TWIBS: Trans Athletes Are Cultural Marxism, Says Gaines
During an interview with Fox News, silenced pundit Riley Gaines drew parallels between trans athletes, Marxism, and mysterious dark money, which she knows all about as the co-chair of dark money-funded Nine PAC.
Humor by Alyssa Steinsiek
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s oldest column! Every Friday, Alyssa Steinsiek digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
I haven’t talked shit about Riley Gaines in a while. Let’s do that!
At a Department of Justice presser on Wednesday, yappy retired dental student Riley Gaines spoke at length about the Trump administration’s brave decision to starve Maine children by denying them federal funding for school nutrition programs over two transgender girls. Two, in the entire state, who Governor Janet Mills has thus far refused to throw under the bus to placate Trump after he issued an Executive Order demanding that all trans girls be banned from school sports.
When she was done yapping at the Justice Department, she presumably went back to her hotel so she could yap some more on Fox News. Introduced on the Evening Edit segment as “one of the first female athletes to speak out against men in women’s sports,” Gaines cannot help but immediately spew an absolute torrent of disingenuous crap.
“I personally have been fighting this fight for three years,” she opined. “I feel so angered that, here we are as women, basically begging for fair treatment, begging for equal opportunities, begging for privacy in areas of undressing, begging for safety in our sports and beyond ... when you put it like that, what we're asking for is the bare minimum. We want equality, we want the chance to compete and succeed.”
Keep in mind that there is no significant link between trans women and violence in gendered spaces or excessive injuries in sports. Quite the opposite, in fact: While there is zero correlation between trans women and sexual harassment or assault in bathrooms or changing rooms (despite the right’s incessant harping about it for over a decade now), there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the sort of open hostility and disdain people like Gaines show for trans women in gendered spaces drives us out of public life entirely. As far as sports injuries go, a study funded by the International Olympic Committee suggests that medically transitioning may make trans female athletes weaker than their cisgender counterparts.
The host then says, “Governor Mills is saying there's only two transgenders [sic] in the entire state, so why is the president cutting off federal funding for a nutrition program? Many others would say it doesn't matter if there are two … or two hundred … it's a Title IX violation, it's unfair with respect to competitiveness ... but it's also dangerous, and there are so many different faces to women who have been hurt because their opponents are stronger than them, they’re physically not able to compete against them.”
Gaines responds, “I've talked to girls who've had their teeth knocked out from field hockey incidents ... I've talked to girls who have suffered career-ending injuries, I've talked to girls who've had permanent brain injuries in volleyball and softball and other sports, so I guess my question for Governor Mills is: How many does it take? Two? Three? Five? Is it five girls being injured? Is it an entire [women's] Olympic team being made up of men? Is there a finite number before you begin to care about the safety, the fairness, the integrity of sports for women and girls?”
A couple things, here: Allowing transgender women to compete in sports is not currently a violation of Title IX, which protects against sex-based discrimination in education. Title IX has been punted back and forth between the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations for nearly a decade, but no official mention of protection for or penalties against transgender students has been on the table until Joe Biden’s presidency, during which he promised to make changes to the law that would protect trans kids. He failed to keep that promise, naturally, and thus the current interpretation of Title IX in effect is dated August 2020.
Because Executive Orders are not actually laws, President Trump’s flailing about trans student-athletes is legally meaningless.
Next, I’d invite Riley Gaines (and in fact anyone) to provide verifiable, unbiased evidence that any cisgender girl has ever received an atypical injury at the hands of a transgender girl in the normal course of athletic competition, much less the alleged legion of walking wounded she’s in contact with. Here’s the truth: It hasn’t happened, it isn’t happening. She’s telling tall tales to play on gullible fools’ emotions, because that’s the only way to spin this debate against trans girls.
Folks, I’ve saved the best for last. When asked why “the far left” fights so hard for trans athletes, Riley Gaines presents two fantastic theories:
“Number one, I believe it's driven by money. It's a movement driven by money, we see that on the medicalization side of things, we see that on the corporate side of things, we see that ... in Hollywood,” she says, presenting vacuous and baseless conspiracy theories (known in some circles as lies) based on nothing, I suppose, but her gut feelings on the matter. She goes on, “Fear, number two: I think they're terrified of being called names like transphobic, homophobic, racist, white supremacist, they will label you anything for defending women and girls. I think ... it's pretty deeply rooted in Marxist ideology ... blurring the lines entirely of reality, preying on the most vulnerable ... taking away our freedom, such as free speech.”
First of all, let me say: Hell yeah, sister, that’s righteous. We all know Karl Marx theorized at length about American trans girls competing in school sports. That said, I would venture to guess that Riley Gaines may not know diddly dick about Karl Marx or Marxism… but that’s just my opinion.
How she can say, with a straight face, that she and her compatriots are having their free speech restricted from her podium at the Justice Department or in an interview on one of the most widely watched news outlets in America, I do not know. What I do know is that her suggestion that we, transgender people and our allies, are predators preying on the vulnerable is neither novel nor accurate. It is deeply destructive language used specifically in the hopes of eradicating a vulnerable minority group.
So to you, Riley, I say (as perhaps I have said many times before): Put up or shut up. I want hard data. I want evidence. I want proof that my people are harming your people because sister, facts just do not care about your feelings.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a trans woman journalist who reports on news relevant to the queer community and occasionally posts on BlueSky.
