. It requires no qualifier. No extra start-up syllable. It requires no semantic trickery to take its plain and always-understood sense—its sense since the beginning of time and the discovery of language itself—to try to turn it into something else.

The world, and all the men and women in it, have known and understood what it is to be a man and a woman since there has been a world with men and women in it. It is, if I may use the phrase, one of the atoms, one of the very basic concepts, of human beings. Man and woman are two of the most primary, first-learned, lexical understandings of every language the globe has or has had.

Neither word can, at the flash of whimsical self-declaration, be turned into its opposite. Merely for a man to “say” he is a woman does not and cannot in law, biology, sports, or common sense, make him a her.

The consideration that in so much of the 2023 Western world—in universities, schools, companies, sports leagues, and news media—this patent self-contradiction, this plain nonsense, is now receiving support, is written into some codes of conduct, is made a matter of “bias training,” and is being pushed with angry zeal by so-called trans activists, should be a matter of universal shock. But it is plainly not so.

Should there be one incident to bring back the sense of shock, to call people to their senses once again, it has to be the brutal, cruel, and horrible reception given to Riley Gaines, a star female swimmer, at San Francisco State University on the night of April 8. You may and should watch some of it on various YouTube clips.

After giving a talk and taking questions on why female athletes should not to be forced to compete with males, as she left the lecture room she was literally ambushed by a mob of trans activists. She was hit twice by a male wearing female clothes, and she was shouted at and screamed at with some of the most vulgar terms. She was barely protected by a few campus police officers as they managed to get her into a side room. The mob then demanded “money” before they would let her leave. Naturally Gaines refused. She was then kept virtually a hostage—remember this is on a university campus, a home of inquiry and debate and civilized human exchange—for a whole three hours.

Here, in her own words from an op-ed for the Daily Mail, Gaines writes:

“Just over one year ago, I wouldn’t have imagined that I'd find myself barricaded inside a classroom in a building on the campus of San Francisco State University.

“Outside the door a violent, racist mob chanted threats against me.

“‘Open the door, we want Riley,’ they screamed.

“‘Why are you protecting a white woman?’ the mob spit at security.

“‘This is vengeance.’

“‘You’re protecting a transphobe.’”

The anger of the mob was palpable. But then trans-rights types seem to make anger and abuse part of their tactics. The world-famous author J.K. Rowling, who also wishes to stand by the age-old and absolutely unchangeable meaning of man and woman, has endured one of the great hate crusades, via the internet mostly, of our times. She is, in the clumsy coinage of the angry trans activists, a TERF (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist, for those who want the sludge terms explained), their acronym for what they wish you to believe is the ultimate in bigotry and prejudice.

Female teachers have been fired for not obliging this newest lunacy. In Ontario, mild, multi-cultural, sensitive Ontario, a 16-year-old student has been suspended from his Catholic school for daring to utter the latest heresy: that there are two genders.

It gets worse/better. When he returned to the school he was arrested by two local police officers and charged with trespassing. Josh Alexander is a boy. Attending a Catholic school. In enlightened Ontario. Arrested, effectively, for asserting that men are men and women are women.

Is this why we have schools and police forces in democratic Canada? To take a knee to every strange new dogma of woke madness? How have the modern nations come to this point? How can it be that a brave and extremely accomplished female athlete—who wishes to respect her sport and the other women who wish to participate in it—gets threatened, hit, cursed at, and held hostage by a deranged mob of “right-thinking” activists?

There is nothing in the current round of many idiocies that matches the idiocy of pretending, or obliging, or acceding to the demented claim that someone with a penis and testicles, hairy legs, and a deep voice is a woman because he says so. And that it allows that man to don female attire, undress in female locker rooms, and compete against females, and thereby rob them of honest competition with members of their own sex.

Why was Plato born? Or Socrates allowed to speak? Or Aquinas given to write? Or Francis Bacon to spell out the first notions of science and empiricism?

Why did the West have the Enlightenment?

Why did great minds unravel the universe—Newton finding the laws of planetary motion, and Einstein, brilliance personified, offering a correction to them?

Was it all so that we could come to 2023 and plunge back into what we have come to call the Dark Ages? At times it seems it does.

Why in this fit of current cultural madness are anger-drenched activists under the specious banner of human rights allowed to turn reason upside down, gather many of the authorities to their side, have universities and schools shamelessly accede to their nonsense, and punish, harass, and persecute the few normal people willing to stand up against them?

Riley Gaines is a hero, and deserves so, so much better than she has received.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.