Narcissists, Frauds & Enablers: The Death of Women’s Sports – Riley Gaines (Transcript)

And also I suppose, what sacrifices did your family make to make that possible so that you could compete at this level?

Eighteen Years of Dedication

RILEY GAINES: So I started swimming when I was four years old. I am 22, so I’ve dedicated 18 years of my life to my sport. By the time I was 8 years old, that’s when I really started. I transitioned to swimming year round.

So this meant that in second grade you’re swimming two hours every single day. And it really only gets harder from there because by the time you get to middle school and high school, you’re practicing before school, then you go straight to school and straight from school you go back to practice.

After practice you go home, you eat your dinner, you do your homework, you ice your shoulder, you go to bed, but you wake up and do it all again the next day. And I love what you said about being willing. No one forced us to do this, but we knew that’s what you had to do to compete at that top level. I was very blessed.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Why in the world did you do it? I mean, you know, there’s a lot. Well, first of all, it’s a very focal application of time and energy over a very long period of time. Right. And you could argue that, well, there’s many things to do in life and why concentrate so obsessively on that single thing?

What was it about your family, your situation, your psychology, or your ability that made this attractive to you? Why did you spend so much time and energy on this?

A Family of Athletes

RILEY GAINES: I think a couple things. I come from a family of athletes. My dad, he was an SEC football player and went on to play in the NFL. All of my uncles, they played in the NFL for 10 plus years. They’ve won Super Bowls, done really incredible things. My youngest brother, he’s in college playing football. My mom, she was a Division 1 softball player.

So I think sports is something that I’ve always been almost infatuated by. And it’s weird because swimming, of course, there’s not necessarily a good word to describe it other than it’s treacherous, it’s miserable, but in the best way. So it is an interesting dynamic. It is truly this love-hate relationship.

You love the team. I love setting goals, I love achieving goals. I loved winning and in a sense I loved practicing. Of course it’s painful, it’s hard. You wake up at 5am to go swim three hours right before you go to class all day.

There’s a lot of, I’ll say, negatives that go into competing and training at this level, but the positives, they outweigh the negatives tenfold. There’s no better feeling than achieving your goal, winning.

I think I’m this person who’s driven, I’m competitive, and I think a lot of that stems from my family, from growing up with three siblings. We were always on each other’s backs, but it’s a blessing. I’m very fortunate for really how I grew up and how my parents raised me.

The Value of Ambition and Competition

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, so there was a lot of value in your family placed on athletic accomplishment. But then also on—you talked about two fundamental sources of motivation. And I would say both of those sources of motivation have come under heavy criticism in recent years.

The pleasure that you take, let’s say, in achieving goals, that’s associated with ambition. And as our culture has been torn apart by this current state of ideological idiocy, people have done everything they can to identify ambition, or let’s say that desire for achievement, both with ambition and with dominance and with power.

And then you also make a case for enjoying winning. You know, and there are movements in the education field that have been bandied about probably for a century, but particularly since the 1960s, predicated on the insistence that all competition is intrinsically wrong and that any endeavor that requires the victory of one and the defeat of many, let’s say, which is typically the case, is somehow inappropriate and maybe even at its base immoral.

And I suppose that critique can be extended to the whole free market enterprise, you know, where there are clear winners and losers in different domains.

So why do you think, and why has this been true for you personally? Why do you think that it’s a valid ethical endeavor to be ambitious and to attempt to achieve these high order goals? And why is it, do you think that it’s appropriate to take pleasure in both competition and competitive victory?

Learning from Both Victory and Defeat

RILEY GAINES: I don’t look at ambition as something that’s selfish. I have had my fair share. Of course, I am an ambitious person. Again, I like to achieve my goals. But there are many times where I’ve fallen short of achieving my goals.

So it sounds as if, you know, you’re doing this to win, to compete at that high level and whatever that looks like. But I take value in not achieving my goals. How can we build from that? How can we continue to use your failures, your shortcomings as a way to continue building up?

So as much as I do take value in winning, I think there’s a certain aspect to losing that is also beneficial and has really thrust me into the position that I’m in. That’s—it’s given me the confidence to do what I’m doing, the leadership, the security, to take the arrows that I’ve been taking. And so I think it’s a balance being ambitious.

# The Value of Athletic Competition and Leadership

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, well, that’s a really good point, you know, on the resilience front, because one of the things that people need to do to develop in their lives is, well, you could say grace in victory, but you can also say grace and resilience in defeat. And the reason for that is that as we progress through life, as you pointed out on all fronts, things are not always going to turn out the way we want them to turn out.

And we’re going to all suffer harsh defeats of one form or another, sometimes justly and sometimes unjustly. And because of that, one of the things that we need to learn and to learn early is how to take defeat in stride.

Now, you made a case that not only did you learn to take it in stride, but that you also learned how to extract value, let’s say, from your failures, so that you could then proceed to a new level of striving and attainment. You know, when we see someone who’s a good sport, and generally that’s someone who we might spontaneously admire, we see someone who doesn’t take too much, who doesn’t try to become vain, glorious, let’s say, as a consequence of winning.

But even more importantly, that can take a defeat in good humor, can learn from it, and can move forward nonetheless. And the reason we admire that is because we all need to learn how to do that. And you do learn that in the context of competition, if the competition is structured fairly and as a consequence of task specific merit, let’s say, which is clearly the case in an athletic realm. Absolutely right.

So you think, now you think that you said that you made a lot of sacrifices on the time and energy front, let’s say, to engage in this competitive enterprise, but that the rewards, despite the effort, the rewards were much greater than the cost of the sacrifice. And you’ve alluded to some of the rewards. You said that you’ve been able to discipline yourself and push yourself, and you’ve also got resilient in the face of defeat, which is crucially important.

How do you think that’s generalized to the rest of your life? And do you think that’s typically the case for people who engage in athletic competition? Like, what do you think that does for people in general?

Skills That Translate Beyond Sports

RILEY GAINES: I think the higher you compete in terms of what level you’re competing at athletically, whether that be high school, then college, and then whatever sport that you may be doing, Olympic level, I think the higher you compete, the more benefits you reap. Typically, you learn more about determination, grit, resiliency.

Of course you are able to, the athletic achievements continue as well, but the lifelong skills and characteristics you develop outside of just the athletic achievements, these are skills that will translate far beyond that into your whole life forever. And that’s something again, that I’m witnessing in myself.

I think if I didn’t play sports, if I didn’t have that sense of teamwork, that sense of, I was team captain at University of Kentucky for two years, so if I didn’t have that sense of leadership, accountability, really, I think accountability and responsibility is a good word, then I don’t think I would feel confident enough to take a public stance in the way that I have this past year.

Which it sounds silly because my stance is so simple and it’s rooted in, of course, truth and common sense and science and logic, reasoning, all the things. So it sounds silly to say I might not have the confidence and leadership and the security in and of myself to take the arrows that I’m taking. And if it weren’t for sports, I really do accredit that to being an athlete.

There was an Ernst and Young study that said I think 94% of C-level executives, so CEO, CFO, COO that are females, were once female athletes. And I think that shows how the skills that you develop translate far beyond your sport.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. Well, it might seem silly in one sense for you to make any claims to the necessity for training for just saying the things you’re saying. But there aren’t that many people saying the things you’re saying in as public a manner as you’re saying them.

And so obviously there’s difficulties there that are beyond the typical person’s athlete or not, the typical person’s ability to withstand. So even if the topic is in some ways surreal, it’s definitely the case that it’s unlikely that people are going to take a public stance now.

And so you said you learned to have a certain degree of confidence in yourself, but also to be able to tolerate a certain amount of stress as a consequence of this highly competitive training. But I would also ask you, you were the team captain, you said, for a number of years and, so what do you think the attributes, what are the necessary attributes of a team captain?

Now, obviously, you have to be very skilled athletically and competitive. And that means that you’re striving for victory. You’re striving to be the best on your team. You’re striving to break the appropriate records. But you have to modify that, obviously, if you’re team captain.

And so how do you think, how did you reconcile the demands to be the best on the team with the necessity of being a team leader? And what did you have to learn in order to be an effective captain?

The Challenges of Team Leadership

RILEY GAINES: I think the thing that I knew I wanted to implement as a captain, my team at University of Kentucky, there’s 40 girls. Obviously, when you’re dealing with 40 girls, there’s a lot of different personalities. There’s a lot of different ways people communicate, how they handle situations, how they deal with pressure, how they like to be motivated.

And so as a captain, number one, I wanted to be someone that everyone felt like they could talk to. Again, when you’re dealing with 40 girls, of course, there’s cliques, there’s people on the team who are best friends. There are other people who don’t necessarily like each other. You work together, but you won’t be friends outside of your sport.

And so I wanted to be someone who could, who could unite everyone, in a sense. I’m not, I don’t want to make anyone be friends with someone they don’t want to be friends with. But how can we come together to achieve our goals and what that looks like in terms of communication, which, again, I’m seeing that translate now into my life and how I deal with what I’m dealing with.

But I think communication is huge too. I think what strived me to help us all achieve our goals, our goals we set as a team, was to constantly remind the team of the goals we set. I think it’s very often in sports where you talk about big things and then you kind of forget about it.

And when it comes championship season or whatever, that looks like you’re not geared up to achieve what you’ve set because you haven’t worked towards it, really. You talk about it, but talking about it isn’t enough. So in practice, I would constantly remind people, hey, you know, this is the goal you set for yourself personally, which can help us achieve our goals as a team. Don’t forget that. And I always saw them great.

Aligning Individual and Team Goals

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So that’s that alignment. Well, one of the most effective leadership strategies, although I hate to reduce it to a strategy, because it’s more than that, is to produce an organization predicated on the intrinsic alignment of interests. Right?

And so what you really want, if you set up an organization is you want each person pursuing a goal that they personally value and so are willing to work for and to sacrifice for and to dedicate themselves to. And then you want each of those goals to be serving a superordinate goal that unites and moves the entire team ahead. And then you don’t have to use coercion and so forth.

And you can imagine if you’re doing that, helping each athlete become the best they can be on the personal level, for whatever personal gain they might manage in terms of being more resilient and in terms of, you know, achievement status and all of those things, comparative status, you’re also doing the same thing for the team.

And you can see perfect, you can understand, understand without much effort, how useful that would be in executive management, for example. I worked with a number of extraordinarily good managers in the business realm, especially on the legal front, and then also in academia.

And the really great managers, they had a very light touch. They tended to go around and remove problems before they started. And so it often looked like they were doing almost nothing. But they were also extremely good at aligning people’s interests so that everybody was moving in the same desirable direction.

And so what do you think you did badly on that front and had to learn to do better? And what do you think you did well?

Accountability and Understanding

RILEY GAINES: Well, I think the things I did well were the things I mentioned. Especially as a woman, it’s difficult to hold each other accountable. Typically women, they don’t like to be assertive. And in that way they think it’s mean, they think it’s, they take it personal.

And so something I always tried to do well was hold people accountable in a way that made them want to do better. And I think that falls along with, again, helping people develop personally to reach those team goals, which, again, I don’t think even a male can understand necessarily how women, how especially a room, a group of 40 women, that dynamic is hard to navigate.

And so holding people accountable, I think it’s crucial, and I feel as if I did that relatively well. What I think I could have probably improved on is being a little more understanding. It’s hard for me to put myself in someone else’s shoes sometimes to consider what they have going on outside of the sport, because we truly did put so much of our identity, so much of our self worth into our sport that I oftentimes would forget to look at anything other than what’s going on in the sport.

If someone was having a bad practice, it was very quick for me to get snippy at them without remotely thinking about other factors that could contribute to the bad practice, whether that be sleep, diet, school.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s a hard psychological dynamic. And you made a sex specific comment there too, that we could delve into. Well, you know, if you’re focused on a particular goal and you’re competitive and achievement oriented and you want to win, then your focus tends to narrow to that particular domain, right?

RILEY GAINES: Absolutely.

Gender Differences in Team Dynamics

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: What that means is that you’ll sacrifice other interests and concerns for that particular, what would you say, ability to progress along that particular axis. And as you said, well, that can come across as harsh.

Now, on average, women are more agreeable than men. And so that means, on average, they’re less harsh, at least overtly. And you know, it’s an open question, and I don’t think anybody knows exactly how to answer this question then what effective leadership on the female front looks like.

Now, you faulted yourself, and I would say you faulted yourself in some sense for taking a more masculine perspective on those sorts of group endeavors. Because it’s typical among men for a group of men to concentrate on the goal at hand and to say, to hell with all the other concerns, which is something like, “Don’t bring your bloody troubles to work, just do your damn job.”

Now you made the point that that was perhaps differentially challenging when working with women. You think, why do you think that? Why isn’t that just a sexist claim, for example? I mean, why do you think that’s the case? Where have you run into that and how would you justify it and what did you do about it?

RILEY GAINES: Right, yeah. This is solely based off my experiences at the University of Kentucky. Of course, there’s a men’s team and a women’s team. My husband, now, who I’ve married, he was the men’s team at Kentucky. Just watching their interactions, watching how they can communicate with each other, brush it off, come back to the next practice and be totally fine. That doesn’t work with girls.

Again, based solely off of my experiences. This isn’t to overgeneralize. This is to share exactly what I have seen firsthand. Girls tend to be more moody. They tend to not take constructive criticism as well, whether that be from the coach or from other teammates or from whoever.

But the men, on the other hand, especially at the University of Kentucky, which again, I was able to witness, they could get on each other’s backs, they could say personal things to each other that even didn’t necessarily apply to their sport when they were getting on one another. As women, there would be cat fights if we did that, which again sounds silly, but that’s truthfully what I experience on a day to day basis.

# The Value of Sex-Segregated Spaces

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, you know, one of the temperamental differences between men and women is that difference in agreeableness. And so there’s less of a tendency for overt conflict among women. Now that doesn’t mean there’s less of a tendency for covert conflict. And actually what you do see is that antisocial women, the ones who can’t cooperate well and who can’t work together in a team, they use underground strategies like reputation savaging and gossip to promulgate their aggressive behavior.

Now men are much more likely to do that up front, and there’s some simplicity in that. But also women have a proclivity to experience more negative emotion than men. And so for each unit of stress, they manifest more psychophysiological response that seems to kick in around puberty. And so that additional, call it volatility, the technical term that’s an aspect of trait neuroticism, by the way, that volatility, also that increased volatility also makes it more difficult arguably for women to brush things off the same way that men who are cooperating in a team might.

And I mean, the reason I’m talking about this, by the way, and delving into this is because we are going to get into the topic of sex and gender very soon, because, well, that’s where we’re headed given that that’s the root of the conflict that’s made itself manifest around you. And so it’s useful to establish and to start to explore the territory that’s relevant with regard to sex differentiation.

Now, obviously when you were competing, you weren’t competing in a co-ed situation, right? It was women competing against women and men competing against men. And it’s been set up like that for a long time. So given the claims in our society for radical equality, both in actuality and as a desirable outcome, first of all, do you think that there’s any, what is, if any, the justification for not making all sporting events, let’s say radically co-ed?

RILEY GAINES: Well, because I think we know how this would turn out time and time again, regardless of the sport, regardless of if it’s an individual sport, a team sport, what that might look like. We’ve seen example after example where a mediocre male or mediocre men’s team nowhere near ranking the top, let’s say this could be nationally, this could be whatever level you’re comparing here, unanimously, these men, these men’s teams, they dominate the women.

So having a co-ed team, that would not be beneficial to women by any means. So I think that’s why I believe there’s value to having co-ed instructional teams when you’re younger, when you’re learning, but once you’ve gone through that puberty, it’s irreversible. Men are of course, on average taller, faster, stronger, more powerful, they jump higher. There’s so many different attributes, advantages that men have in comparison to women. And so I think co-ed teams, in a sense, if that’s what you’re looking for, of course there’s value to it. But at the competitive level where you’re competing again to win, that’s what your goal is. Having men compete against women is very obvious. It’s unfair.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, so let me push this. I’m going to push this as far as I can push it because things are being pushed in our culture as far as they can be pushed. So we might as well go in for a penny and in for a pound. I could say, well, why don’t we just scrap women’s sports altogether? Like if the goal is faster, stronger, better, more powerful and on average that’s not happening in the female domain. Why don’t we just give up the entire enterprise on the female sports end and just let the men take over the playing field? If that’s the point, you know, if the point is to foster the highest possible level of performance.

Celebrating Women’s Unique Achievements

RILEY GAINES: So to say that men are stronger, to say that men are faster, taller, whatever, that’s not to say that women are inferior. That’s not to say that we’re not capable of amazing things and we’re not strong and we’re not again, all of those words I previously mentioned. But we have different physical ceilings. I believe we deserve to be celebrated on our uniqueness. That’s what makes the women’s sporting category special.

And there are still phenoms in women’s sports just like there are male sports. Look at Venus and Serena Williams. While by no means could they compete with the best male tennis player, they’re phenomenal. They are. It’s amazing what they’ve accomplished. They’ve set themselves apart from every other female in the world and that deserves to be recognized. So just say we’re different.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Let’s delve into that. So because you might say, well, there’s two reasons for high level competition and let’s say on the athletic front, one would be to extend the domain of what’s possible in terms of performance and to model that for other people. And then you could make a case, well, you could make the case that the absolute records are the best example of that. So the fastest person in the world, the fastest swimmer in the world, and most of the time that’s going to be men.

But then you could make a more sophisticated case, which I believe is the proper case, that actually what you’re doing as an athlete or as any expert in a competitive realm is modeling the ability to push the envelope and to further transform and develop. And unless you believe that that’s less important for women, which is a preposterous thing to believe, then you have to believe that setting up a situation where women can push the envelope consistently in whatever directions they’re pushing, you have to presume that that’s a psychological good and a social good. And then you have to presume that the spaces where that can occur have to be protected.

But that also opens a can of worms, doesn’t it? Because since the 1960s in particular, we’ve blown off the barriers between men and women in terms of general participation in society, right? And so we’ve decided that, all things considered, spaces isolated to a given sex are suboptimal, right? The schools are co-ed, like the public schools. The universities are co-ed, all business enterprises are co-ed, so to speak.

And then of course, so that raises the question, well, should any domains be left sex segregated? If so, how do you walk the fine line between sex segregation for the purpose of facilitating development and sex segregation that turns into prejudice and oppression, right? Just rejection on the basis of sex.

Drawing the Line on Sex-Segregated Spaces

And then also the thorny question of, well, if most enterprises should be completely open to both sexes, which enterprises should be protected? Do you have any, obviously you believe that athletic performance, athletic competition per se, should be one of those protected categories. But do you have any sense of how we as a society should draw the line?

It’s like, are there spaces that should be male only? Like, one of the things I really wonder about, for example, I talked to Tulsi Gabbard about this a while back is like, it isn’t obvious to me at all that our society would benefit by having women in frontline combat, right? Like, and it isn’t that I can generate an immediate coherent argument for why I believe that there’s something about it that strikes me more deeply and emotionally, I suppose that just there’s something preposterous about that.

Maybe it’s partly because, look, it isn’t obvious to me that professional frontline combat that’s pretty d*mn hard on anyone, that’s even really hard on extremely well put together and extraordinarily strong and brave men. And so to also presume that that’s going to be open to women just seems to me to be taking the whole bloody charade too far. Now, you know, you could say, well, that I’m old fashioned and prejudice, although I don’t actually think I’m either.

But you know, it is a thorny question, right? It’s like, well, if men and women are equal, then why should there ever be sex segregated spaces of any sort? And we’re certainly seeing that on the bathroom front, we’re seeing that on the change room front, we’re seeing that on the athletic front. So what do you, where do you think that the line should be drawn so that there are female spaces and male spaces and that those are protected? And how do you think we manage that, like, legally and conceptually?

RILEY GAINES: I think where any place where either of the sexes is vulnerable, whether that be in regards to privacy, in regards to safety, in regards to anything that relies on your physiology, because of course men and women are physiologically different, I think that’s where that sex protection based rights are important.

So prisons, that’s an area where women specifically are vulnerable. Of course. Shelters, again, bathrooms, locker rooms. No woman should be subjected to having a male in that space. So I think it’s areas where sex…

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, so it’s, okay, so it’s something like there’s a subset of areas where the fact of the biological difference between men and women becomes paramount.

RILEY GAINES: Correct.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. And so those would be, well, in change rooms is a really good example of that. But you extended that also to say women’s shelters and prisons and so forth. So there’s something there that’s sort of, what would you say it’s reminiscent of the idea of nakedness, I suppose, because you mentioned vulnerability. Right. So when you’re stripped down to your most vulnerable, that’s when the segregation is most necessary. It’s something like that, right? I believe it seems that way.

RILEY GAINES: Yeah, I believe there’s value in understanding that. I truthfully think anywhere where sex is relevant, there are certain places. Let’s consider the workplace. There are certain places where sex isn’t necessarily relevant. There are certain places where it are. I like how you mentioned military. That’s a very good point. Men and women, there are differences there that would again make anything that requires sheer strength, make men be advantageous and make that more achievable. That’s what we’re wanting. Right. We want to be this powerhouse. We want men at the forefront. So I think where sex plays a role, that’s where we kind of have to draw that line.

Where Biological Differences Matter

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So it would be where the biological differences are germane, number one to performance, like specifically germane to performance, but also number two, specifically germane to differential vulnerability. So anywhere where women are sexually vulnerable or anywhere where the physical differences in performance actually have a substantive effect on the performance itself.

So here’s an example. I mean, there’s no evidence that men and women differ in IQ. There are micro differences in IQ and some of them are arguably important in some micro domains. But overall the evidence is quite clear that on average, men and women have the same level of intelligence. And so then we might presume that in any domain where intelligence is the fundamental marker of potential merit, there should be no sex segregation.

But if we’re looking at something like, let’s say military battlefield rescue, that might be a good one, where physical strength becomes a paramount marker of the actual ability to do the job, then sex based discrimination starts to become appropriate and morally required. And then you could make the reverse case which is, well, where women are particularly vulnerable on the sexual front. So that would be in locker rooms, for example. That’s also a place where sex segregation is reasonable. So those are the basic rules, something like that.

RILEY GAINES: Not just is it appropriate and morally responsible, it’s beneficial. It’s something that is good for the greater good of society in general. So yeah, I agree.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay. Okay. Okay. Well, that seems to be a reasonable set of rules of thumb. Okay, now let’s talk about, I have one more question about your, the discipline that was required for you to become a high level swimmer because you said that the benefits were worth the cost. But I’d like to talk a little bit more about the costs.

And the reason I’m curious about this is because we’re going to talk about Leah Thomas soon and we’re going to talk about the entrance of men into the female competitive realm. And I want people to understand just exactly what’s on the line here.

The Cost of Athletic Excellence

So when you were in junior high, which is the time when teenagers start to become, say more hypersocial, they’re spending most of the time with their peers. They really care about that social time with their peers. They adjudicate almost all of their status and self confidence in relationship to their peer relations. You’re spending what, four hours a day swimming? So what did you have to give up in order to, on the social front, let’s say maybe on the relationship front, for that matter, what did you have to give up to pursue your single minded devotion to your sport?

# The Sacrifices of Elite Athletic Competition

A Life Dedicated to Sport

RILEY GAINES: It’s impossible to put into words what you have to give up. By no sense is this a normal childhood, shall we say? You don’t get to go to prom, you don’t get to go on vacations, you don’t get to have sleepovers with your friends. And again, no one forced us to do this. My parents didn’t force me to play my sport. It’s just what I knew I had to do. And so you pick one thing to prioritize. And for me it was my sport.

But there was a lot of social sacrifices at the collegiate level. You’re missing weeks of school at a time, so right there you’re sacrificing your education. In a sense, we were very fortunate that we have resources like tutors and different things that help us not miss out too much. But the amount of things that are altered because of your sport, it’s impossible to put into words.

Again, my world, essentially all of our world competing at that level, it has to. There’s no other option. It revolves around your sport. That is your priority. And everything else really falls in line behind. I missed out on funerals of loved ones because I couldn’t leave college to go home. Which sounds, of course, morbid, it sounds toxic. It sounds as if this is crazy. But again, that’s just what you have to be willing to do, especially in a sport like swimming.

Swimming is obviously unnatural for human beings. We don’t have gills. It’s not a natural ability. So taking a day off, that’s not allowed. Especially over COVID, this was a really hard time because again, we never got sent home. I was at University of Kentucky summer all summer long. We were there over Thanksgiving. We didn’t get to leave for Christmas. You never got to go home. You got a week off in August each year.

The COVID Disruption

But over COVID, of course, we did get sent home. This was a struggle, not just physically, but the amount of the toll this had on one mentally. Naturally, you’ve dedicated your life to your sport. Suddenly, very abruptly, that’s taken away. And so when we get sent home, no pools are open, no gyms are open. We got sent home three days before our national championships my sophomore year.

So it felt as if we had trained all year to get to the fastest meet in the world. Because that’s what this meet is, especially short course. The fastest meet in the world, you train all year, all your life, you get sent home three days before. That was hard. That was a hard period of time.

But being sent home, no pools, no gyms, nothing is open, constant stress. I was very fortunate to be from Tennessee, where there’s lots of lakes. So every day my only option was to put on a wetsuit and swim miles aimlessly up and down the lake. That’s all I knew I could do because again, that’s how dedicated I was. And that’s not unique to me. It might be unique in a sense where I had lakes around me, but any of us competing at that level, if you’re dedicated to achieving your goals, that’s what you would do. So that’s what I did every single day for months.

The Social Contract of Fair Competition

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, so now we could, let’s take a look at your situation. So you’re playing a game. You’re playing this game of competitive swimming. And let’s lay out the broader social rules. So the rules are something like this: your contribution is the sacrifices you’re willing to make and the discipline that you’re willing to impose on yourself and the leadership roles that you’re willing to take on to help other people do the same thing. That’s your contribution.

Now the game rule is that if you do your part then you can compete against other people who are basically facing the same limits you are intrinsically. So those would be people of your sex. And then all of you are competing to transcend your limitations to become better losers, to become better winners, to become more resilient people, to become more focused and disciplined. And that’s the payoff for you. But all those rules have to apply fairly in order for that game to be justifiable.

Now you’re objecting because some of that contractual bargain, let’s say, was violated by the COVID pandemic prohibitions. But we’re now going to turn to a more specific case. So the rules are you’re competing against people who have the same limitations you are so that all of your attempts to transcend your limitations are fair and then equally rewarded.

But now we throw a monkey wrench into the works. We decide that a biological male who undergoes a certain amount of psychological and or physiological transformation can now be deemed a woman. And so let’s turn to that. So when were you and your teammates first faced with the necessity of competing against someone who was, at one point, 100% a biological male?

First Encounters with Male Competitors

RILEY GAINES: This is something we did in practice oftentimes. So in a sense, we were relatively used to, at least we understood the differences between men and women because we would practice together in the mornings. At nights, we would have different practice times, the men and the women’s team, but in the mornings, we would practice together for the most part. So we knew what that looked like.

I mean, the worst men’s swimmer on the men’s team at University of Kentucky could easily beat the fastest girl on our team. So we knew what that looked like. But in terms of facing a male in competition, that did not happen until our NCAA championships in March. For my team, there were other teams within the Ivy League, other schools, that this was something they dealt with all year long, starting in October.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That was what year?

RILEY GAINES: This was, it started in 2021-2022.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So 2021. And that you said in March.

RILEY GAINES: So it was in March of 2022, but the season began in about October, September of 2021.

The Psychology of Training with Male Athletes

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, now, so now two questions that come out for that. The first is when you’re practicing with the men in the morning and you see that the worst man on the male team can swim faster than the fastest woman on the woman’s team, what’s the appropriate psychological reaction to that?

Because you could imagine that, you know, you could imagine two routes. You could imagine on the one hand that it would be demoralizing because it is in terms of absolute performance, or on the other hand, you could think, well, it’s irrelevant because that’s not the game. Right. The game is that you’re competing against people who have your limitations, not people who have this other set of limitations.

I mean, if you were in the pool with a dolphin and it swam faster than you, that wasn’t, well, it’s not going to be demoralizing because it’s not the same game. So was there any sense of demoralization among the women with regards to the apprehension of the superior performance of the males, or was that off the table? Was that irrelevant?

RILEY GAINES: Yeah, that was irrelevant. Of course, we expected to get beat, but in a sense, it gave us kind of a driving factor. If we were racing next to a male or whatever that looked like, if we’re practicing next to a male, you could almost strive to keep up with them because you knew in a sense that you couldn’t, but you could kind of set that barrier. Let’s see how close I can get.

So by no means was it demoralizing. It was more so irrelevant. If not, I mean, it could be seen as beneficial to competing or not competing, training with males, because you’re training next to someone who’s better than you. And that’s always a good thing, right? If you’re dedicated to pushing yourself and bettering yourself. So it was not demoralizing by any means. It was more so irrelevant.

The First Competition Against Lia Thomas

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, okay, okay. So now March 2022, you’re at a championship. Maybe you can fill us in on the details here. And is this the first time that you come up against Lia Thomas, particularly?

RILEY GAINES: This is the first time I had swam against Lia Thomas.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Tell us that story. And how did you find out? Tell us the whole story. How did you find out that this was even going to happen? So how did you respond and how did your team respond?

RILEY GAINES: So in about November of 2021, November, December time period, this is about the middle of our season. It’s my senior year. I had made it my goal to become a national champion. The year prior, I finished seventh in the country and I knew I could do better. There was a lot of girls who finished above me who were graduating or who they weren’t competing in the same events for whatever reason. So I knew I could perform better than I had the year before.

About November, December, I was on track to do so. I was ranked third in the country behind one amazing female swimmer who I knew very well, because like in most sports, your top tier athletes, you know each other regardless of where you compete in the country, which school you go to, what events you even swim, because you’ve grown up competing against each other. And she was of course ranked second.

Red Flags and Suspicions

And the person who was ranked first was, this was the first time I became aware of Lia Thomas. But at the time, unbeknownst to me, this was a male. There was a lot of red flags, one of which being this was a swimmer from University of Pennsylvania, which is not a school that historically produces fast swimmers. Think of basketball. You have your schools that historically are pretty good. I’ve never heard of anyone come from University of Pennsylvania and be a decent swimmer.

Two, this person was a senior, which was bizarre. Swimming is a sport where typically you peak when you’re younger to peak when you’re 22 years old. That’s not common. Three, the swimmer was ranked at the top in everything, all the freestyle events, from the 100 freestyle, which is a sprint, everything in between to the mile, which the mile is long distance. And so think about your Olympic runners. Your best 200 meter runner is not your best marathon runner. But that’s what we were seeing in this individual. Those are totally different systems. Lots of head scratching.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. So that’s, we should concentrate on that for a second because I think your comments there are particularly germane because when you’re competing at a very high level, small differences in specialization are going to loom large. And as you said in the Olympics, the people who win the sprinting events aren’t the people who win the long distance events. Those are, even though both of them are running, there’s enough difference between those formats of running and the strategies to completely differentiate the athletes now.

But you’re seeing someone who is all of a sudden far above the average on a whole sequence of events that shouldn’t be associated in that manner.

RILEY GAINES: Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And so there’s something in the wood pile that isn’t just exactly right. And so, and you said at the moment, at that time, you didn’t know that this individual, Lia Thomas, was male.

RILEY GAINES: No idea. Lots of head scratching. You know, who is this person? I talked to my coaches, he knew my goals and he knew this person was a threat to my goals. And we’re trying to figure out, you know, why have we never heard of this girl? We thought at the time, why have we never heard of this person? You know, we talked amongst our team, just there was this feeling, how the…

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: How the hell did you not know? How is it possible that you didn’t know and that your coaches didn’t know that this person was male? This is so weird because it’s not like you wouldn’t normally, as you said, know who your competitors are. How was this little secret, let’s say, kept secret?

# The Revelation and Its Impact

RILEY GAINES: I think it was something the university kept under wraps for a while. And I didn’t compete again directly against this person. I had no idea what this person looked like. No idea that this person was 6 foot 4. And it just seemed so far fetched that this could be a male. It never even once crossed my mind. Never once.

I was more apt to believe that this was just someone who appeared than it being a male. I thought that would never happen, especially at the level we were competing at. But it was only a few days after these nation leading times were posted that an article came out. And I’m talking in a very brief sentence as if we were supposed to just read over it and continue on.

And the article didn’t say this very briefly, the article says Lia Thomas is formerly Will Thomas and swam three years on the men’s team at University of Pennsylvania before deciding to switch over to the women’s team and then continued on. And so my coach sent me the article and he says, “You need to look at this.” And I read it and I have to read it again.

And I was shocked naturally, of course, when I read this. But truthfully, it felt like a sense of relief. It made it all make sense. It makes sense why this person is dominating everyone. Again, I’m relating back to my experiences in competing and training, I guess practicing with men. Naturally this person is dominating. That’s why I say it felt like relief because I was then able to look up who Will Thomas was.

I was curious, was this a lateral movement? Was this someone who went from ranking first to continuing to rank first? Which is of course not what we saw.

The Rankings Reality

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: No, no, let’s talk about what we saw. Because this is absolutely relevant psychologically and this is where I think the rubber really hits the road. Because it would be one thing perhaps to have someone who was outstanding in their fair competition then become outstanding in your competition. But although Will Thomas was a decent swimmer, he was by no means outstanding.

So you could say that comparatively speaking, it wasn’t exactly as if he was a failure because he was a competitive swimmer, but he was no bloody champion. And so to me, and I’m speaking as a psychologist here, that begs the question, well, he wasn’t spectacularly successful on the male front. And so you might ask, well, exactly what are the motivations for choosing to be spectacularly successful on the female front?

And that doesn’t strike me as part of the bounds of fair competition in any sense of the word whatsoever, psychologically or socially. Okay, so let’s talk about Will Thomas, pre-female record as a swimmer.

RILEY GAINES: Absolutely. So what we saw the year prior at best, Lia, when Lia was Will, was ranked 462nd nationally among the men at best. So of course that’s why, that’s again why I felt relief, because I thought of course it was obvious just looking at what’s on the paper in front of us, this was not a lateral movement by any means.

I thought the NCAA, which is of course the governing body who would ultimately decide if Thomas got to compete with the women, I thought they would see it exactly how I saw it. Nothing opinionated, nothing hateful, nothing rooted in hate. The facts of it, what we were looking at, that is not how the NCAA saw it. They saw absolutely nothing wrong with allowing Thomas to go from a mediocre male to now the fastest woman in the country.

The Psychology of False Victory

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, so let me ask you a question here. This is going to require some speculation on your part. So we might say, well, it’s all about winning and so why not set up the contest so that you can win. And I know this is preposterous. Imagine you wanted to play one on one basketball for entertainment and you decided that what you were going to do is win.

And maybe you’re, so you decide to play basketball with your, I could do this even though I don’t know how to play basketball worth a damn. I could pick my 3 year old grandson to play basketball against and I just stomped the hell out of him. And pretty regularly, right? And pretty convincingly and I would be the winner.

And anyone with any sense would look at that and say, well that’s pretty pathetic kind of victory there, buddy. You know, why don’t you pick on someone your own size? And anyone with any sense would also point out, well, you know, it’s probably the case that if you pick the wrong opponent, which is someone that you can trounce regularly without effort, that’s really not going to be very fun.

And that’s partly because you’re not pushing yourself in any real sense. You’re not breaking, pushing the boundaries, you’re not developing yourself, you’re certainly not helping them develop, you’re demoralizing them. So I could say, well Riley, why don’t you enter yourself into a swimming contest for girls, but in the 10 year old division? You could win hands down, quite handily, I would presume you could make quite the fools out of those 10 year old girls.

And so now, and this is what I would like you to speculate on, what kind of mental gymnastics do you think you would have to perform internally so that if you did that and you would think that in any way you were actually a winner? You know what I mean? Like how do you have to twist and dement yourself to the point where you believe that having done that and accomplishing your aim, which is the devastation of your opponents, that you’re now someone who can celebrate themselves?

Here is my trophy. And that others celebrate and that anyone who refuses to celebrate is now bigoted. So what kind of mental state do you have to be in to do that?

RILEY GAINES: I think what that boils down to is of course, selfishness, entitlement. That’s the word I think of when this whole trans movement, it’s as if they feel owed something, they feel entitled to winning and they have an utter disregard towards everyone else, for everyone else’s happiness, feelings, safety, privacy, dignity.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: As long as discipline, sacrifices. As long as all of the things that you put into this. The thing that I find so utterly appalling about this, although there’s many things, is that you really spent, as you said, 18 years preparing yourself for this and that came at a non-trivial cost.

And I mean, I’m not feeling sorry for you, but what I am thinking is, well, you know, you were playing a straight game and the consequence of that was that you were then subjected to a crooked championship. Hyper, hyper crooked, hyper moralistic. And that you were thrown into the ring with someone who’s an unrepentant narcissist. And then because of your objections were also pilloried morally, which is just, you know, the icing on the cake.

Okay, so now you find out that Lia Will is a man. Not was, but is a man. And he’s decided that he’s a woman. And the people who are enabling this idiot narcissistic delusion have also decided that he’s a man. And so now you’re facing him in competition. So what sort of shock waves, let’s say, does that send through you psychologically but also through your team?

Living in the Twilight Zone

RILEY GAINES: Swimming is of course a physical sport. There’s a lot of, there’s several physical aspects that go into it, but just like any sport, there’s so much mental that goes into it as well. So I can’t even tell you what this distraction, because that’s ultimately, take away the unfair competition piece. That’s ultimately what this was. It was a huge distraction.

It was all anyone could talk about. There was so much media attention, which I think we can all agree swimming is not a sport that typically garners media attention. There was awkward whispers on the pool deck of people who felt so uncomfortable and wrong but didn’t feel comfortable enough to say it loudly. There was side eyes, eye movements. There was so much that just kind of made you feel as if you were living in this twilight zone. So that’s what that piece looked like from the mental aspect.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So what do you mean living in, what do you mean, living in a twilight zone? What was that like, psychological? I have a specific reason for this, which I’ll tell you about, but what do you mean? What do you mean? It was like a twilight zone?

RILEY GAINES: It felt as if, in my perspective, two years ago, maybe a man enters a woman’s locker room. He’s immediately arrested and charged with voyeurism, indecent exposure, sexual harassment. I’m sure the list could go on. But now, not only was it happening, it was being celebrated, it was being encouraged.

It just felt as if so quickly, again, maybe I was naive to how rapidly this was happening or if this had been happening for a while. And now kind of doing more research and studying up on this, I realize it happened quick, in a sense, but this has been, it’s been happening for a while. This was their ultimate goal for a while now.

The Marker of Trauma

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: There’s a marker for traumatic stress. By the way, one of the markers for traumatic stress is a phenomenon called derealization. And so if something happens to you and you can’t believe it’s happening, then that’s a marker for the development of traumatic stress disorders. Now, it’s not an invariable marker, but it’s a pretty good marker.

And so you’re talking about a situation where you’d played a straight game and were in a straight game for 18 years, and then one of the most fundamental rules of the game was flipped, and not only with regards to swimming. And that’s not nothing, because you devoted your life to it and so had your teammates, but also with regards to the locker room.

There’s two things going on here. Not only are you competing against Will Thomas, who now calls himself Lia and has his idiot acolytes going along with that, but there’s the locker room issue, too. So let’s fast forward to the competition itself. Tell me about the locker room situation and then also tell me about what it was like to compete that day.

# The Competition and the Trophy Incident

RILEY GAINES: I’ll start by kind of filling you in on the competition. So that first day of competition, I don’t have any events that fall on this day. So this was a day that I didn’t compete. But this was the 500 freestyle, one of the events which was the event that Lia swam the first day. Again, being an event I didn’t compete in, I got to sit on the side of the pool and watch this.

And if you don’t know how swimming works at this level, you swim in the morning, you have to swim prelims, but you have to qualify for finals to come back and swim again at night. So top 16 make it back and swim again. And so I’m watching prelims in the morning, and there’s several heats, maybe eight or so heats.

And so this girl comes up next to me. She had just swam in one of the earlier heats. Her name is Reka. She swam for Virginia Tech. She’s a fifth year because of COVID. We got an extra year of eligibility to which she took. She was from Hungary and she stayed in the U.S. I asked her, I was like, “Why did you take your fifth year?” And she said, “I wanted to become an All American.”

And so she was standing next to me. She was out of breath, her heart rate was high. And she was watching the result board to see if she made top 16. And she realizes as the last heat dives in the water, which this is the heat that Lia is swimming in in the morning, she realizes she’s going to be right on the cusp of making it back.

She watches. Lia dominates, beats everyone in the water by seconds, which in swimming, even one second is a ton. But Lia beat everyone in the water by multiple seconds, body lengths. And these are Olympians. These are the most impressive female swimmers of all time. But again, beats everyone.

Reka looks up to the result board and she realized she placed 17th. And I knew her relatively. I didn’t know her well, but I knew her name. And we’re standing next to each other and she grabs me, grabs my hand, looks at me with tears coming down her face.

And this is when my feelings shifted because up until this point, I felt kind of mad, just confused. I felt mad that the NCAA, frustrated, they didn’t see it how I saw it. But she grabbed my hand, tears rolling down her face, and she says, “I just got beat by someone who didn’t even have to try.”

And that’s when my feelings shifted to heartbreak. Seeing how this affected her, knowing she put in the same work to a level that I did, knowing she stayed an extra year from her home country in Hungary, in the States, so she could achieve this goal. And she just had that stripped from her. And again, that’s when it felt like I’d been punched in the gut.

And so we come back that night and of course, Lia Thomas swims to a national title, beating everyone. The time Lia went this year would have beat everyone in the country again. Or, sorry, the time Lia went last year would have beat everyone in the country again this year by seconds.

So Lia became the first male to win a national title on the women’s side. That next day of competition, this was the day that Thomas and I competed against each other in the 200 freestyle. We both swam in the morning, we qualified top eight. We came back that evening, and we raced.

And almost impossibly enough, we tied. So we went the exact same time down to the hundredth of a second, which I won’t say never happens in swimming, but that’s rare, right, to touch the wall at the exact same time. And so we actually tied for fifth place. It wasn’t a best time for either of us. I didn’t perform my best. And Thomas, I can speculate. I like how you use that word. I can speculate in a minute about what I think.

But we go behind the awards podium after our race, and the NCAA official looks at both Thomas and myself and says, “Great job, you guys tied. We don’t really account for ties in terms of trophies. We only have one. So that trophy goes to Lia.”

And so I was of course, taken aback by this. Not because I wanted the tangible trophy. I’m a 12-time All American, so I have lots of those. But it was the principle of him outright looking at me as if it didn’t matter and telling me that Lia got the trophy.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So what was the justification? Yeah, exactly. What the hell’s the justification for that decision?

RILEY GAINES: I questioned him.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: At minimum, you’d expect a coin toss.

RILEY GAINES: Absolutely.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: To randomize it. So what the hell’s going on there? Exactly.

RILEY GAINES: And I asked exactly that. I said, you know why? I understand we tied. I understand there’s one trophy. But why are you adamant on Thomas having this trophy? And he was not prepared to answer this. They hadn’t been questioned. And when I say they, I mean the NCAA, they hadn’t been questioned for anything they had done thus far.

So he kind of stumbled on his words and said, “Oh, well, we’re just doing this in chronological order.” To which I pressed back again. Okay. I said, “What are you being chronological about? Because we tied. And if you’re referring to our names, I’m certain that G comes before T. So what are you being chronological about?”

To which he didn’t have an answer. And he says back, “Well, Lia has to have the trophy for photos. You can pose with this one, but you’ll have to give it back and you go home empty handed and Lia takes the trophy home.”

The Narcissism of the Situation

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Oh, so Lia has to have the trophy for photos. Okay, so that’s the rationale. Okay, so let’s just delve into that for a second. So now I’m going to put myself in Lia Thomas’s place, in Will Thomas’s place, and I’m going to think, well, you know, I’m 6 foot 4 and I’m a man. And I just tied this young woman who’s been working her whole life to become a fast swimmer.

And comparatively speaking, she’s a much faster swimmer than me because I was 462nd among my peers and she’s third. And so, and now I’ve tied her. And now these people have come up and they’re arbitrarily going to award a trophy to me, even though there’s no evidence that I deserved it. At best, there’s a 50% chance that I’m the deserving party here.

So what that would mean is that if Lia Thomas was being a proper gentleman, let’s say he would have done one of two things. He would have said, “Well, we have to flip a coin or I won’t take the trophy.” Or he would have said, “Well, I’m not going to take the trophy because it’s unfair that you give it to me under these circumstances.”

And yet he did neither. Instead, he took the trophy and he went and posed for the damn photographs. And so it’s very difficult for me as a clinician to see anything in that other than all the hallmarks of extraordinarily narcissistic and entitled behavior, because it is such a violation. A violation of what would you say the minimum professional athletic standards? That it’s a kind of miracle.

And the fact that the NCAA would promote that kind of pathological, narcissistic behavior is really quite the bloody miracle. So. And anyways, that’s what happened. So now he’s out there, what, parading around with this trophy, towering over the girls, and we are watching him do this. Like, what the hell are you thinking?

Is he actually enjoying himself? Like, it’s so preposterous, right? Because I can’t. I just can’t imagine how anybody can be foolish enough to think that what they’ve done actually constitutes an accomplishment. And then to get all that false attention. “You’re such a hero. You’ve made such sacrifices.” It’s all lies at every single level of analysis.

And yet he’s basking in the glory, you know, and also claiming that anybody who might object is nothing but, you know, a prejudiced bully, when in fact, he’s 100% and obviously the bully abetted by the NCAA. So you’re watching this. What the hell are you thinking?

RILEY GAINES: It felt as if I had been reduced down to a photo op. That’s how I felt. I felt like, again, everything that I had worked my entire life for was reduced to this photo opportunity to validate the feelings of a male at the expense of my own. Not just my own, every female somewhere at that meet.

It felt as if, of course, I understand the implications of Title IX, which was just to ensure equal opportunities and prevent discrimination on the basis of sex. It felt as if we were totally throwing it out of the window. In that moment, we were doing a 180 in the guise of being progressive. “We were moving forward. This is progress.”

This is not progress. This is taking us back at least 50 years in time, 51 years in time, to 1972, when Title IX was enacted. This is not progress. How can we sit here and actually say that women losing out on opportunities, women losing spots on the podium to a male is progress? That is quite literally the opposite.

That’s how I felt. I felt as if it was at this point, truthfully, when I realized I was fed up. Because I knew up until this point, I knew the unfair competition was wrong. This wasn’t trivial. I knew this. I knew the locker room was wrong, which I know I’m going to touch on because I think it’s important. I knew that was wrong.

But this piece, this whole trophy incident. And again, it wasn’t about the tangible trophy for me. It wasn’t about something as simple as holding. It was the principle behind it.

Why Female Athletes Remain Silent

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So, okay, so a couple. Now it sounds to me, you know, because part of me thinks, well, I have no idea why the women’s team, your women’s team, for example, agreed to compete against Lia Thomas to begin with. Now, I’m going to modify that a bit. I think the reason in all likelihood that you agreed is because you guys were confused and you didn’t know what was hell was going on and you couldn’t believe it.

And so I think you were thrown into a situation that required more preparation and philosophical finesse than would have been reasonable to expect from you. But I have been struck by the fact that the vast majority of female athletes seem willing to. They’re no worse than university professors on the woke front, by the way. It’s the same bloody thing.

But it is striking to me because it isn’t the least bit unreasonable for the female athletes just to get together and say, “Well, we’re not competing against men, like period, if you want to do that, we’re not going to attend the meets. We’re not going to play that idiot game.”

And so now you’ve decided in many ways not to play that game, but you’re obviously still representing, at least formally, a minority position. I know that behind the scenes, like the probability that the vast majority of female athletes feel that this is a travesty unless they’re doing some idiot woke virtue signaling at their own expense, that’s 100%.

But why do you think that people who are doing what you’re doing, given the vast and self evident injustice of this situation, why do you think they’re so rare and why in the world are you different?

RILEY GAINES: I think they’re rare for a couple reasons and these are some pieces I want to touch on. One, the silencing aspect that has gone into this. I’ve talked to many of Lia Thomas’s teammates at great lengths, one of which only just this week has alerted me. She’s really ready to use her name behind speaking out. It’s taken her a full year to recover from everything.

And when I’m talking to her, I’m asking her, you know, “Why are you so scared?” What they went through is nothing short of chilling. I mean, it’s truthfully scary to think of the suppression. They were forced to go every week to mandatory LGBTQ education meetings to learn about how just by being cisgender they were oppressing Lia Thomas.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. How long per week did they have to attend the Maoist re-education camps?

RILEY GAINES: I’m not sure what the time looked like, but they alerted me it was every week. They had to go.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, that’s good. I see. So not only did they get to be defeated unfairly, but they had to go learn about how immoral they were for being annoyed about it.

The Silencing and Intimidation of Female Athletes

RILEY GAINES: Well, that’s exactly. Because when they sent an email to their administration expressing, along with their parents on the email expressing their discomfort in the locker room, their administration responded back with, “If you feel uncomfortable seeing male genitalia in your locker room, here are some counseling resources that you should seek.”

They were told that they are not allowed to take a stance because their school has already taken their stance for them. They were told, “You will never get a job. You will never get into grad school. You will lose all your friends, you’ll lose playing time, you’ll lose your scholarship if you speak out.”

They were told that if you happen to speak out and any harm whatsoever comes toward Lia Thomas’s way, whether that be physical harm, emotional harm, whatever that looked like, then they were solely responsible, which that’s a big weight to put on anyone.

These girls were emotionally blackmailed. They were gaslit into making themselves feel wrong for feeling as if they wanted fair competition, which is traumatizing. Right. I mean, these girls.

The Locker Room Revelation

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Who is this teammate? Or can you reveal her name yet or not?

RILEY GAINES: I don’t know if she wants me to reveal her name.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, okay.

RILEY GAINES: There are several.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: I’ll track that down separately.

RILEY GAINES: There are several of them, and I think you would be a great outlet for her to even…

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Just tell her, I’ll talk to her whenever she wants. Yeah.

RILEY GAINES: This girl in particular, actually, she disclosed to me, again, privately, that when she was in high school, she was raped, which, again, is traumatic. And when she began to share that locker room space with Lia, who would shower in their locker rooms, would undress, of course, fully exposed in their locker rooms. That was very…

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: He’s quite the scum. He’s quite the scum rat. All things considered. No, I’m dead serious about that. There is 100% no excuse for that. And what those administrators did to the teammates of Lia Thomas, it goes way beyond immoral. It verges on criminal. Oh, man, it’s really something.

RILEY GAINES: But this girl, when she, with her background in being sexually assaulted, she went to her coach immediately and said, “This is really hard for me. Is there something we can do?” And he said, “I’m sorry, you have to be inclusive.” That’s what they were doing to these girls. So that’s why a lot of these girls are terrified.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Did you watch what happened to Nicola Sturgeon, the Prime Minister of Scotland? She tried to be inclusive with the serial rapist. Turns out there are some people you just can’t be that inclusive with. And psychopathic serial rapists who are claiming to be women so they can get access to women? Turns out sharing a locker room with them is probably not in anyone’s best interest.

RILEY GAINES: Not kind.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Isn’t that a shock?

RILEY GAINES: No.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it’s really quite something. Yeah. So let her know I’d be happy to talk to her. And if she wants to round up a couple of her teammates, we could do a nice podcast.

RILEY GAINES: I would love that.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Lay bare everything that… Well, let’s do it, man. We’ll lay bare everything the idiot virtue signaling woke administration laid on them when they were doing nothing but trying to defend themselves.

RILEY GAINES: Absolutely.

The Locker Room Situation

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay. Okay. So let’s talk about the locker room situation. So now not only are you and your teammates being stomped by this second rate male who is narcissistically claiming to be a female so he can get his photo ops and aggrandize himself, but you have to share a locker room with him as well. So what the hell do you think’s going on in his mind when he’s stripping down next to these women? Apart from the fact that he’s extremely fortunate to be there, let’s say.

But no, seriously though, what do you think’s going on with him? How is he acting? How is he behaving? Does he have the good graces to at least look somewhat embarrassed? Does he go change somewhere where he can’t be seen? Or is he right there out in the open, flaunting his package?

RILEY GAINES: Let’s say he was in the open, granted in a corner, relatively. As if that’s supposed to make anything better. It doesn’t, but I’ll kind of set the scene.

First of all, swimming locker room is not necessarily a place of modesty. Locker rooms are uncomfortable in general for anyone, bar adding someone of the opposite sex into that space. But growing up a swimmer, you almost feel comfortable being vulnerable in that environment. These suits you put on, they’re skin tight. So it takes about 15 minutes to really tuck and poke and prod yourself into these suits. 15 minutes of which you’re fully exposed.

But this locker room, it’s also a place of buzzing and chatter. You get to see your friends from all over the country who you haven’t seen all year. It’s an exciting place. Lots of talking, lots of laughing. But I can’t even tell you the dead silence in the room when all of a sudden… well, first it got silent. I turn around, unsure why it got so quiet so quick. I turn around, there’s a 6 foot 4, 22 year old male dropping his clothes and is fully intact with and exposing male genitalia.

So let me be clear. We were not forewarned we would be sharing this changing space. No one told us, no one asked for our consent. We did not…

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So what did you think? What did you think in that situation? I mean, what went through your mind?

RILEY GAINES: The first word that went through my mind was betrayal.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, right.

RILEY GAINES: That’s the first thought I had. The people who were supposed to be ensuring our privacy, protecting us, failed on every front and bare minimum did not tell us. So I immediately left the locker room. I immediately left and I went to one of the officials on the pool deck, just one of the officials.

And I went up to him and I said, “You know, I understand the guidelines for the meet,” which was at the time, it was only 12 months of hormone suppression. I said, “I know that, but what are the guidelines for the locker room?” And word for word, this is what he says: “Oh, we actually got around this by making the locker rooms unisex.”

So I’m thinking, okay, unisex. Okay. So this means that any man could have walked into our locker room. Any man. Not just a self identifying woman. Any man, a coach, an official, I guess a parent, if they could be on the pool deck.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: A fan seeking opportunity.

RILEY GAINES: And no one told us. That’s why I say it felt like…

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s a nice touch. I really like the fact they didn’t tell you. That’s real sweet of them.

RILEY GAINES: Yes. So that’s why I say it felt like betrayal. It felt like belittlement. Of course it’s awkward, it’s embarrassing, it’s uncomfortable. There are so many feelings.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. It didn’t feel like betrayal, by the way. It was, it 100% was betrayal. Absolutely at the deepest possible level. And not only was it betrayal, it was conniving, cowardly, sneaking, subtle camouflage betrayal. Because they didn’t have the goddamn good graces to come out and tell you.

RILEY GAINES: Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: You know, they sprung it on you, so to speak. And so that is absolutely 100% unforgivable. And then to do that under the guise of making the locker rooms unisex. That’s just cherry on the… that’s just icing on the cake, man. It takes a real, what would you say, conniving, malevolent, underground genius to come up with something that sneaky and pathetic.

RILEY GAINES: Absolutely.

San Francisco State University

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So. Oh, so. So that was quite the fun meet for all you female athletes. You got stomped real nicely on the competitive front. You got to have such good time in the locker room, too, with this six foot four, narcissistic wannabe who’s parading around not only his parts, but his virtue in this absolutely contemptible sense. And then, of course, if you object to it, you’re now the bad guy.

Let’s talk about that a little bit. You were at San Francisco State University, right? So that’s fun. Don’t go to universities because they’re pretty damn pathological. So now you went there and you were invited to go there, so you’re actually a guest, right? So in principle, they should treat you nicely since you’re a guest and you’re taking your time and energy to go talk to people who invited you. And why and what happened when you went there?

RILEY GAINES: I was invited by the Leadership Institute, which is an organization that tries to advance, really, they uphold the freedom of speech. They try to advance the conservative movement on college campuses. And so I spoke at a Turning Point event. I’ll kind of fill you in step by step of what this looked like.

I got there. I was supposed to meet the campus police department an hour and a half before the event. We were set to meet at this parking garage and then walk over to the event together. The police never showed up. And so I didn’t think much of it. You know, there was still an hour and a half before. So I figured I could just walk over and I’m sure they would make their way over. We would talk about an exit strategy if something were to happen, which I thought I knew what I was getting myself into.

I knew this was San Francisco. I knew this was a different environment, which almost excites me, not because I want controversy or because I’m looking for arguments, but because this is an opportunity to get in front of people who don’t agree with me. I was more hopeful that they would come with somewhat of an open mind, to which they simply didn’t. There were some civil…

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, that was definitely naive. That was definitely naive, but, you know, excusable and acceptable. While you were going to university campus, did you think you were a conservative?

RILEY GAINES: I… Sorry, did you say, did they think or do I think?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: No, no. Do you? Well, you know, you talk to Turning Point, that’s Charlie Kirk’s organization. It’s definitely a conservative organization. Did you have before all of this, did you consider yourself a political creature? Did you have a political home or an affiliation?

RILEY GAINES: I’ve always been politically in tune. I’ve always been pretty up to date and knowledgeable about the different issues we face and what that looks like. And typically my views do align conservative. That’s not to say every view. I’m not someone who is going to feel like I have to lean a certain way because that’s how I align. That’s not me.

But I like to be well versed. I like to be knowledgeable about what’s going on. And so I’ve always been in tune, shall we say. But by no means did I have any sort of political background or any sort of ulterior motive to where I wanted to be in the position that I’m in.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right, right. So you weren’t a political actor?

RILEY GAINES: Oh, goodness, no.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, okay.

RILEY GAINES: But always tried to be knowledgeable. Who’s where, who’s doing what. Always watch the news and things of that. But by no means did I feel equipped for the position I’m in. I still don’t. I’m learning. I’m learning every day.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, so back to SFU. You’re there, the police who are supposed to help you don’t show up. And so you’re looking forward to this event. And so let’s continue walking through the day’s events.

# The Mob Attack at San Francisco State

The Speech and Growing Tension

RILEY GAINES: So we walk over to the room. It’s in a building, it’s on the third floor. Very quickly the room fills up. It’s about 50/50 supporters versus protesters in the room. But they very quickly reached the maximum capacity to which the administrators who were present said, “We’re not allowing anyone else in the room.” And I was cool with that. I understood up at this point that there was some counter events going on, some protests around campus, one of which they organized this big sign-making event where the protesters, they got together and they all made signs and they all walked over together.

They orchestrated a sit-in to where they sat in the speech, which again, I understand that’s your right to protest. You have the right to organize. By no means do I think that I’m worthy of stopping that. That’s understandable as long as, again, it’s civil and somewhat respectful. Right.

So I was able to deliver my speech. I talked for probably 40 minutes. And let me reiterate what my speech was. I talked about what it takes to compete at that level, my background, how this is a lifelong journey. I talked about the competition. I talked about the locker room. I talked about the silencing piece, not just from the female athletes, but parents, administrators, medical professionals even. Nothing opinionated, really. My speech, there’s no opinions in it. It’s strictly my experience.

So I was able to deliver the speech. I answered questions afterwards to which I was met with lots of questions and oppositions which I find extremely easy to answer. Whether they take my answer, that’s on them, but they’re all easy to answer.

The Mob Enters

But it was only after the speech, I just had concluded it had been probably an hour. Everyone was standing up to leave. And as people were standing to leave, first of all, I should mention, while I was giving my speech, I could hear people outside the building. I could hear them chanting. And it was a large group of people, you could tell. I could hear them chanting things such as “trans women are women,” or other chants they could come up with.

But as I continued my speech, I could hear chants getting closer and closer to when I concluded. I could hear these people right outside the hallway to where one side of the hallway would yell, “Trans rights are under attack.” The other side of the hallway would yell back, “What do we do? We fight back.”

And so I could hear this, which was a bit unnerving just to know that they were right outside the door. But again, I didn’t really let it bother me. That’s not something that necessarily shook me at the time. But everyone stood up to leave. All of a sudden, a mob of people enter into the room. They rush into the room, they flicker the lights, they turn the lights off. And this is when they rush to the podium where I was and some other members of the Turning Point chapter were. And this is where we were met with assault and violence.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So they turned the lights off. So how dark is it in there when the lights are off?

RILEY GAINES: This period is a blur to me. It all happened so quickly. I felt so disoriented. I felt so jostled, I felt so confused. You know what is happening? I was told, granted, I never talked with the police before this, but the Turning Point members told me the police said they’re going to lock the doors at a certain time. There should be no problems, we’ll be good.

So I was under the impression that the doors would be locked, which they were not. So it all just happened so quickly. But yes, they turned the lights off and it was nighttime outside, so it’s pitch black in this room, which, of course, you have to imagine.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So it’s really dark. Oh, so that was a sneaky little—

RILEY GAINES: You have to imagine.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. The campus police are completely—of course it’s intentional. They know exactly what they’re doing. And the campus police are 100% unprepared for any real aggression.

RILEY GAINES: Absolutely.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. Yeah. And, I mean, to some degree, that’s on them, and it’s on the administration, but it’s also outside their normal course of training and activity. They have no idea what to do. So the idea that you’re going to be protected by campus police on campus, you can bloody well just forget about that. That’s not going to happen. Okay, so now it’s dark. And who is it that’s rushing you? Exactly. And how many of them are there?

Chaos in the Dark

RILEY GAINES: A mob of trans rights activists. Whether that be trans individuals themselves, whether that be people within this LGBTQ community, whether that be someone who just considers themselves an ally to this community. There were so many different—I don’t want to say combinations of a person, but there were men dressed as women and women dressed as men and everything in between.

So it was very, again, disorienting. It was like, who am I being met with? What is happening? So as the lights are flickering, the lights are on, they’re off. An officer approaches me very quickly, and she grabs me, and she’s wearing nothing that indicates she’s an officer. And again, I hadn’t met her. She never alerted me she was in the room. Her face is covered with a mask.

And she tells me very quickly, trying to pull me along as more people are filtering into the room. She says, “Come with me. I’m with the police.” And I didn’t believe her. Why would I believe her? Right. So I was very hesitant. I was reluctant, but truthfully, I had no other choice at this point because I was being—we were being rushed at the front of the room.

So we kind of navigate out of the room. We’re only met with more protesters once we get into the hallway. We couldn’t even come out of the door of the classroom because there were so many people filtering in that we had to go out this back door that led us to another classroom to get out that way, to which, when we got to the hallway, you look down to the staircase. There’s hundreds of people. You look down to the other staircase, of course, which is your exit path to get out of the building, and it’s hundreds of people.

So ultimately, we had no other choice than this officer led me to another room along that same hallway where I was barricaded for three hours, over three hours, which was interesting. It was—I mean, you—in those moments, in those hours, you fear for your life, hearing what these people are yelling, hearing the things they want to do to you. An array of things, all of which were violent and vengeful and hateful. And all of the words, of course, in the—

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Oh, let’s hear them. Let’s hear them. What did they tell you?

The Threats and Chants

RILEY GAINES: Some of the things they were yelling away. One of the terms they kept saying, using, which I think is so ironic, they kept saying, “We fight back.” And I thought about this, and I thought, the day before this event, the day before, the press secretary of the Biden administration in a press conference said the words, “Our trans community, they’re resilient, and they fight back.”

And so it just kept replaying in my head. Wow. They’re using verbatim, the same verbiage that Jean Pierre, whatever her name is, is using. They were yelling—

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: I see. So this is right from the top. That’s one of the things that really makes you wonder just exactly what country you’re in at a time like that, doesn’t it? When the people who are threatening you and barricading you in because you’re objecting to being—what would you say, subjected to an unfair competition by any reasonable standard. And now you’re being mobbed by half-demented lunatics directly who are directly acting out words that have come from the highest possible state or, well, federal authorities. Yeah, that’s real cute. There’s a betrayal for you. That’s a nice one.

RILEY GAINES: They were yelling things such as to the officers who were standing outside. They were saying, you know, “You’re only protecting her because she’s white.” They were yelling things, which is—they were yelling things such as, you know, “You shouldn’t have come here. You should have known what you were getting yourself into. You knew we would riot. Let her out of that room so we can handle her ourselves” at a point.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: What do you think would have happened? What do you think would have happened, just out of curiosity, or what were you imagining would happen if you would have—if they would have got access to you? It’s a scary sense. Like, realistic. Yeah, but we saw what happened to Posey Parker in New Zealand. I mean, she got mobbed quite nicely, and she had tomato soup doused on her. It never got to the point of, you know, permanent physical violence. But they would have—what do you think would have happened?

RILEY GAINES: I think just that. I think these people, based off of what they were saying, I mean, they were explicitly saying they wanted to hurt me.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah.

RILEY GAINES: I don’t know to what extent that looks like, but I’ll tell you, these people are—they were unhinged. They were relentless. And that’s something they kept saying, is “We’re not letting up.”

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Well, and they’re in a mob, too, which is always a bad thing. Right. Because even if each of those people was only 5% insane on their own, in a mob, they’re 100% insane. And so, yeah. And so how many people are in there barricaded in with you? And why were the barricades effective? Why didn’t they just, like, hammer down the doors and have at her?

Barricaded and Alone

RILEY GAINES: It was just in terms of people in the room other than the officers. It was just me in that room. There was a few officers who would filter in and out, but there was a few campus officers who stood outside the door who kept people from, I guess, tearing down the door.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: How did they treat you? How did the officers themselves treat you? What was their attitude towards you?

RILEY GAINES: Like, I was—I, of course, respect law enforcement and applaud them for their job because it’s a hard job and it’s a thankless job. But these officers were—I don’t know if pitiful is too harsh, but they were terrified. They were terrified. They were scared to be seen as anything other than an ally to this community.

There was one person in the mob who was African American, who I guess the officer just had to push around a little, into which this person yelled back, you know, “You’re only doing this because I’m African American. I’m going to sue.” And so these officers, they don’t want to put themselves in that position. They’ve seen how that’s gone in the past again to a much greater extreme. But they don’t want to deal with this. They want all hands off deck.

So it affected how they did their job. They were terrified of creating a safe exit strategy for me, using force by any means. I missed my flight home. To which I told them, you know, “I’m going to miss my flight. Is there something we can do? I want to go home. I don’t want to be stuck in San Francisco anymore.” To which, at this point, I began to get upset.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So you’re essentially, at that point, you’re essentially kidnapped.

The Extortion Attempt

RILEY GAINES: Well, it gets even better because inside this room, I could hear these protesters on the outside. And probably two hours or so in maybe two and a half, these protesters, the Dean of Students shows up. These protesters are trying to negotiate if I make it home safely. They’re saying, “If she wants to make it home, she has to pay us.” To which the Dean of Students is negotiating with them. They all claim pay.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Pay you what?

RILEY GAINES: Pay you meaning what I had to pay the mob. That’s what they were claiming.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: What did you have to pay them?

RILEY GAINES: A couple suggestions. One person suggested, you know, “If she wants to make it home safely, she has to pay us $10 each,” which is so silly.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: But it’s not silly. It’s kidnapping. It’s not silly. It’s horrible. It’s beyond reproach. Or beyond—it’s beyond, it’s beyond surreal. Oh, that’s amazing. And so the dean of this did—the Dean of Students didn’t take names and decide that those were some students that could be easily dispensed with and removed from the campus permanently. She decided she’d negotiate with him, play nice, because after all they were doing was kidnapping you in extortion and engaging in extortion with the threat of violence.

That’s all they were doing. Whereas you were, you know, complaining about the fact that you’d been subjected to an utterly unfair competition by officials that had betrayed you. That’s your crime. Their crime is kidnapping and extortion.

The Aftermath of Violence at San Francisco State

RILEY GAINES: And you’ll love this, because after this event, and I can talk a little bit about how I actually got out, but after this event, rather than releasing a statement saying we condemn violence or we have to uphold the freedom of speech, the Vice President of Student Affairs, her name is Dr. Jamila Moore, she sent out an email to their student body.

And this email, it says, “We applaud our brave students. They were in a situation where they were met with adversity. They were met with—they were put in a very hard circumstance listening to someone who spreads violence, and we applaud their bravery and their peaceful protest.” Sent an email to their university describing what I went through as peaceful. And so I read this.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

RILEY GAINES: And I’m so curious.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: You know, that’s a real backhanded compliment that you’re a sufficiently terrifying force to have oppressed, you know, 200 rampaging mobsters. You know, you really are quite the monster if you were able to manage that.

RILEY GAINES: Exactly.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: While you’re being barricaded in a room and essentially kidnapped and extorted. So, you know, that’s definitely a compliment.

RILEY GAINES: Totally.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Most backhanded possible way. Yeah.

RILEY GAINES: Yeah.

The Inversion of Victimhood

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, it’s quite something to watch this offer of an extended sense of victimization to the perpetrators themselves, you know, had to undergo all the trauma of having to listen to you describe how you were betrayed by the NCAA and by the Biden administration and by all the virtue signaling dimwits who thought that forcing you and your teammates to compete against a man was actually acceptable and morally justifiable.

You know, and so now we’re in a situation where your mere attempts to defend yourself are regarded as some variant of hate speech and provocation to violence. Yeah, that’s perfectly goddamn delightful. That’s a lovely way to think about it.

So, yeah, I don’t suppose you heard from anyone like Kamala Harris, for example, complimenting you on your bravery. I know she sent off a missive a while back to Dylan Mulvaney, you know, letting him know what a brave soul he was for doing whatever the hell it is that he’s doing. I don’t suppose you heard anything from anybody up in the Democratic authorities?

RILEY GAINES: I sure have.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: On your bravery.

RILEY GAINES: Absolutely.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. I bet you haven’t.

RILEY GAINES: No. Yeah, that is—I’m not holding my breath. That’s—

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: No, no, no, no, no. Okay, so let’s—look, we should wrap this up. We’ve been going for about 90 minutes. That’s a lovely story to conclude with.

And so, wow. So one final question perhaps, and maybe there’s something else you want to add as well. That’s quite the experience you went through at SFU. I experienced something like that at Queen’s University. We were barricaded into a—I had 500 people in there with me, but the mob came and barricaded the doors and they were pounding on the windows, which they eventually broke. And, you know, it was quite the mob scene.

And so, you know, yeah, yeah. So I’m familiar with that kind of thing. Although you were outnumbered a lot worse than I was, let’s say. So that’s another existential shock to go through something like that and to see just exactly how corrupt these bloody institutions have become and how eager they might be to throw you to the wolves.

And so, you know, you’ve already been through your fair share of inverting experiences, let’s say. What did this do to you?

RILEY GAINES: It was interesting.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: What conclusions have you drawn?

Finding Strength in Opposition

RILEY GAINES: At first, naturally, this almost deters you, right? I mean, when you’re met with this kind of force, it’s terrifying. Again, based off of what they were yelling, how they orchestrated all this, how the officers did nothing, how the administration applauded it, it just makes you feel as if you’re doing something wrong.

But after, of course, the next day, I step away from the situation. I’m thinking to myself on my flight back home—eventually I made my flight back home—and it just occurred to me, they have nothing else to dissuade from my argument other than reacting that way. They don’t have truth, they don’t have science, they don’t have any logical points, they don’t have reasoning. They don’t have anything that would allow them to have an argument that’s substantial enough to go back and forth with mine. So that’s why they react the way they do.

So then it hit me. This can’t be something that silences me. If they act this way, it only means you’re getting closer. You’re right over the target. That being said, it’s not going to deter me. It’s only going to encourage me to continue. I have now increased my security. So I guess I can thank them for that.

And I can thank them for—truthfully, I think this whole situation backfired on them because again, while this shouldn’t be a political issue, it’s inevitable that it is. And this has made even a lot of liberals, a lot of people who typically lean left, really open their eyes to what the left—again, I hate this is political, but it is—what the left is really doing here. This is how they react when they simply don’t agree with someone. This is what they’re willing to do.

And so it’s opened a lot of eyes. It’s only increased my social media following. It’s only increased my platform to continue sharing my message, which—that’s never—I never want to advance myself personally again. It’s not about me. It’s not about my social media following. It’s about getting the message out to whoever will listen, whoever wants to hear. And I’m willing to talk.

Terms of Peace: What Needs to Change

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: What do you want? If you could have what you wanted, let’s talk about the NCAA. Let’s talk about these sports organizations. Like, what are your terms of peace? What do you think should be done?

RILEY GAINES: Of course I want change. What I’ve been doing this past year is traveling state to state, testifying at different state legislatures. I’m going back to Texas on Monday to testify, testifying in front of Congress in just a few weeks. So whether that be the state level, the federal level, upholding Title IX, that’s a big ordeal right now, doing everything in my power to combat this movement. So I’m hopeful there.

In regards to sports-specific governing bodies, it’s interesting because you have many sports going many different ways. Swimming, track and field, they’ve taken a good approach. But what about rowing and FIFA and other sports? They’ve taken the total opposite. Mixed martial arts, fighting, they’ve taken the total opposite approach.

And so while I might not have much expertise in cycling or disc golf or whatever that might look like, I still want to do everything I can to fight for those girls and women. Again, they might not have the confidence, they might not have the personal testimony I have. They might not have the security to speak up. So doing what I can for them.

So ultimately, change is what I want to enact. No girl should have to go through what we went through, regardless of what level, regardless of what age, regardless of what sport.

Two, I think there needs to be a sense of accountability, whether that be from universities, whether that be from administrations, whether that be from the government. There needs to be a sense of accountability of how this is harmful to women. Because the people who are in opposition of this right now, of protecting women’s sports—specifically, really women in general, but we’re talking about women’s sports—these people who are doing everything in their power to advocate for male trans inclusion in these spaces, they’re not acknowledging how this is hurting women and therefore it’s overall harmful.

I believe there needs to be a sense of acknowledgment from all of those different entities that I listed to understand why this is harmful to women. So that’s what I’ve been trying to communicate to anyone and everyone who will listen.

Holding the Line Without Apology

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yep. Well, kind of looks to me like you’re doing it with a fair degree of effectiveness. And so, you know, congratulations on that front. I’m sure you’ve got no shortage of surreal adventures in front of you over the next while. Because, you know, this is a crazy situation that you found yourself in, and you certainly saw that at San Francisco State.

You know, to be mobbed like that and then to have the administration feel sorry for the mobbers and to acclaim their virtue for, you know, having the courage to stand up to such a reprehensible, powerful individual as you. It’s quite the bloody charade. And, you know, it’s very much emblematic of what’s going on in the universities. They have many sins on their conscience, that’s for sure, and this is one of them.

And this whole spectacle is so surreal that it’s, you know, it’s a form of black comedy and it’s quite something to be in the midst of that maelstrom. But you seem to be holding your head up quite nicely. And if you’re careful and you’ve been smart enough not to apologize or backtrack, and that’s a big deal.

So tell the people that you’re in touch with, you know, that especially Leah Thomas’s teammates, that I’d be more than happy to talk to them if they’d like to share with me exactly what has happened.

RILEY GAINES: That’d be great.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Especially with regards to the administrators of the athletic events and the university administrators especially, I’d really like to talk to them about how it was that they got finagled into taking mandatory ethical retraining programs as a way of redressing their complaints. Because that is so inexcusable that it’s, well, it’s a whole new level of miraculous and malevolent stupidity.

Right. “Oh, you don’t have a problem. You’re actually mentally ill. And if you were just a little bit more compassionate, you wouldn’t mind sharing your locker room with a demented male narcissist.” Absolutely. Right, right, right. So we could have a fun conversation about that. So you can let them know.

RILEY GAINES: I will, I will. They’ll love that.

Closing Thoughts

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: All right. All right. Okay. So, Riley, well, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today. That was quite fascinating. And, you know, congratulations on your hard-won resilience. It seems to—you seem—it seems to—all that dedication seems to have paid off in a very strange way. And God only knows where that’ll lead.

And to everyone watching and listening on YouTube, thanks for your time and attention to the Daily Wire Plus people for facilitating this conversation. Thank you to the film crew here in Porto, Portugal. Thank you for making this so smooth and making it work.

And we’re going to—I’m going to continue to talk to Riley for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform side of things behind the paywall. If any of you who are listening are inclined to throw a little support in their direction, you might want to consider doing that because we are in something approximating pretty deep cultural war. And you might want to, you know, do what you can to support those people who are, well, let’s say, who are supporting the proposition that women shouldn’t compete against giant men in their own sports, just for starters.

So, all right, Riley, good to meet you.

RILEY GAINES: And yes, you too.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Meet again here right away. Okay. Hello, everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on DailyWire+.com.

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