TWIBS: The Grey Lady Loves Riley Gaines
The New York Times profiled professional bigot Riley Gaines with a reprehensibly soft touch, and failed to acknowledge their own role in perpetuating hatred of trans people.
Humor by Aly Gibbs
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s oldest column! Every Friday, Aly Gibbs digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
It is, my friends, an absolutely banner day at the tail end of a miserable week. I don’t need to tell you why; suffice to say, things have been exceptionally difficult, and the situation may deteriorate… but that’s an evergreen statement, isn’t it? Yet we must rejoice, for today I will return to an Assigned Media standard, one of my oldest and most treasured bits to date: making fun of Riley Gaines.
We’ve been making fun of Riley Gaines for years now. We’ve discussed Gaines’ personal fragility, her myriad personal shortcomings, and her penchant for backing losers. Those are just a few selections from more than a dozen articles about Gaines, not to mention the countless times she’s simply been mentioned in relevant stories where she is not the headliner. You could be forgiven for thinking we’re obsessed… but the reason we’ve spent so much time and energy covering Gaines is self-evident: She’s a major figure in the greatest conservative grift of the era, anti-trans activism.
Which is why it’s both deeply annoying and utterly unsurprising that, on Wednesday, the shameless two-bit rag somehow known as the paper of record spotlighted Gaines in a sickeningly supportive, nearly 3,000 word long profile.
Unsurprising because, of course, The New York Times has been the tip of the spear for transphobic journalism for years now. As Erin Reed said earlier this year, “In the fight for transgender rights, few institutions have been more complicit in fueling the backlash than The New York Times.” Indeed, as Reed points out, NYT was cited no less than seven times to support the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Skrmetti that legitimized state bans on necessary, life saving healthcare for transgender youth across America.
The profile’s author, Ruth Graham, covers “religion, faith and values” for NYT. She wrote for Slate Magazine starting in 2010, taking on a more regular contributory role starting in 2015, then departed in 2020 to write for NYT. She attended Wheaton College, a private Evangelical university in Illinois, and says she’s “covered religion and faith for over a decade,” which probably explains that piece she wrote for Slate providing a voice and platform for people who reject the notion of bodily autonomy for women.
Graham’s profile of Gaines for NYT starts by recapping the fateful fifth place tie that propelled the mid UKY swimmer to fame and fortune. She is described as “a roving speaker, indignant influencer and canny provocateur,” said to have stolen the spotlight from Lia Thomas (who has largely receded from public view, likely because of harassment on a national level), though Graham never mentions Gaines’ many blatant lies about the trans woman she exploited to enrich herself. Graham references a NYT poll that suggests “79 percent of Americans oppose [transgender women playing women’s sports],” but says nothing of NYT’s consistent and meaningful contributions to the climate of transphobia and hatred currently dominating the American news cycle.
What a surprise.
Graham uncritically publishes Gaines’ perfectly crafted recollection of the March 2022 NCAA Championships, eschewing any notion of journalistic integrity by glossing over the fact that her story now directly contradicts statements she gave in the days after the competition.
She does, however, illuminate one piece of the puzzle that is failed dental student Riley Gaines: her long-term goals.
“If people accept the premise that transgender women do not belong in women’s sports, then they have conceded that transgender women are not fully, truly women,” she says Gaines believes. “As she sees it, more sweeping restrictions of transgender people flow from there … Her longer-term goals include the restriction of transgender medical treatments for adolescents, and ultimately the legal and cultural dismantling of the belief that transgender people exist.”
“The gender ideology movement is a house of cards, and I believe it’s lying on that sports issue,” Gaines told her. “This will be the card that makes all of it crumble.”
Graham makes mention of having difficulty scheduling Gaines for an interview, due in part to just how busy the anti-trans activist is. This begs the question: Why platform her at all? The answer is obvious to anybody who has kept up with NYT’s slanted coverage on transgender Americans, of course. It’s the same reason, I suspect, that Lia Thomas couldn’t be reached for comments on Gaines’ profile: NYT, and anybody who works for them, has lost the trust and respect of trans people across the world.
According to Graham, Gaines’ mother says her daughter “hated losing more than she loved to win.”
The profile characterizes Gaines as “a deeply competitive person,” a note that unknowingly strikes at the heart of this particular issue: Riley Gaines traded competitive sports for competitive bigotry. That angry, mean-spirited bottle blonde was never going to become a dentist, because she was always destined to be an asshole.
Aly Gibbs (She/They), formerly Alyssa Steinsiek, is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
