Riley Gaines, a former National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) swimmer and advocate against biological males competing in women’s sports, described feeling “terrified” the moment before she was physically assaulted by a transgender activist at San Francisco State University earlier this week.
She was on campus on the evening of April 6 to give a speech about saving women’s sports to an audience of about 80 to 100 people, about half supporters and half protesters, she said.
The protesters, who had messages written on signs and in Sharpie over their faces and hands, were holding a sit-in at her speech. Gaines said she was aware of their plans ahead of the event and had no problem with them.
But over the course of her speech, more protesters, she said, had gathered in the hallway outside the room, chanting, “Trans women are women!” “Trans liberation!” “Trans rights are human rights!” “It’s time to fight!”
As Gaines wrapped up the question and answer portion of the evening and prepared to leave, the protesters outside the classroom rushed in. Someone turned the lights off. Shortly after, Gaines was cornered into the front of the room behind the podium.
“I’m in San Francisco, which is one of the most liberal cities. There’s no police in here. And no one told me what to do in this scenario,” Gaines told The Epoch Times on April 8.
Surrounded
Gaines was supposed to meet up with campus police ahead of the event, similar to when she gave speeches at other universities, to discuss action plans. But this didn’t happen.Soon, the lights in the room started flickering. And some protesters were shining their phone flashlights on her face.
Gaines was struck twice on the shoulder and once on the face, she said. And through the flickering lights, she was able to make out that the assaulter was a man who identified as a woman, based on the person’s feminine clothing.
Amid the chaos, a woman grabbed Gaines and asked her to follow her. Even though Gaines didn’t know the woman’s identity, following her appeared the best option at the time. Gaines later found out that the woman was an undercover campus officer.
The officer pushed her along, and together they broke through the crowd and made it into the hallway, where more people were blocking the building exit.
Gaines was pushed into another classroom down the hallway, as protesters swarmed outside. Two campus officers stayed with her in the room, and more were outside.
Behind the closed classroom door, she could hear protesters yelling: “Open the door! We want Riley! It’s time she gets the justice that she deserves.”
The protesters, Gaines recalled, also had a message for the police: “You’d better not put your hands on me, or I’ll sue you.” “Don’t touch us.” “You’re a pig. You’re protecting a white girl.” “You all are just racists!”
Their messages seemed to have had an effect on campus police. In the room, police officers said that they wanted to avoid all means of getting potential backlash, according to Gaines.
“They were not willing to make any sort of arrest or to be assertive in any way because they were scared. So, they didn’t want to put themselves in a position where they could be accused of anything,” she said.
“I do think the campus police did a very poor job for this whole incident.”
‘Violent,’ ‘Vengeful,’ ‘Hateful’
Ultimately, Gaines stayed in the classroom for three hours before officers with the San Francisco Police Department arrived to escort her out of the building.When she left the room near midnight, the hallway was still not entirely clear. But the police were able to form an enclosure around her, and she could move to the exit of the building. More protesters were outside and started running toward her when they saw her.
“I’ve never seen a movement like this. It’s violent, it’s vengeful, it’s hateful,” Gaines said.
The protesters, she said, also talked about getting “reparations.” They said if the university paid Gaines for the speech, which wasn’t the case according to her, they should also get paid. The speaking event was hosted by youth conservative group Turning Point USA and the Leadership Institute.
“My whole argument is just that men competing in women’s sports is unfair if you have gone through male puberty, because male puberty results in advantages that can never be mitigated,” Gaines said.
“And, of course, [there’s] the privacy aspect of the locker room situation and the safety in our sports.
“I wholeheartedly believe everyone should have a place in sports. It’s just about competing where it’s fair and safe. I’m not trying to segregate the trans community. I’m not trying to ban the trans community from playing.”
Trans advocates, meanwhile, argue that transgender athletes’ success in competitions doesn’t prove they have an unfair advantage, nor does it justify their exclusion from women’s events.
The university police department (UPD) said it was investigating the situation. “There were no arrests related to the event,” it said in a statement on Friday. “The disruption occurred after the conclusion of the event, which made it necessary for UPD officers to move the event speaker from the room to a different, safe location.”
The Epoch Times has reached out to the UPD, San Francisco State University, and San Francisco Police Department for further comment.
Bizarre Locker Room Experience
Gaines’s personal experience competing against transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, formerly William Thomas, prompted her to speak up.In March 2022, she competed against Thomas at the NCAA championships. On the first day, she watched Thomas swim to a national title in the women’s 500-meter race, defeating Olympians and the best female swimmers in the nation.
On the second day, the competition started with a bizarre locker room experience. Gaines said she didn’t get a heads-up that Thomas would be using the female locker room. Thomas was “fully intact and exposing male genitalia while facing in the locker room where other women were undressing,” she recalled.
“The girls, I would say the majority of them, either left or turned around. You kind of turned around and you huddled teammates, and your eyes just got really wide and faces turned red, blush, or pale,” she said. “It was an extremely uncomfortable experience.”
For Gaines, this experience felt like a violation.
“We’ve been taught our whole lives—at least I know my parents taught me my whole life—that I should never lose my ability to consent in areas of undressing where a male will be present,” she said.
She explained that it takes about 15 minutes to tuck oneself into competitive swimsuits.
“Obviously, you’re naked. You’re trying to get your hips into the suit. The suits are teeny tiny, and they don’t stretch. So, you have to poke and prod,” she said.
Gaines said she left the locker room and asked an NCAA official on the pool deck about the locker room situation.
“They said, word for word, ‘We actually got around this by making the locker rooms unisex,’ which meant that they were subjecting us to any male walking in that locker room looking at us undress,” she said.
“And they didn’t even, bare minimum, tell us that this was the arrangement that was going to be had.”
The experience was so unsettling that the female swimmers questioned themselves first, Gaines said.
“We just thought to ourselves, if the NCAA let this happen, clearly, there’s nothing wrong about it,” she said.
“And they tried to warp your perception of this happening. They tried to virtue signal. [They] tried to make you feel like you are wrong for feeling uncomfortable.”
She described what she learned from Thomas’s teammates at the University of Pennsylvania, who had to deal with the locker room situation regularly.
“They were told they had to be kind. And if they didn’t feel comfortable seeing male genitalia in the locker room, then that was not kind, that was not inclusive. They’re supposed to be welcoming and accepting,” Gaines said. “And so these girls were emotionally blackmailed into feeling like their feelings of comfort and their feelings of safety were not valid.”
During an interview with ABC in May 2022, Thomas said, “Trans women are not a threat to women’s sport.”
Turning Point
Then, the last straw happened.When she tied with Thomas for fifth in the women’s 200-meter NCAA championships, she was told that Thomas would get the trophy at the event because Thomas needed to have the trophy for pictures.
She said that was the moment she was done waiting for others to speak up.
Fortunately, the March 2022 event was Gaines’s last meet. But she learned from other female athletes who were still competing in the NCAA that they had to share locker rooms with transgender athletes and accommodation during training trips.
To speak up for many female athletes and their parents who are concerned about the same issue, she changed her original plan to go to dental school. After graduating from the University of Kentucky in May 2022, she has been dedicating herself to her cause of saving women’s sports.
By going public on this issue, she had prepared herself for backlash.
“But I was not ever anticipating being physically harmed,” she said. “That’s something that no one should have to even remotely prepare themselves for, for speaking the truth. Because that’s what this is.”
“We live in an upside down universe,” Gaines told The Epoch Times in a text message the morning after the attack.
‘Speak Louder’
According to Gaines, a lot of the protesters who comment on her social media are typically “college-age, white females who identify somewhere in the LGBTQ community, or label themselves as a cisgender ally,” who haven’t participated in sports at the collegiate level.“They don’t understand, and they couldn’t understand unless they were to do it,” she said.
Gaines considers it ironic that the same people who are threatening her with violence “are the ones who constantly complain that they’re the ones being persecuted and that they’re the victims of violence.”
“But in my experience this past year, I have never, on my end, delivered violent rhetoric. I have never incited violence. I never would wish violence on anyone,” she said.
“I’ve always been on the receiving end of it. ... When they’re yelling things at you, when they’re threatening your family, when they’re wishing death on you, when they’re telling you they will pursue these acts, you have no other option than to be scared, but I won’t let that fear be instilled in me.”
She described the campaign as “personal attacks” because “they don’t have any science or reason or logic or common sense on their side” when challenging her argument.
“So they would rather silence me with verbal and physical abuse,” she said.
Still, Gaines is undeterred.
