Conservative activist and former collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines spoke at Ohio State, discussing topics such as transgender people in sports and freedom of speech. Credit: Davis Beatty | Lantern Reporter
Ohio State’s chapter of Turning Point USA hosted Riley Gaines — a prominent former collegiate swimmer known for advocating against transgender women’s participation in women’s sports — at a campus event Tuesday.
The event, titled “The Fight is Far from Over,” attracted more than 100 attendees who gathered in the Ohio Union’s U.S. Bank Conference Theater to hear Gaines speak on various topics, including transgender women’s place in sports, freedom of speech and more.
Concurrently, a protest comprising roughly 35 students and Ohio State community members was held on the South Oval.
Turning Point USA is an organization that advocates to “restore traditional American values like patriotism, respect for life, liberty, family, and fiscal responsibility,” according to its website.
Prior to the event, Danny Philip, a fourth-year in finance and president of the university’s chapter of TPUSA, said in an email Gaines “brings a message that deeply resonates with female athletes both at [Ohio State] and across the country.”
“We aim for the audience to gain insight from the perspective of a former top NCAA athlete who faced unique challenges that previous generations of female athletes never had to contend with,” Philip said.
Opening remarks
Gaines opened the event at 7 p.m. by recounting an experience speaking at San Francisco State University in 2023, during which she said she was “ambushed” and “barricaded” into the room she was presenting in by demonstrators who demanded a ransom pay for her release.
According to an April 7, 2023, article from SFSU’s student publication, Golden Gate Xpress, Gaines was “forced to take shelter” in an on-campus building after protesters entered the room of the event, at which point Gaines left the campus with a full police escort.
The university police later stated they found no evidence of crimes committed at the event, according to a Feb. 22, 2024, Golden Gate Xpress article.
The vice president of student affairs at SFSU sent a university-wide email the next day, stating she was “proud of [their] brave students for handling Riley Gaines in the manner that they did,” Gaines said at Tuesday’s event.
According to an April 8, 2023, X post from a TPUSA regional manager, SFSU’s Vice President of Student Affairs Jamillah Moore’s university-wide email neither condemned nor praised students’ potentially violent actions toward Gaines.
“Thank you to our students who participated peacefully in Thursday evening’s event,” Moore said in the email. “It took tremendous bravery to stand in a challenging space. I am proud of the moments where we listened and asked insightful questions. I am also proud of the moments when our students demonstrated the value of free speech and the right to protest peacefully. These issues do not go away, and these values are very much at our core.”
Gaines said in contrast to her experience at San Francisco State, she has felt welcomed and uplifted at Ohio State.
“The support has just been overwhelming — certainly more support and encouragement than I had not too long ago in San Francisco,” Gaines said.
Event details
Following her opening remarks, Gaines voiced her support for two of President Donald Trump’s recent executive orders: “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” issued Feb. 5, and “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,“ issued Jan. 20.
Subsequently, Gaines discussed her collegiate swimming career, particularly her interactions with transgender athlete Lia Thomas, who swam for the University of Pennsylvania.
As a Division I swimmer for the University of Kentucky, Gaines said she competed against Thomas multiple times, though she specifically spoke about the NCAA National Championship meet during the 2021-22 season.
In the 200-yard freestyle race between Thomas, Gaines and other swimmers, Gaines said she and Thomas finished within a “hundredth of a second” of each other. She said even though they tied, the officials deemed Thomas the winner.
According to the Associated Press, Gaines and Thomas officially tied for fifth place in the 200-yard freestyle race, which sparked national controversy after Thomas was handed the fifth-place trophy over Gaines. Thomas separately went on to win the 500-yard freestyle race — in which Gaines did not participate — making Thomas the first transgender woman to win an NCAA swimming championship.
“It wasn’t until this official reduced everything we’d worked our entire lives for down to a photo op to validate the feelings and the identity of a man at the expense of our own — that’s when I just wasn’t willing to wait for someone else,” Gaines said.
Following the 2022 national championships, Gaines was one of more than a dozen college athletes who filed a lawsuit against the NCAA, “accusing it of violating their Title IX rights by allowing transgender woman [Thomas] to compete,” according to the Associated Press.
The lawsuit “details the shock Gaines and other swimmers felt when they learned they would have to share a locker room with Thomas at the championships in Atlanta,” according to the Associated Press.
Gaines said the decision to include a transgender athlete in the competition was unfair to female athletes, recalling her personal experiences in the locker room.
Though Gaines said locker rooms “aren’t necessarily a comfortable space” in general, she said growing up as a swimmer helped her “become comfortable being vulnerable in that environment.”
Gaines said she felt her “vulnerability [was] stripped” from her while using the same locker room as a transgender woman.
“A separate outside professional who sat us down — my team — and they said, ‘Look, girls, I understand wanting to feel comfortable in an intimate space,’ talking specifically about the locker room,” Gaines said. “‘But what it sounds like you’re advocating for is segregation,’” Gaines said.
Fellow female athletes felt afraid to speak up to school administrators regarding locker room privacy, Gaines said.
“That’s why so few were willing to put their name and their face to this [issue], not because they agreed, not because they thought it was fair, or righteous, or just, or moral or fair treatment of women by any means,” Gaines said. “No, it’s because they were understandably terrified, and that was the universal experience.”
Q&A
Gaines then opened the floor for questions and comments. Topics included threats made to a transgender audience member after a previous TPUSA event and alleged discrepancies of funding between genders in different college sports.
Tay Thibodeaux, a first-year in atmospheric sciences, said he attended the Oct. 16, 2024, TPUSA event featuring Vivek Ramaswamy and was “approached by three separate people who told [him] to kill [himself]” following the event.
Thibodeaux asked Gaines how she can say she has “no hate in [her] heart” when speaking in front of an audience who have said “extremely hateful things to [him] personally.”
“I just want to show people like, hey, not everyone is here backing down,” Thibodeaux said in an interview with The Lantern. “I’m not going to hide, I’m not going to detransition, I’m not going to compromise on these things because this is who I am.”
Gaines said the comments Thibodeaux has heard from previous event attendees are “detestable” and “not a stand that [she] has taken.” She then said those comments were “similar to the treatment” she received on a “daily basis in tenfold from the other side.”
“I’m seldom [able] to find those on the other side who have welcomed me, but I imagine there are many people in this room who would love to be your friend,” Gaines said.
Directly after this statement, Gaines pointed out Thibodeaux’s visible reaction and said “This almost disdain comes from both sides.” She also said he could find a “welcoming crowd if [he] allowed [himself] to.”
Thibodeaux replied by saying he would go outside to join his “crazy trans brothers and sisters dancing in the Oval,” referencing the coinciding protest against the event on the South Oval.
“I do feel like there is a very big difference between having respectful discussion and then refusing to respect someone by just calling them what they wanted to be called; calling their name, their pronouns, things as simple as that.” Thibodeaux said in an interview with The Lantern. “I almost feel like, if you’re not respecting the individual, all the other things that you say kind of just lose their value.”
Kaden Gordon, a third-year in mechanical engineering, asked Gaines how men’s club sports can feel better supported when he said more resources are going toward female sports at the NCAA level. As an athlete on the men’s club rowing team, Gordon said he feels the resources allocated to his team are less than what the women’s team receives.
Gaines responded that there were sports programs being cut from other universities, such as California Polytechnic State University, which cut both their men’s and women’s swim teams, according to Associated Press.
She then suggested Gordon should encourage more people to get involved on his team because there is “strength in numbers.”
After an hour and a half of discussion, Gaines thanked the audience for attending and said it was a good idea to compete against the protesters outside, after an audience member commented about racing them.
“Although it might defeat my whole argument because even though those [are] men out there, I think I could beat them,” Gaines said.
