This story was produced in partnership with the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast. Watch the accompanying episode below or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
At a White House ceremony last February, before President Donald Trump signed an executive order to defund schools if they permit transgender girls to play girls’ sports, he turned and looked over his shoulder. Behind him stood former college swimmer Riley Gaines, wearing suffragette white in a crowd of young female athletes and conservative activists. “You’ve been waiting a long time for this,” Trump told the 24-year-old.
Almost three years, to be exact. Since tying for fifth place in a March 2022 championship race against transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, Gaines has used the story of their matchup to leap to the vanguard of the anti-trans movement, campaigning not just to ban trans women from women’s sports, but to end public acceptance of transgender people.
Gaines joined the political fray just as 14 states had already enacted restrictions on trans athletes and four more were on the verge of doing the same. With backing from GOP donors like the Amway billionaire DeVos family, she has crisscrossed the country with a simple message: Women’s sports need “saving” from “men”—that is, transgender girls and women.
No matter that the NCAA president said in 2024 that less than 0.002 percent of college athletes at the time were openly transgender (the percentage of Olympians is about the same). Gaines and her allies argue that trans athletes are stealing opportunities from every woman and girl who competes with them. Alongside other athletes, she filed a federal lawsuit against the NCAA seeking to ban trans girls from girls’ school sports nationwide, arguing that trans-inclusive policies are a form of discrimination against women.
“She’s a perfect message,” says Ronnee Schreiber, a political science professor at San Diego State University who studies women in the conservative movement. Even voters who generally support transgender people, Schreiber adds, are “still a little anxious about the trans athlete thing.”
Indeed, before Gaines arrived on the scene, right-wing politicos had sought for years to draw attention to transgender women in sports—a poll-tested wedge issue to stoke anti-trans outrage among voters across the political spectrum. Lia Thomas, tall and unapologetic, was the villain they’d been waiting for, and Gaines—feminine, poised, outspoken—the ideal victim. Within months of her race against Thomas, Trump was summoning Gaines onstage at CPAC: “Where’s our beautiful, great swimmer?”
Thanks in large part to Gaines, trans athletes became the reddest of red meat issues during the 2024 presidential election, with the Trump campaign pouring money into a brutally effective attack ad declaring, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” During the executive order signing ceremony, Trump declared, “This was one of the big reasons that we all won.” He added later, “I want to thank Riley. She really has been in the forefront.”
Interviews with former teammates and competitors at the fateful 2022 championship, as well as a review of Gaines’ public statements, legal documents, nonprofit filings, and other records, reveal how she transformed herself from captain of a deeply troubled swim team to one of the leading conservative activists of her generation.
Today, Gaines serves as a real-life Regina George figure in the MAGA universe, with her online dustups receiving celebrity coverage in the right-wing press. A Fox News darling and social media bomb-thrower affiliated with some of the country’s most influential right-wing advocacy groups, she broadcasts the pictures and names of trans middle and high schoolers to her 1.6 million followers on X, encouraging younger athletes to boycott and shun trans competitors. For her, this cause is “spiritual warfare.”
Meanwhile, she’s cashing in: Between recording sessions for her podcast, Gaines for Girls, she reps an anti-trans clothing line and slings a student debt refinancing plan, herbal supplements, and ivermectin. In 2024, she released a children’s book and a memoir. Her speaking fees run as high as $25,000.
By multiple measures, Gaines and her allies have largely prevailed in their original quest to rid women’s sports of trans athletes. Twenty-nine states have now banned trans girls and women from participating on the school sports teams that match their gender identity (though some of those bans are blocked as they work their way through the courts). And after Trump’s executive order, the NCAA and the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee both changed their policies to categorically exclude trans women.
But Gaines, who did not respond to interview requests and questions for this story, shows no signs of stopping. After all, sports is just a stepping stone to a more sweeping goal.
“The gender ideology movement is a house of cards, and I believe it’s lying on that sports issue,” she told the New York Times last August. “This will be the card that makes all of it crumble.”
Riley Gaines opens her 2024 memoir, Swimming Against the Current, with a formative experience from her childhood. When she was 8, she writes, her father, Brad, led her to the edge of an outdoor pool in the middle of winter and told her to jump in. “No shaking or chattering,” he commanded. She needed to learn “mental toughness.”
As she grew up in a conservative Christian family in the suburbs of Nashville, the daughter of two college athletes, her father’s lesson served her well. Especially when she was recruited to swim at the University of Kentucky, a Division I school with a women’s swim team rising in the national rankings under a mercurial head coach, Lars Jorgensen.
Gaines was a repeat Tennessee state champion and had qualified for the Olympic trials at age 15. Despite such accomplishments, during her recruiting trip to campus, Jorgensen told her she was “okay” and “walk-on material,” she’d later tell a local sports reporter. She committed to UK anyway. “You could look at his comments as hurtful and mean, but I know it was just tough love,” she said. “He would trash talk you, but that was part of what makes this special for me.”
During her first year, she writes, Jorgensen often called her a LOFT—for “lack of fucking talent.” But she was not offended. “He didn’t actually think I was a LOFT,” she explains in her book. “This was just his way of seeing how we liked to be motivated.”
Jorgensen “definitely had this cult of persona around him,” recalls Trinity Ward, a teammate one year behind Gaines. “When he was singing your praises, at least for me, it felt like you were on top of the world. And when it felt like you were disappointing him, that felt horrible.”
Ward, as well as two more of Gaines’ teammates—who requested anonymity to avoid backlash from Gaines’ fans and followers—are speaking publicly for the first time. They say Jorgensen often screamed at swimmers, told them they weren’t worth coaching, and tried to force them to swim when sick or injured. According to a 2023 investigation by UK’s athletic compliance office obtained through a public records request, swimmers reported that “voluntary” practices weren’t really optional and that Jorgensen imposed grueling extra swims for transgressions. “We had a punishment where we had to swim with our snorkels for two hours and we weren’t allowed to stop,” one of Gaines’ teammates remembers. The NCAA eventually suspended Jorgensen for violating limits on practice hours.
“It’s been really weird to see [her] completely transform. If you told me four years ago that Riley Gaines was going to be the spokesperson for the anti-trans movement, be speaking with Trump at CPAC, I’d be like, ‘You’re crazy.’”
Swimmers say Jorgensen mocked teammates’ weight and pressured them to lower their body fat percentage to extremes. “Lars is the biggest reason that an alarming number of the Women’s Swim Team suffers from Eating Disorders,” one former swimmer wrote to UK officials. “The damage from Lars’ words and remarks about female bodies last long beyond the four years of collegiate swimming.”
“It was hard to know until we got out of it that he was crossing the line,” Ward says. Teammates who complained were treated as “not tough enough,” one of the anonymous teammates adds. “They didn’t have what it takes to be a D1 athlete.”
Ward maintained a friendship with Gaines, who she says was generous with her car and could party hard. Even when Ward, who is queer, started dating a woman, Gaines was “friendly and respectful.” Once, as they drove together to a team retreat, they chatted about their respective experiences of being raised in religious conservative families. It was the summer of 2021, Trump had recently left office, and Ward remembers Gaines saying she didn’t like Trump. “It’s been really weird to see [her] completely transform,” Ward says now. “If you told me four years ago that Riley Gaines was going to be the spokesperson for the anti-trans movement, be speaking with Trump at CPAC, I’d be like, ‘You’re crazy.’” Gaines, who was seen as one of Jorgensen’s favorites, seemed to weather the pressure on the team better than most. “I never saw Riley cry because of something Lars said,” Ward recalls. “I never saw her have like a mental breakdown or show that any of this was getting to her.” In her book, Gaines writes that, despite his “utter savagery,” Jorgensen “became, and still is, one of my best friends.”
Jorgensen wasn’t the only swim coach creating a toxic environment. In the fall of 2019, Gaines’ sophomore year, the university started looking into the behavior of one of their assistant coaches, Laurence “Chip” Kline, based on complaints from swimmers who had graduated. “We all felt uncomfortable about Chip,” one of Gaines’ anonymous teammates remembers. According to records from the ensuing investigation, Kline allegedly touched a swimmer’s leg under her towel, forced her to hug him before letting her enter the team room, and made sexual comments about team members, comparing their bodies to meat and saying, “With a butt like that she ought to be a good swimmer.” The school eventually determined that Kline violated its harassment policy and suspended him, then declined to renew his contract; it also suspended Jorgensen for six days for failing to report what he knew about Kline’s conduct. (Kline declined to comment.)
The problems on the UK team reflect widespread issues in women’s athletics. One in 5 NCAA athletes experience some form of abusive supervision by coaches, according to a recent study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Sexual misconduct is distressingly common: A 2021 World Players Association survey of female professional athletes worldwide found that 1 in 5 had experienced sexual abuse as children in connection with sports. And coaches are the most common perpetrators of unwanted sexual contact, according to a survey by the US Center for SafeSport, a nonprofit authorized by Congress to investigate and prevent abuse and misconduct.
Still, despite everything, the UK team was getting faster. In 2021, they won the prestigious Southeastern Conference Championships for the first time in the school’s history. At the NCAA national championship that year, Gaines came in seventh in the 200 freestyle and was crowned an All-American. “As soon as I placed seventh in the country my junior year, I immediately made it my goal to win a national title my senior year,” she writes in her memoir. “It was all I could think about.”
But by the next year’s NCAA championship, the world of swimming had become fixated on Lia Thomas. The transgender competitor at the University of Pennsylvania had been breaking pool, school, and conference records since that fall, generating a flood of news coverage that began in right-wing media—Fox aired 32 segments about her in six weeks—and spread to virtually every major news outlet.
Thomas had competed on the men’s team at Penn for three years, winning three silver medals at the 2019 Ivy League Championships. She’d come out as transgender to her family and a friend after her first year of college but delayed her medical transition until after she completed her sophomore season. “I did HRT [hormone replacement therapy] knowing and accepting I might not swim again,” she told Sports Illustrated.
But when she returned to school after taking a year off during the Covid pandemic, she was eligible for the women’s team under NCAA policy, which at the time allowed transgender women to compete after 12 months of testosterone suppression. There was just one problem: She was winning. Her race times, though slower than before her transition, qualified her among the country’s best female swimmers that season.
The science around trans women athletes is sparse and extremely contested. Though it’s well established that their athletic performance declines after hormone therapy, the data varies on how much. A 2024 International Olympic Committee–funded study of 23 transgender women athletes found that participants on hormone therapy tended to have greater handgrip strength compared to cis women, but lower jumping height and aerobic capacity. A pair of studies analyzing military fitness test data from the Air Force in 2020 and 2023 found that after two and four years of hormone therapy, respectively, trans women’s performance was comparable to that of cis women on two out of three measures.
Thomas declined an interview request, but, in a radio interview, said she returned to swimming after Covid feeling “confident and happy in my body”—a stark contrast from the depression and hopelessness she’d experienced the previous season. “I was way, way weaker. My muscle mass had decreased so much, and I had way less endurance, but I could put my full energy into swimming again because I wasn’t putting most of it into dissociating just so I could get through the day.”
By the start of the 2022 NCAA Division I women’s swimming championships, held at Georgia Tech’s aquatic center in Atlanta, the attention on her had become a frenzy. Protesters held signs outside the facility. Leading up to the championships, the UK swimmers had been obsessing over Thomas, says one of Gaines’ anonymous teammates: “I do remember, as we were training for NCAAs, people being like, ‘Oh my gosh, is she gonna be there? Is she gonna compete? Is she gonna be in our locker room? I’m gonna look at her when we’re in our locker room,’ stuff like that,” she says. “[Gaines] and Lars and some of the other coaches would just talk about how disgusting it was, and unfair, and they just couldn’t believe it was happening.”
When Thomas won the 500 freestyle, receiving the national title—albeit with a relatively slow time for that race—the swimmers reacted with despair, the teammate says. “I think there was this idea in everyone’s heads that, ‘She won the 500, she’s about to take them all,’” she recalls. “People were acting insane over this, like she’d done this jaw-dropping, Katie Ledecky–rivaling time, and that’s just not what happened.”
The next day, members of the UK team stood on the pool deck to cheer as Gaines lined up for the 200 freestyle. It was one of the team’s best shots at an NCAA title. But when the results appeared on the scoreboard, Gaines and Thomas had tied for fifth, at 1:43.40—a full 2.28 seconds slower than the first-place finisher.
Seeing the numbers appear, the teammate felt a sense of dread. “I remember looking over at [another member of the UK team],” she says, “and we were like, ‘Fuck, this isn’t good.’”
The story of what happened next appeared five days later in the conservative Daily Wire. After tying her race, Gaines and the other swimmers went behind a curtain, preparing to take the podium. There, an NCAA official informed her that he had already given the fifth-place trophy to Thomas, Gaines recounted to the reporter. Her own fifth-place trophy would come in the mail. In the meantime, she could pose with the sixth-place trophy.
Gaines was indignant. “I told the guy, ‘I don’t think that’s right, and I don’t think that’s fair,’” she said. But the official insisted. “The more I thought about it, the more it fired me up,” she remembered. “Who are we trying to protect here?”
Sharing the podium with Thomas, “aghast that no one was standing up for female swimmers,” changed the trajectory of Gaines’ life, she writes in her memoir. “I decided I was no longer willing to cower and lie.” In an interview years later, she’d say, “I thought of it as a tragedy. I thought to myself, no one, no girl, no woman should ever have to face” that “level of humiliation.”
The Daily Wire article catapulted her into the feverish world of right-wing media. On March 28, 10 days after her race with Thomas, she appeared on the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show; on April 1, Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn hosted Gaines on her podcast; on April 6 she was a guest on Tucker Carlson Tonight, where Carlson lauded her for “bravery.” “I’m just fortunate enough to where I have such an amazing support system at the University of Kentucky, whether that be from the athletic director all the way down to my head coach, Lars Jorgensen,” she told him.
“I’m going to save the world woman,” Gaines texted her mother. “Martyrs have to be willing to put themselves out there if you want to make change.”
As she made more media appearances, Gaines’ rhetoric grew sharper. In her initial Daily Wire interview, she’d said of Thomas: “I am in full support of her and full support of her transition and her swimming career and everything like that, because there’s no doubt that she works hard too, but she’s just abiding by the rules that the NCAA put in place, and that’s the issue.” Yet by the following spring any empathy she once had for Thomas had vanished: “He is an arrogant, cheat who STOLE a national title from a hardworking, deserving woman,” she tweeted.
Soon the locker room became a central theme, as she accused the NCAA of having “forced” the swimmers to change with Thomas and allowing “any man” to walk in—though both the men’s and women’s locker rooms had been opened to the competitors at the women’s championship. “If you walked in and saw Lia and you didn’t want to be in there, you could walk next door to the other locker room, or go in the stall,” says one of Gaines’ teammates. Though a handful of swimmers at the meet also went public to say that Thomas’ presence in the locker room made them uncomfortable, Gaines’ version of the story was more lurid: “We turned around and there’s a 6-foot-4 biological man dropping his pants and watching us undress, and we were exposed to male genitalia,” she told Fox News. “Not even probably a year, two years ago, this would have been considered some form of sexual assault, voyeurism.”
But other swimmers who saw Thomas in the locker room say she changed facing a corner, wrapped in a towel. “She was just in the corner, changing normally, keeping to herself,” says one competitor.
Gaines fit seamlessly with a right-wing strategy that dated back to 2015, when the Supreme Court recognized the right to same-sex marriage and when Christian conservatives, fearing they were losing the culture wars, began searching for issues to fire up their political base. “We knew we needed to find an issue that the candidates were comfortable talking about,” Terry Schilling, the president of the socially conservative American Principles Project, later told the New York Times. His group polled voters on a range of messages and found that trans people in women’s sports struck a nerve, including among conservative Democrats and independents. Thus began an effort to transform the debate about trans athletes into a political lightning rod.
Then Gaines came along. Within weeks of the NCAAs, she started collaborating with the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative group that would later bring her aboard as a spokeswoman. Its savvy operators helped her “understand the logistics of the political sphere as well as tools to increase my effectiveness in spreading my message,” she writes in her memoir. The month after the championship, she appeared in the Kentucky Legislature as the guest of a Republican state representative, successfully urging lawmakers to pass a trans sports ban over the governor’s veto. She would go on to testify for anti-trans bills in at least 10 statehouses and appear in ads for Republican candidates including Kristi Noem, Rand Paul, and Herschel Walker (as he fended off domestic violence allegations). Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign paid her, at one point, for “political strategy consulting.”
Online, she started to toe the line between earnest advocate and troll. She stirred up conflict with prominent female athletes who supported trans people in sports, including Megan Rapinoe and Brittney Griner, then reveled in the ensuing coverage. In speeches, she tried out a religious tone: “I feel like we’re in this battle of really spiritual warfare,” she said at the University of Pittsburgh in March 2023. “It’s no longer good or bad or right or wrong. This is like moral versus evil.”
In July 2023, the Fox-owned sports website OutKick announced the launch of the weekly podcast Gaines for Girls, whose first episode promised to expose “the truth about transgenders in women’s sports.” She would interview not only fellow anti-trans athletes, but also powerful anti-LGBTQ Republican lawmakers and officials, including Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and former Oklahoma public education superintendent Ryan Walters.
Meanwhile, the Leadership Institute, a nearly 50-year-old nonprofit that trains conservative activists, launched a project it called the Riley Gaines Center. In fundraising materials, it promised to send Gaines to speak on college campuses and recruit other student athletes who had been “harmed by zealots of transgender ideology.” The Dick & Betsy DeVos Family Foundation—one of the biggest funders of the conservative movement—donated $100,000 to the project in 2023. In the first five months of the center’s existence, the Leadership Institute paid Gaines more than $126,000, according to tax filings. As more student athletes began to forfeit matches with trans players, Gaines awarded them medals stamped with the Leadership Institute logo and emblazoned with the name of her center.
She also signed on with Turning Point USA, the conservative youth organization co-founded by the late Charlie Kirk. Following Kirk’s model, she gave speeches on college campuses, then debated students who disagreed with her. In April 2023, she took her message to what was sure to be a hostile crowd at San Francisco State University. In a third-floor classroom, Gaines spoke to about 75 students, some with slogans written on their bodies in marker. Scores of protesters chanted in the stairwell, and more gathered outside.
When the event finished and the classroom door was opened, protesters rushed toward Gaines. She tweeted that she was assaulted by a man—“a guy in a dress,” her husband later clarified to Fox News—though the university police later said in a statement to the student newspaper that “claims of crimes committed were unfounded.” “We had four different cameras, and we reviewed all of the footage, we asked all the reporters, we interviewed a majority of the people, everyone we could identify we reached out to and interviewed. Nobody saw that happen,” says Josh Carter, the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper. “We scoured the video pretty religiously…We confidently could say, 100 percent beyond the shadow of a doubt, that she was not hit.”
But Gaines was forced to stay in a separate classroom for about three hours while campus police guarded the door against furious protesters. At one point, as an administrator tried to calm them, a protester shouted, “Tell her to pay us, then she can go—10 bucks each,” and was met with laughter. Eventually, more police arrived, formed a protective escort, and whisked her downstairs and out the back, to her car parked behind a police line. “I literally had to run from the middle of the diamond formed around me and into the car to avoid being slammed to the ground by protesters,” she writes in her memoir. “It was like a scene from Black Ops-Zombies.” (Two student reporters present say there were no protesters nearby as she got into her car.)
Gaines had a new story of victimization—this time by a “woke mob.” In the following days and weeks, she embarked on a media tour, claiming she’d been “punched,” “hit multiple times,” and held for “ransom.” The next month, testifying before a House Homeland Security Committee hearing titled “‘Mostly Peaceful’: Countering Left-Wing Organized Violence,” she described the episode as “kidnapping.”
After the event, Gaines texted her mother. “I’m going to save the world woman,” she wrote. “Martyrs have to be willing to put themselves out there if you want to make change.”
By early 2024, Gaines was preparing to take her fight to the legal arena in partnership with the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, a new nonprofit known as ICONS. Like Gaines’ activism, ICONS was born from the furor over Lia Thomas. Its founders—Arizona backstroke champion Marshi Smith and swim mom Kim Jones—have said that they were first introduced by Gaines herself in the spring of 2022, not long after the NCAA championship.
Smith had co-authored a letter to the NCAA protesting Thomas’ inclusion. Jones—a Stanford tennis player in her glory days—had been concerned about Thomas since she first spotted the swimmer’s meet results early in the 2021–2022 season. Her daughter, who swam the 200-meter freestyle at Yale, placed second to Thomas at a meet and missed the Ivy League Championships final by one spot while Thomas swam to victory.
In 2022, they formed ICONS, which the New York Times has called the “pre-eminent organization in the trans sports ban movement.” By the end of 2024, ICONS had grown to a million-dollar operation, according to tax filings. Aside from an early $54,000 infusion from Jones and her husband, a tech executive, their donors are largely anonymous.
“I feel like we’re in this battle of really spiritual warfare. It’s no longer good or bad or right or wrong. This is like moral versus evil.”
One exception is XX-XY Athletics, a sports apparel brand launched in 2024 by former Levi’s marketing executive Jennifer Sey, which blends open transphobia with glossy girl-power messaging to sell T-shirts, shorts, and hoodies. The company, which intentionally misgenders trans people on its social media, offers endorsement deals to students who denounce trans athletes and says it has donated revenue to ICONS, the Riley Gaines Center at the Leadership Institute, and Gays Against Groomers. Gaines, who released a clothing line with the company last summer, serves as a brand representative, as does her younger sister.
Initially, ICONS hosted press conferences and events where Gaines and other athletes delivered speeches. But the group soon shifted its focus to lawsuits, arguing that trans-inclusive sports policies discriminated against women. For help, it turned to Bill Bock, the former general counsel of the US Anti-Doping Agency, whose legal bona fides include nailing Lance Armstrong for using performance-enhancing drugs and representing Donald Trump in his bid to overturn the 2020 election results in Wisconsin. (Bock’s son also worked for Trump for a time as a fact-checker in the White House speechwriting office.)
Bock, too, has said that Thomas was the catalyst that made him shift his focus to transgender athletes. “Bill has made this a life cause,” says a lawyer with knowledge of Bock’s cases. In 2024, he resigned his position on an NCAA committee and authored a Wall Street Journal op-ed accusing the association of having “regressive, discriminatory, antiwoman policies.”
One month later, funded by ICONS, Bock filed Gaines v. NCAA. The class-action lawsuit retold the story of the NCAA 2022 women’s swimming championships, arguing that the NCAA—and, by extension, the Georgia state university system that hosted the meet—had violated Title IX, the federal law that forbids sex discrimination in education, including school sports.
The NCAA “imposed a radical anti-woman agenda on college sports, reinterpreting Title IX to define women as a testosterone level, permitting men to compete on women’s teams, and destroying female safe spaces in women’s locker rooms,” the lawsuit argued, adding that the NCAA’s previous rules were unfair because they allowed trans women to have testosterone levels higher than cis women could achieve without doping. In practice, according to the 2024 IOC-funded study, the testosterone levels of transgender women athletes on hormone therapy are equivalent to those of cis women.
Bock wasn’t the first to bring the fight over trans athletes to court. Alliance Defending Freedom—the conservative Christian legal nonprofit behind major anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion Supreme Court decisions—filed an early case in Connecticut in 2020, arguing that two trans high school runners deprived other girls of championship titles and potential scholarships. (After being quashed and later resurrected in appeals, the case is currently stayed, pending a Supreme Court decision on trans athletes.)
In 2020, as Republican state legislators started passing trans sports bans, LGBTQ rights groups began to fight back with lawsuits of their own. In West Virginia and Idaho, for example, the ACLU sued on behalf of a trans middle schooler and a college student who wanted to join their schools’ women’s cross-country teams. They won in the circuit courts, with judges ruling that sports bans counted as a kind of illegal sex discrimination. The Supreme Court agreed to review both cases at the request of Alliance Defending Freedom lawyers representing the states. A decision is expected by summer 2026.
“Once you chip away at trans people’s rights, and you see them as not being entitled to the same protections as everyone else, then it’s easier to attack their rights in other ways.”
Gaines v. NCAA is even more sweeping than the current Supreme Court cases. Rather than arguing over whether states can ban trans athletes from teams matching their gender identity, the case argues that trans girls and women must be banned from women’s sports, starting with the NCAA and Georgia. The case contends that “trans inclusion is sex discrimination against cisgender women,” summarizes Jess Braverman, legal director at Gender Justice, a Minnesota nonprofit. In September, a judge dismissed the claims against the Georgia state university system but allowed Gaines’ Title IX case against the NCAA to continue.
ICONS is also funding two more Bock-led cases making similar arguments. One, filed in November 2024, involves college volleyball players who opposed a trans player at San José State University; Gaines reportedly helped recruit the lead plaintiff, Brooke Slusser, who previously had been close with her trans teammate. The other accuses the University of Pennsylvania and the Ivy League Council of Presidents of violating Title IX by letting Thomas compete three years ago, and calls for Thomas’ name to be erased from public record books.
The underlying goal of ICONS’ lawsuits is much bigger than Thomas and bigger than athletics. Shiwali Patel, senior director of safe and inclusive schools at the National Women’s Law Center, says the cases “could have a huge impact beyond sports,” affecting trans people’s rights under Title IX and potentially their constitutional protections. “Once you chip away at trans people’s rights, and you see them as not being entitled to the same protections as everyone else, then it’s easier to attack their rights in other ways,” Patel explains. “And that’s what’s happened here. It began with sports five years ago, and then it went to bathrooms, gender-affirming care, or other aspects of education and life.”
ICONS, for its part, isn’t hiding this strategy. Sports “is the public arena of the difference of the sexes,” Jones said in an Instagram video in 2024. “If men can’t be women in sports, and we win there, they can’t be women anywhere.”
With Donald Trump back in office, Gaines’ political influence has reached new heights. She recounted a story recently that highlighted her access to the new administration. Right after Trump’s inauguration, she contacted the incoming director of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, Joseph Edlow, with a complaint. Her husband, a British swimmer whom she had met at the University of Kentucky, had been unable to get a green card due to a requirement that he receive the Covid vaccine. Within a couple of days, Edlow’s office had dropped the requirement, which the immigration official confirmed personally while appearing as a guest on Gaines’ podcast.
“It would be an absolute privilege to swear him in personally to be a citizen,” Edlow gushed.
Meanwhile, Trump’s White House immediately started using its power to target trans athletes. Under President Joe Biden, the administration had interpreted Title IX to forbid discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. Trump promptly reversed that policy. He signed his “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order the day after ICONS filed its lawsuit against Penn. The day after that, the Education Department opened Title IX investigations into both Penn and San José State University, using the same arguments ICONS made in its legal cases. Soon, the administration announced it was withholding $175 million in federal funding for Penn over its trans athlete policy.
“I think it’s very telling,” says one of Gaines’ anonymous teammates. “She’s very, ‘Protect women’s sports.’ But not when it comes to our team.”
Penn folded under the pressure. Last summer, Gaines returned to the White House, along with Bock and Smith from ICONS, for the announcement of a resolution between the administration and Lia Thomas’ old university, putting an end to the Title IX investigation. The school had agreed to wipe Thomas’ records from its books, ban trans women from women’s teams and locker rooms, and send “a personalized letter of apology” to each “impacted female swimmer.”
“The most prolific offender of Title IX in collegiate sports has bent the knee,” Smith declared on Gaines’ podcast soon after. “But,” she added, “it’s definitely not enough.”
What would be enough? Thomas’ name is still on the record board at an Ohio university, Smith pointed out. The NCAA hasn’t erased her national title either. And then there’s every other trans athlete to go after: “There are many other sports affected and many other schools aside from just Lia Thomas, over the past few years, that need to be rectified.” ICONS, she told Gaines, will keep pushing for anti-trans court rulings that will outlast their allies in the Trump administration. “I feel really secure for the next three years or so, but we don’t know who’s coming next,” Smith said.
As her clout within the MAGA universe grows, Gaines has expanded her repertoire beyond anti-trans advocacy. On her podcast, she now decries the gamut of right-wing bugaboos, from Planned Parenthood to the “deep state.” Nor is she the only Gaines making her presence known in politics. Her dad, Brad, is running for Congress in Tennessee.
As of last June, she’d clocked 118 Fox News appearances since the NCAA championship, according to Media Matters. She’d appeared on the network nine times that month alone, amid an online skirmish with Olympic gymnast Simone Biles, who had slammed Gaines on X for misgendering a transgender high schooler. “You’re truly sick,” Biles posted. “All of this campaigning because you lost a race. Straight up sore loser.” In response, Gaines posted a video of Biles testifying that she was sexually abused by USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. “Simone Biles when she had to endure a predatory man Vs Simone Biles when other girls have to endure predatory men,” she quipped, equating trans women in sports to sexual abusers.
Since Biles had compared Gaines’ body to a man’s—Biles later apologized—Gaines unveiled her baby bump and ultrasound photos onstage at the Young Women’s Leadership Summit put on by Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. “How many men do you know that have this?” she beamed at a crowd of shrieking young fans.
It was a crowning moment for Gaines, who had consolidated her position as one of the country’s most prominent female conservative activists. Fordham University associate professor Zein Murib compares her to an internet-era Anita Bryant, the singer and Miss Oklahoma turned anti-gay activist in the 1970s whose “Save Our Children” campaign overturned anti-discrimination ordinances. Gaines, Murib says, is similar to Bryant in “the ways that she is working to create hysteria around a vulnerable group of people for her own political purposes and profit.”
Her rhetoric about protecting women, Murib adds, “is part of a long history of whiteness and femininity being deployed, under the logic of protection, to advance a very particular political project.”
After Kirk’s assassination in September, Gaines was floated as a possible successor. The night after the shooting, she filmed a video in her pajamas, calling him a friend and a mentor. “I would have been there with him this week when he was fatally shot if I weren’t this far along,” she said, indicating her pregnancy.
Gaines pledged to continue touring with Turning Point USA. “I would be lying to you if I said there wasn’t any apprehension on my end to go back onto these college campuses,” she said. “I have seen with my own eyes and my own experiences the violence…especially from Transtifa,” she added, using a term used to falsely portray trans people as violent extremists.
Then she went a step further. Anyone who believes that people can be transgender is crazy enough to commit murder, she argued. “If you’re insane enough to believe that men can get pregnant and that women need prostate exams, and that tampons belong in boys’ bathrooms or whatever other crazy stuff that they believe, you’re insane enough, clearly, to pull a gun and shoot someone.”
While Gaines continues blasting her message, another lawsuit is making its way through the courts more quietly. In the spring of 2024, two former members of Gaines’ University of Kentucky swim team filed a lawsuit alleging that Lars Jorgensen, their coach, had sexually assaulted them.
Both swimmers are former students whom Jorgensen hired as assistant coaches. In their complaint, they allege he groomed them by pressuring them to lose severe amounts of weight, emotionally abusing them in front of team members, and making sexual comments to them. The assistant coaches, who believed their careers were dependent on Jorgensen, allege he invited them to his home and sexually assaulted them.
One swimmer alleges Jorgensen forcibly raped her multiple times between 2019 and 2023, telling her he would “ruin her reputation” if she told anyone. The other says that in 2022, he groped and kissed her despite her protests. Their complaint also alleges that Jorgensen raped a third assistant coach at his home after a coaching staff Christmas party several years earlier. They claim that university employees were aware of some of Jorgensen’s abuse and discouraged them from reporting it when they came forward. (“UK has consistently acted upon and investigated allegations when they were known and when complainants have opted to pursue allegations and participate in the investigative process,” a university spokesperson says.)
One of the assistant coaches who filed the complaint now identifies as transgender. (In court documents, he uses she/her pronouns to refer to the period before his transition.) When news of the lawsuit first broke in April 2024, Jorgensen’s attorney at the time claimed the allegations were politically motivated, fabricated to punish Jorgensen for supporting Gaines. “This all has to do with NCAA woke philosophy and his support of his swimmer, Ms. Gaines,” the lawyer, Greg Anderson, told the Lexington Herald Leader. “The timing of it, in light of her statements publicly, is extremely suspicious.”
Gaines—who had once declared her trust in and affection for Jorgensen—posted a long message on social media a few days after the lawsuit was reported. “I never saw or heard any of these claims taking place, but it isn’t difficult to say I vehemently condemn all violence, especially sexual violence against women,” she wrote. “While I spend most of my time speaking to the harm and severity of allowing men into women’s sports, we can’t neglect or condone other issues that are far too common in female athletics like sexual abuse from authority figures. It’s my mission to defend women (really, humanity) and this falls in line.”
But in the year and a half since then, Gaines has been quiet in public about the lawsuit. Two UK swimmers told me they’re disappointed and frustrated that she has not used her platform to talk about the problems that affected her teammates. “I think it’s very telling,” says one of her anonymous teammates. “She’s very, ‘Protect women’s sports.’ But not when it comes to our team.”
“The reality is that there are much bigger problems that women face in sports,” Ward says. “Society has ignored these problems for decades. And now, all of a sudden, we’re pretending to care about women in sports in the name of banning trans people?”
In October, following an investigation, the US Center for SafeSport permanently banned Jorgensen from coaching, citing sexual and physical misconduct, sexual harassment, and other findings. The lawsuit against Jorgensen has not yet gone to trial; a judge ruled last February that some of the allegations were too old to sue over. Jorgensen did not respond to a request for comment; in court papers, he has denied the claims. Ward says she believes them. “When I wear my UK swimming gear out,” she says, “I’ve had three times where somebody’s approached me and asked me about Riley Gaines. And I’ve said, ‘Well, do you know about Lars Jorgensen?’”
“Every single time, they’ve said no,” she continues. “And I just say, ‘You know, it’s hard for me to care about Riley Gaines tying for fifth when my swim coach is accused of raping my teammates.”
