By SHANNON O. WELLS
As a pro-transgender rally of around 200 people blocked traffic nearby at Forbes Avenue and Bigelow Boulevard, former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines spoke to about 70 people in the O’Hara Ballroom.
In her 45-minute address, Gaines shared her experiences competing, and sharing a locker room with, a transgender woman and what she calls the “spiritual warfare” of the increasingly common trend in women’s athletics.
Gaines speech and an upcoming debate on campus, sponsored by Pitt’s College Republicans, between conservative commentator Michael Knowles and transgender activist Deirdre McCloskey have drawn condemnation from many — including nearly 11,000 people who signed an online petition asking Pitt to cancel the events.
Chancellor Patrick Gallagher said on March 23 at Senate Council that a university is not a place to limit or quash ideas, no matter who is espousing them. The student-sponsored events are all being paid for by entities outside the University (see related story).
When Gaines took fifth place in the 200-meter freestyle event during last year’s NCAA swimming championships, the then-University of Kentucky swimmer had company. Lia Thomas, a transgender athlete at the University of Pennsylvania, finished at the same instant.
“Which meant that we went the exact same time, down to the 100th of a second, which, I'm not gonna say it never happens in swimming, but the tie is relatively rare, especially in a longer event like a 200,” Gaines said on March 27 at Pitt’s O’Hara Student Center.
When an NCAA official informed her the one fifth-place trophy they had would go to Thomas, an incredulous Gaines said the official “was like, ‘Ah, well, we're actually doing this in chronological order.’”
Not quite sure what that meant, Gaines was told she could pose with the trophy, but had to return it to Thomas. After winning the women’s 500-meter freestyle event, Thomas became the first openly transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division 1 national championship in any sport.
“You go home empty handed,” Gaines paraphrased the official as saying, “and Lia takes the trophy home because they use it for pictures.”
It was at that point that Gaines, who already felt that Thomas — who she considers a biological male — had an unfair advantage in their competitions, realized she’d “had enough.”
“When this official reduced everything that I had worked for 18 years of my life … to a photo op to validate the feelings of a biological male … I realized I was done waiting for someone else to speak up,” she said. “I thought surely there would be a parent. There would be a coach. There would be someone within the NCAA. There would be someone with political power. There would be some other swimmer who would say something. I didn't feel like it was my job. I still don't feel like it's my job.”
Hosted by Pitt’s chapter of Turning Point USA, a national group that promotes conservative politics on college and high school campuses, the event was open to University affiliates and community members. It was the second in a series of controversial campus speakers sharing views that many in the transgender community consider hate-based condemnations. On March 24, Cabot Phillips, senior editor of the conservative website The Daily Wire, spoke in the Cathedral of Learning on “Everything the Media Won’t Tell You.”
‘Automatic protest’
At the same time as the March 24 Phillips event, La’Tasha Mayes, a 2004 Pitt graduate and a Democrat in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, delivered a keynote address in Alumni Hall to mark the 50th anniversary of Rainbow Alliance and Pitt’s Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Department. She criticized the University for allowing the speakers on campus, potentially encouraging “harm” to those in the trans community, the Pitt News reported.
“I denounce the transphobic speakers who are here on campus. I condemn the University for doing so,” Pitt News reported Mayes saying. “My speaking here was planned months ago, but I don’t believe this is an accident. I am exactly where I need to be.”
Mayes also addressed this issue with Chancellor Patrick Gallagher at hearings last week before the House Appropriations Committee on the budgets of the state-related universities.
The March 24 speaking events were preceded by a 6 p.m. rally outside the Cathedral, where several transgender advocates — including students from Carnegie Mellon University as well as Pitt — shared their dismay that Pitt’s administration provided the speakers a forum.
Amid intermittent chants of “What do we want? Trans rights! When do we want it? Now! If we don’t get it? Shut it down!” speakers, including Pitt Ph.D. student Pat Healy, took turns through a shared bullhorn.
“They need to realize the University runs on (transgender student) labor,” Healy said to the sign-carrying, student-heavy crowd. “If we stop working, this University stops working!”
After the rally dispersed around 7:20 p.m., Healy said he was pleased with the turnout and the grassroots way in which it transpired.
“I call it an ‘automatic protest,’ because this evening everybody just showed up because they care about (transgender rights),” he said, noting that some email coordination, flyers and word of mouth were all it took to create the rally. “From my experience, the University administration doesn’t tend to listen … They don’t tend to respond.” However, the event, “in the end, did what it needed to do,” Healy admitted. “We have a community here. We just need to do something with it.”
‘Moral vs. evil’
During Riley Gaines’ March 27 talk, the 2022 University of Kentucky graduate shared her shock at learning that her NCAA competitor Thomas was using the women’s team locker room. She said the typically chatty intimacy of the space was broken by Thomas’ presence.
“You turn around and there's a 6-foot-4, 22-year-old biological male dropping the clothes, fully equipped with and exposing male genitalia in an area where you’re undressing,” Gaines said. “It felt like I was betrayed by the people who were supposed to protect us. And so I immediately left the locker room.”
To this, one audience member — who’d held up a sign mocking Gaines’ fifth-place tie — yelled, “Why were you looking?” before being cautioned by an event monitor not to interrupt further.
When an NCAA official told Gaines that Thomas was accommodated by designating “locker rooms (as) unisex,” she said it meant that “any man could have walked into our locker room. And they didn't even, bare minimum, tell us this was the arrangement,” she said. “This meant a coach could have walked in, an official, any outside male …”
Gaines also criticized the Biden administration’s interpretation of Title IX to ban discrimination based on gender identity rather than one’s biological sex and warned that an increasing number of male convicts apply to be women in the prison system “because they saw the system in place and how they could take advantage of it.”
In conclusion, Gaines said the transgender movement in athletics is asking to “deny objective truth. It’s to deny the sky is blue (to) say that men and women are the same. We’re equal, but we’re not the same. We are different,” she said. “I feel like we're in this battle of really spiritual warfare. It's no longer good or bad or right or wrong. This is like moral versus evil.”
Closing the gap
During a brief question-and-answer session, Gabby Yearwood, senior lecturer in Pitt’s Department of Anthropology who teaches an Anthropology of Sport course, asked Gaines about the anatomical advantages of Olympian swimmer Michael Phelps.
“He's been held up as having anatomically very different features, but he's not penalized for those differences, right? It'd be like me saying I deserve to be in the NBA or people above 6 feet shouldn't be in the NBA,” the less-statuesque Yearwood said. “So I have a better chance to play the NBA.”
Citing other examples such as anthropological evidence that Olympic track-and-field gold medalist Jesse Owens’ success resulted from intensive training more than race or biology, Yearwood said, “When I have seen athletes, they can talk about ‘the 10,000 hours (of training).’ So you’re actually discrediting all of the work that you put in, all the work that (Thomas) has put in, and all the work that the athletes have put in.”
Gaines countered that Phelps’ anatomical advantages or factors like more intense training are “nowhere near” enough to close the “typically 10 to 12 percent” gap between top-level male and female performance levels. “To compare men and women, to Michael Phelps and the next best competitor is not equivalent by any means.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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