Former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines on Monday responded to the remarks Lia Thomas made in an interview final week in regards to the alleged “half assist” she acquired from ladies who argue solely athletes born ladies must be competing towards fellow females in sports activities.
The former University of Pennsylvania swimmer instructed Schuyler Bailar’s podcast “Dear Schuyler” that some ladies use the “guise of feminism to type of push transphobic beliefs.” She expressed dismay over the assist she received from popping out as transgender in distinction to the furor there was when she competed towards organic females in ladies’s sports activities on the NCAA degree in the course of the 2021-22 season.
Pennsylvania’s Lia Thomas waits for a preliminary warmth within the Women’s NCAA 500 meter freestyle swimming championship begin Thursday, March 17, 2022, in at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. (AP Photo/John Bazemore)
Gaines responded to Thomas on the “Michele Tafoya Podcast.” The Kentucky alum tied with Thomas in one of many occasions on the NCAA Championships final yr.
“It simply blows my thoughts, honestly, after I hear that,” Gaines instructed Tafoya. “What I see, the phrases that come to thoughts, is entitlement. It’s narcissism. It’s placing your individual emotions, your individual security, your individual privateness, your individual equity, your individual dignity, your individual psychological well being, I might go on … Above each single different particular person’s realizing you’re the one affecting all of these issues for almost all of the inhabitants. Women make up 51% of the world.
University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, center, smiles with Yale University swimmer Iszac Henig, proper, after profitable the 100 yard freestyle in the course of the 2022 Ivy League Womens Swimming and Diving Championships at Blodgett Pool on Feb. 19, 2022 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Kathryn Riley/Getty Images)
“Lia knew by competing with us that we had been uncomfortable within the locker room. Lia knew that we had been giving up our alternatives to somebody who would have by no means earned these similar accolades within the males’s division, but, didn’t care. It simply reveals an utter disregard for girls. That’s what misogyny is.
“Feminism and sex-based phrases they’re not fluid. These should not phrases that simply to alter based mostly on the way you’re feeling. And so to completely change what the feminist motion is and what the feminist motion was began for, what it represented within the 90s, what it actually represented up till three perhaps years in the past, I feel COVID was a giant turning level for lots of these items, these phrases don’t change. You don’t get to alter them simply since you really feel prefer it. So, now, I assume I do contemplate myself a feminist which was one thing I by no means would have thought-about earlier than. And so, I name it a modern-day feminist which simply means ladies deserve respect. We deserve equal alternative, and we don’t need to be overshadowed, neglected by males within the farce of being a lady.”
University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, left, and Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines react after ending tied for fifth within the 200 Freestyle finals on the NCAA Swimming and Diving Championships on March 18th, 2022 on the McAuley Aquatic Center in Atlanta. (Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire by way of Getty Images)
Thomas’ remarks got here as Republicans backed a House invoice geared toward stopping organic males from competing as transgender athletes in women and girls’s sports activities. The Biden administration has additionally proposed new additions to Title IX guidelines to bar states from enacting comparable payments.
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