This Week in Barrel Scraping: Cougar Splash Record Falls to Trans Titan
Meghan Cortez-Fields’ teammates joined her in the general women’s locker room when anti-trans rules barred her from the women’s team locker room.
by Alyssa Steinsiek
Blue, pink and white smoke rises over your local pool… a new Lia Thomas has been elected.
That’s right, trans collegiate swimmer Meghan Cortez-Fields has broken a swim competition record, once and for all proving that trans women have an astounding and insurmountable athletic advantage over cis women. I mean, I assume that’s what she’s proven, since all of the headlines are saying shit like SMASHES RECORD! That’s some loaded language if I’ve ever seen it, and I can’t imagine…
Sorry, enough snark. I think you know roughly what I’m about to say.
Ramapo College swimmer Meghan Cortez-Fields broke the Cougar Splash 100-yard butterfly record by 0.68 seconds. Her Ramapo College record time of 57.22 is more than 5 seconds behind the Division III record of 51.36 (set by cis swimmer Kimmie Harris in 2012), and more than 10 seconds behind the NCAA Division I record of 48.46 (set by cis swimmer Kate Douglas earlier this year).
Just a smidge over half a second off a school record. And for this, Meghan is—of course—receiving death threats.
Lisa Ambrose, a spokeswoman for Ramapo, stated in an interview with NJ.com that multiple people on campus had received death threats over Meghan’s participation, despite the fact that the trans swimmer is fully in compliance with NCAA regulations and was approved by the NCAA to compete.
Until the 2024-2025 school year, anyway, since the vast majority of trans women are soon to be banned from competitive swimming. In a super non-discriminatory way, I’m sure.
Anyway, you gotta wonder where the sort of exposure that leads to this hateful vitriol comes from. Who would target a young trans woman in this way, to a horde of slavering lunatics that regularly phone in bomb threats on hospitals? I can’t think of a single person who would… sorry, I’m being snarky again, fucking of course it was Riley Gaines.
screenshot from twitter.com
I’m sorry! I know I said I wouldn’t write about her again, but what am I supposed to do? This is, like, the singular thing that drives her entire life, and she just keeps turning up everywhere I go.
Riley, who definitely isn’t obsessed with Lia Thomas and surely isn’t intentionally gunning for Cortez-Fields, who has cited Thomas as her inspiration, shared Ramapo’s Instagram post congratulating Meghan on her win on Sunday so that she could talk shit about her.
Now, I would never suggest that Riley is intentionally directing a tidal wave of hatred and death threats at any person or institution who supports trans athletes, as well as the athletes themselves.
I wouldn’t do that.
Come on.
Riley does accuse Meghan of being part of a sex cult because of her extremely sick tattoo, which is a transfemme-themed riff on Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.
So I guess Riley’s dreams of dentistry never included an 101 Art History course.
When Ramapo’s social media account removed the congratulatory post, Riley tweeted about it to make fun of them for fearing “public attention.” Ambrose clarified in her interview with NJ.com that, of course, they removed the post for Meghan’s safety. Because a horde of psychopaths want to kill her for existing.
The self-appointed Independent Council on Women’s Sports, or “ICONS,” tweeted about Meghan’s win, too. Like Gaines, they happily misgender her as many times as they can possibly squeeze into a single tweet, presumably giggling gleefully and stroking themselves off at the idea of hurting a stranger’s feelings for no reason.
My favorite thing about ICONS is that their preferred acronym drops women. It seems like they should have had at least one big thinker handy to point out that, since “erasing” women from women’s sports is supposed to be their whole thing, maybe they shouldn’t go ahead and do it themselves.
I want to close this out by highlighting just how cool and inspiring Meghan Cortez-Fields is.
When she gave this interview to The Ramapo News in October of last year, Meghan was still participating on the men’s swimming team, probably because she had yet to achieve the NCAA standards for trans athletes participating on the women’s team.
She talks about taping her breasts with KT Tape because swimmers on the men’s team can’t wear swimwear above the waist. Meghan felt “uncomfortable and [dehumanized]” without a top on, so she chose to endure pain and the scrutiny of strangers to feel more at home in her own skin.
She talks about being allowed to change either in the men’s team locker room or the women’s general locker room, but not the women’s team locker room. Her teammates on the women’s team would change with her, rather than leave her feeling lonely in an empty locker room, which sure puts a dent in the bigots’ suggestion that she’s making cis athletes endure some great discomfort.
She talks about how Lia Thomas is an inspiration to her, even though she was afraid of achieving success because she knew the ghouls would do the same thing to her that they did to Thomas.
Unfortunately, she was right. Earning some small victories has now upended her life in a very public way, and I can’t tell you how fucking angry I am about it.
But what I can tell you is that Meghan is an inspiration herself, and I wish more than anything that there were women like Meghan and Lia in the world when I was a young girl.
Women like me, who I could look up to and aspire to be like.
I am so proud of women like Meghan for refusing to back down from the things they love just because some bottle blond troll doll told them they should.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer and video games nerd who hails from Appalachia but lives, laughs, loves in Rapid City.