This Week in Barrel Scraping: Fifth-Place Gaines Backs a Loser
Riley Gaines was all in for the Republican challenger to Andy Beshear of Kentucky, but her losing record doesn’t seem to have helped the Republican’s prospects.
by Alyssa Steinsiek
I know I’ve been harping on Riley Gaines kind of a lot lately, what with her stupid ass “Real Women’s Day” proposal that she immediately screwed up. It’s super funny to laugh at transphobes saying ridiculous things and turning everything they touch to shit, but I don’t want to beat a bottle blonde horse.
I wouldn’t dare write a third article about Riley Gaines.
Well, unless she had managed to devote even more time and energy to something objectively worse than “Real Women’s Day,” and if that, too, had blown up in her face. And I can’t imagine something like that would ever happen again—
Oh boy, it happened again! That means I get to talk shit about Riley Gaines!
Okay, so, Riley’s most recent wetting of the bed starts in late September, when she appeared in a slate of commercials run by the American Principles Project against Kentucky governor Andrew Beshear, who was seeking reelection at the time. AAP is a political action committee that claims to be “America’s top defender of the family,” in their FAQ, which forces me to pose the question: whose family, exactly?
Ah, yes… “the traditional family”—meaning white, cisgender and heterosexual. It’s a good thing APP is protecting the nuclear aryan families of America because, good golly, if not them, then who?
It’s kind of wild how many stock images of brown people they have rotating on their website, considering.
Let’s talk about the commercials APP ran against Beshear, because they sure are… something! They cut a total of six ads, two of which Riley appeared in, and before we jump into Riley’s contribution to the anti-Beshear smear campaign, I want to go through the four she wasn’t actually involved with.
First is “Common Sense,” an ad focusing on the idea of kids getting “sex changes,” which… you know… doesn’t happen. Obviously. Kids aren’t getting gender-affirming surgeries, and pre-pubescent children aren’t being prescribed gender-affirming hormone medication. Trans teens might be prescribed completely safe puberty blockers that cause no permanent changes, so that they have time to consider their options as they get older. Adolescents with a stable, consistent identity may start hormone therapy, but that’s about it, and always with their parents’ consent and a doctor’s supervision.
This is basic shit, people.
“Private Spaces” suggests that adult men are invading children’s locker rooms, which has never happened. It’s a common transphobic bullet point meant to cast trans people—and trans women in particular—as violent sexual deviants. The truth, of course, is that trans people are at much greater risk of sexual assault in bathrooms than cisgender people have ever been.
In “Tripled,” AAP insists that trans healthcare is a massive, money making industry, when, of course, nothing could be further from the truth. In the state of Kentucky, where these ads were run, trans people make up less than half a percent of the total population. Considering how aggressively trans people are discriminated against in the workforce, I’m gonna make a judgment call here and say that, actually, the trans community isn’t a particularly good cash cow!
Last, but not least, my favorite AAP ad is “Remember When?,” which appeals to your fondness for an old fashioned America, for a time when boys were boys and girls were girls, before jumping cutting into an absolutely hysterical frame of a shadowy hooded figure, complete with dramatic music. This is supposed to represent… a trans woman, I guess? What the fuck?
That should give you some idea of what we’re working with here, which means we can move on to Riley Gaines’ lovely one-two punch ad set!
First up is “Protect Women,” in which Riley cannot stop herself from talking shit about Lia Thomas, again. Gaines’ obsession with Thomas is so fierce that I have to assume there’s some sort of terrifying life-size effigy of her one time swim competitor in her closet, made of chewing gum and anger.
Gaines’ history with Thomas is just a little bit fraught, considering she’s done a complete 180 on her feelings about the trans athlete since they initially competed against one another. What I can’t stop thinking about, though, is that Thomas is the only trans person Gaines ever talks about. Like, Riley Gaines has never so much as been cut off in traffic by a trans person. Believe me, she’d talk about it!
In her second ad, “Real Man,” Riley questions Beshear’s manhood by conflating Beshear’s vetoing of a harmful transphobic bill with encouraging men to enter women’s locker rooms. You know, a real thing that has definitely happened a lot, and isn’t just made up scaremongering horse shit from a bunch of weirdos with hatred and cash in excess.
Honestly, these dull word vomit videos about how much Riley hates girls with dicks aren’t even worth reporting on… if not for the fact that Riley’s candidate, Daniel Cameron, got his ass kicked up and down the aisle by the incumbent she talked so much shit about.
And it wasn’t just Cameron! Thanks to reporting from the inimitable Erin Reed, we know that even in throbbingly red states like Kentucky and Virginia, the electorate are getting sick of all this shit about trans people.
Despite spending over $2 million, AAP couldn’t get a Democratic governor ousted in Kentucky. Candidates whose platforms are based entirely on transphobia are losing big nationwide.
Whether it’s school board candidates sponsored by far-right Moms for Liberty failing miserably, Danica Roem winning her bid for state senator in Virginia, or the incumbent governor of Kentucky winning reelection despite Riley Gaines’ best efforts, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that hatred of trans people just isn’t good enough to move the political needle in most places.
I’ll make a deal with you, Riley:
You stop making a living off of your silly transphobic grifting—since it’s starting to look like almost nobody gives a shit what I do with my body—and I’ll stop writing an article every time one of your projects goes tits up!
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer and video games nerd who hails from Appalachia but lives, laughs, loves in Rapid City.
