Swimmer Riley Gaines reveals her trans competitor Lia Thomas is so well-endowed that she had to ‘refrain from looking’ at her crotch in the locker room of fateful Atlanta race meet
The swimmer and women’s sports advocate Riley Gaines has revealed that her trans competitor Lia Thomas is so well-endowed that she had to ‘refrain from looking’ at her crotch in the locker room they shared at a race meet.
In a tell-all podcast with Bill Maher that’s set to drop on Sunday, Gaines repeatedly declines to state the length of Thomas’ appendage, saying only that it’s in proportion to the frame of a ‘6-foot-4 male.’
Since tying against Thomas in the 2022 NCAA Championships, Gaines has said allowing a biological male to compete against the women athletes was unfair, and how changing alongside her in the locker room was awkward.
‘That was a situation I tried to refrain from looking at entirely,’ Gaines says in the Club Random podcast, a transcript of which DailyMail.com received ahead of its release.
Riley Gaines sat down with Bill Maher for his Club Random podcast, and bared all about her locker room experiences
The trans athlete Lia Thomas has an appendage that is in proportion to the frame of a ‘6-foot-4 male,’ says Gaines
‘We can’t unsee it. Being in that space with a male, it’s like a bad car wreck.’
Maher repeatedly asks Gaines to say more about the physique of Thomas, who joined the University of Pennsylvania women’s swim team after competing for three years on the men’s squad.
‘I was trying to run away from this question,’ Gaines replies.
‘6-foot-4 male. Use your imagination,’ she adds.
Gaines has become one of America’s staunchest voices against allowing biological males to compete against women, saying their greater strength and stamina renders races unfair and even pointless.
It’s part of a bigger debate about whether trans women should be allowed to join women’s sports teams, use women’s bathrooms, or even spend prison sentences in women’s lockups.
Gaines and other critics say it’s neither safe nor fair, and serves to ‘erase’ women.
‘I think even using the term trans woman is giving Thomas some of our language as women,’ she says in the podcast.
‘I think trans woman is a subset of male. I do not believe trans women are women.’
At the March 2022 championship in Atlanta, Thomas won the women’s 500-yard freestyle, becoming the first trans woman to claim a national title in swimming and becoming a symbol of trans athletes — stirring both opposition and support.
Last year, Lia Thomas became the first trans woman to win an NCAA swimming title, beating off biological women like Riley Gaines
Video.
Gaines says trans Tiktoker Dylan Mulvaney is motivated by ‘clicks and likes’
Trans rights activists say trans women are real women, that they need to be included in sports, and that they don’t have an advantage over biological women because they suffer so much discrimination.
In the same episode, Gaines discusses other views about gender, including how men have become less masculine in recent decades, and on the motivations driving trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
Mulvaney has attracted 10.7 million followers to her TikTok series 365 Days of Girlhood, which charts her transition from a bubbly young gay man to a ‘girl,’ while promoting cosmetics, clothes, and other products.
‘Dylan Mulvaney is doing this for clicks and likes,’ says Gaines.
Gaines, who comes from Tennessee and swam for the University of Kentucky team, also says US society needs ‘more masculine men’ and praises the combatants in the second world war.
‘That’s the last time we had strong men,’ she says.
‘Think about this, 1940s, World War II. Men lied about their age to get in to enlist. Now, in 2023, we have men lying about their s*x to get into women’s sports or women’s prisons or domestic shelters or sororities or bathrooms, locker rooms.’
She blames society for redefining ‘masculinity as toxic and bad and undesirable.’
‘We need men to protect and provide,’ adds Gaines, who is married to Louis Barker.
‘I want a man to provide for me.’