“It felt,” she says, “like heartbreak. Women had dedicated their entire lives to this. We had spent 5½ hours every day in the pool. To have it taken away from you by somebody who, only a year earlier, would never have even qualified for this competition as a man? It was a total slap in the face.”
It's more than that. It's a disgusting display of collective misogyny.
“In the locker room, you’re comfortable for the most part being half-naked. It’s not necessarily a place of modesty. But it is a place where you don’t have to feel vulnerable.
“We were not forewarned about Thomas sharing our space. That’s absolute insanity to me. All of a sudden, the place goes silent and there’s a 6ft 4in biological male towering over everyone else, starting to undress. You feel this sense of total discomfort. It was the most bizarre experience. I walked out of there thinking, ‘Am I missing something? Why are people in authority not talking about how this is wrong?’”
Because they are complicit in a collective display of disgusting misogyny. Encouraging and supporting men who want to violate women's boundaries, their space and their dignity, and enable predation.
The backlash can occasionally be ferocious, but Gaines insists she has the emotional resilience to cope. “The negative responses I receive are purely along the lines of ‘you’re bad at swimming, ‘you’re ugly’ or ‘you’re a transphobe’. It rolls off my back. There’s nothing, in terms of science or even common sense, that invalidates my argument.”
Nope. Because it's misogyny, not science, not equality, not fairness.
Kim Jones, the mother of one of Thomas’s fellow competitors, protested vigorously against the presence of a biological male in female changing facilities, only to receive an email from the Ivy League saying that anyone who objected was advised to seek counselling.
Ffs
We're always told that the other teammates don't mind. We know they bloody do. They are being forced to shut up.
But in this, her first interview with the British press, she explains that she is now consumed by the quest for fairness for women in sport.
Good for her. I hope she finds Mumsnet.