What is Riley Gaines hiding? We investigated…

“she was covered in a towel & kept to herself”

As had been pointed out time and time again, those who declare that TW AW show they don’t really believe it.

I seriously doubt any female competitive swimmer would be in the female changing room covering herself with a towel getting into competitive swim gear.

Also, women campaign for women right in general, but arent power lifters or swimmers themselves = whats it to do you, you dont know the first thing about the sport.

Women campaign for something they have direct experience of = they are liars, unreliable, dont have the 'correct' opinion on other issues.

Women can have too much funding to have an opinion, but also too little. Where she getting the money, also take no notice of her - shes only a housewife on twitter.

Men with or without a gender identity = have the right to speak with authority regardless of credentials, other opinions and income.

Can't be bothered with you but a man should not be in the female changing room. Doesn't matter if he was wearing a towel - he can see the women around him changing. Please stop mis-sexing this man btw.

I was thinking the same. Ime only men believe in misandry. Women usually know it's BS.

In a nutshell.

I don't give a monkey's if she's gone on to forge a career as an activist (having been hounded out of swimming by MRAs), or who she votes for.

Pathetic self-serving attempts to smear her are a juvenile and ineffective debating strategy.

There should be no dick in the ladies' competitions or changing rooms.

Woman gets paid to campaign for something she believes in and serves her and her sex well = bad.

Many, many men (transwomen) get paid for campaigning for something they believe in and serves them and their sex well =So fucking good they deserve many, many Charities .

She is a well-paid pundit and lobbyist and this could perhaps be made clearer. It isn’t altruism that is driving her.

By this measure, people in stonewall and mermaids are not driven by altruism.

Do you believe that no campaigner should be paid for their time or just the ones you don’t like?

There was absolutely no mention of the pressure the women were under, that has been backed up by multiple women now, to remain quiet about this issue. There was nothing mentioned about if someone complained, there scholarships may be in jeopardy.

It was one snide remark after another with no balance at all. And there seemed a very bizarre dynamic where it comes across that she is blamed for all the female sport's campaigning and all the commentary from political candidates and political commentators.

As I said, these two commentators seem to think they know a great deal about what they are talking about, but they know very little. But they are fucking capitalising on their knowing just enough that they think they are very clever and making an expose!

We all knew that Riley was being paid. That has been established for a long time. My reaction to that has not changed. It remains, 'so what? she is not spreading misinformation, she is not speaking falsehoods, she is a full time campaigner'. There really is a huge fucking difference between someone who campaigns with accurate information, making appearances at congressional committees, on stage for speaking engagements, speaking on media segments, vs a person who is doing the same thing but spreading misinformation and falsity.

More logic there, Lego

Exactly.

The lack of logic and consistany is breath taking and only works if women some how don't matter as much as men in any form.

She is a well-paid pundit and lobbyist and this could perhaps be made clearer. It isn’t altruism that is driving her.

bloody hell. She was pretty much cancelled. How the fuck, especially now she has a baby?, is she supposed to earn a living.

Why should she be altruistic? should she live on air and rainbows?

The fact is that the idiots simply cannot countenance anything, any idea or anyone who doesn't 100% agree with them. This is absolutely batshit.

So she is a right-wing conservative christian woman. I probably disagree with her on 90% of political issues. That doesn't make her awful it makes us different.

Likening her to Kirk is provocative.

The podcasters are acting like Riley had no reason to be upset. They are laughing about her reaction on camera. They discuss the story being picked up by the Daily Wire and Riley doing interviews.

I'm not going to listen to the podcast because i CBA, but is there any acknowledgement there (or anywhere) that it is entirely possible that Gaines put up with harassing behaviour from coaches in order to keep her swimming career on track, and that she slowly peaked and that giving Thomas the trophy when they tied was her ultimate peaking moment? Most of us have one, some earlier some later.

For eg. I was in the army. I actually put up with a lot of sexist and misogynistic bullshit in order to do the job i loved, and get on in rank and then start to tackle the sexism and misogyny (unfortunately no headway with that) and eventually that is why i left. We don't always give up when being abused, we often develop tactics and coping mechanisms (and make excuses to ourselves why it's not so bad after all, and could be worse)

I haven't listened to the podcast, I have an aversion to listen to things that will send my already high blood pressure higher. I'm also more of a reader than a listener. From what Helleofabore has told us of the podcast, not only was there no testimony on the podcast from any of the teammates, but the sole focus seems the be that Riley Gaines is right wing, therefore, her fight for womens rights is invalid. It is the same political tribalist echo chamber propaganda. I disagree with a lot of Gaines' political views, but I agree with her on this. It's not just 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend', but it is that feminists, though we're I'd say a majority of us are left wing, we are not a homogenous group.

For full disclosure, I am a financial branch member of the Labor party in Australia. My membership is due at the end of December. I'm going to let it lapse. I find this issue is too important to me, and I have been disheartened at the revelation that our Federal govt had been working against the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls Reem Alsalem. I could approach my local (Labor) member, Shayne Neumann, (he is Labor right, like I am and I think he'd be reasonable) but the nature of the party is that it is complete solidarity. He could not, and would not cross the floor on this issue. I was also previously a moderate small l Liberal financial branch member of the Liberal party. Both the moderate Liberals and the Labor party are pro TWAW. Which basically leaves me politically homeless. I haven't talked to Shayne about it yet, who knows me and mother well from branch meetings. But when my membership lapses and he contacts me about it, I intend to email him a long email about my concerns and reasons.

I will speak with anyone from any side of politics on this issue. Left, middle, right, far right, far left. The political purists who shame Riley for speaking with Charlie Kirk don't understand that the fight for womens rights has always won by networking with all sides. I don't agree with much of what Moira Deeming stands for, but she has been an absolute champion for womens spaces and sports. People are complex. We don't fit into one box. The reason why the left are losing this debate and this war, is that they are so narrow-minded and so politically purist they refuse to sit down and talk across all sides. They've made it so that feminism is now owned by the right wing. And that is a huge travesty. Because feminism came out of the left. Not out of the right. They've allowed the right to opportunistically pick the ball up that they dropped. And they will die on this hill and die on this sword. And the people who will gain, are their political enemies. And they did this to themselves.

Huh. I bet they wouldn't say that about someone competing against a competitor on performance-enhancing drugs, would they?

This isn't to say that yours and Tortilla's posts fit this description (not least as I've not RTFT), but IME, these accusations really aren't a reaction to different views, but rather to views that show a lack of understanding of common female experience and, most importantly, a lack of empathy for posters describing it.

I don't see it as a weak gambit in an argument ("Any poster who is brave enough to actually say something a bit different is face with that accusation"). Arguments on here are honestly so robust that posters just don't need to resort to ad hominems. It's maybe more a (clumsy and inappropriate sometimes, sure) attempt to understand the origins of POVs that most posters here honestly find quite extreme(ist, in some cases).

Also, it often reflects the power dynamics inherent to this whole debate - in a discussion that's literally about men invading female spaces under the guise of being women, in a forum in which men do visit just to do that vicariously, I think there needs to be some understanding of - and, again, empathy for - posters' wariness about what sex some posters are.

A simple tit-for-tat (if you'll excuse the phrase!) playground response it ain't.

Also, I do enjoy Howse explaining Australian speech to us. For some reason I think of early X-Men comics, when Stan Lee would have his 1960s teenagers saying "Hotsy totsy! A dame!" or whatever bizarre outdated slang Stan had grown up with in the 1930s.

in case nobody has posted it: Fremdschämen (Fremdschaemen)

They are creating content for a very specific target audience.

I think zero people are going to read an article in Mother Jones and change their mind about anything.

They certainly aren't going to say 'Riley Gaines is just another blond schilling for the republicans ? Until I knew that I had my doubts, but now I'm fine with men in women's sports!'

Yep, it used to bother me when it happens to me but I honestly find it comical now.
(Middle aged woman here who is probably peri menopausal)

Three painful pages in, and the only element of Hows's argument that I've found convincing enough to take on board is their deep-seated conviction that language must be used with exceptional precision where rights and the law are concerned (eg. "changing into a competitive swimsuit in front of me" - paraphrased - is inadequate, with "naked in front of me" - or similar - required in its place).

I'm very glad to have this admission from Hows, as well as their own examples of just this degree of precision (eg. "six foot male").

Whatever else we may disagree on, this at least indicates Hows's explicit support of our ongoing use of "male" to describe transwomen, and, where appropriate, reference to their physical characteristics, in defence of the truth and our rights. This is a huge concession on their part, and a step forward for us.

Its also interesting that the tag line for the youtube video is "Secrets of MAGAS number one sports troll".

Not exact selling themselves on journalistic rigour.

Indeed. But I honestly just laughed when I saw his reply to my joking post. I mean any excuse to derail will do apparently. What his reply had to do with what I actually said is a mystery but he doesn't care.

That Mother Jones image - the passive, blank-eyed woman, with no sign of a thought in her head, being made up and prepared for her public appearance...

This is why I always recommend reading Ira Levin's original novel of The Stepford Wives. (It's a short and pacey read, you can finish it in one or two sittings.) Feminist readers have usually taken it as a critique of conservative small-town sexism, but Levin didn't spare groovy progressive men who were just as misogynistic under the skin.

Mother Jones just said the quiet part out loud.

For a piece that comes under the title "investigations" there is a lot of opinion in there.