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31 reviews for:
Swimming Against the Current: Fighting for Common Sense in a World That's Lost its Mind
Riley Gaines
4.23 AVERAGE
31 reviews for:
Swimming Against the Current: Fighting for Common Sense in a World That's Lost its Mind
Riley Gaines
4.23 AVERAGE
adventurous
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
informative
inspiring
sad
medium-paced
Would love to have given this book negative stars. Rant review incoming.
I read this book to get a different perspective on this issue, but I disagree completely with this book and I have several reasons to break down why this author is not only wrong but why this book was written as a hate piece and my reasoning for such:
Riley Gaines could have chosen to write a memoir about her life, but instead chose to write little but personal stories. This book is nothing but a discriminatory manifesto that severely lacks quality or any of the common sense that she claims to have. I have several opinions and rebuttals, but I am saving them for later on in this review.
She had little to back up her claims aside from some legal jargon and statements about political bills that have come into play over the past fifty years. This could have been a great opportunity for Gaines to do more vast research and back up her points logically, but she consistently talks about things that hard hardly tangentially related at all and does not circle back to them. The only times she does offer solid or concrete research is in chapter eight and what she contributes is not very expansive. She offers up research from one study on distance cycling and a some research based on the Olympics newest compromises on hormone levels and participation of trans athletics post full transition. She does little more than call the approach on this research lazy and based on bear minimum results, but does not further expand upon it. (I go into further detail on bodily examinations mentioned in chapter 8 later on in my review)
Gaines could have taken the opportunity to conduct interviews with athletes from both sides of this issue, discussed this topic with well research journalists on the matter, even dug into some actual studies and discussed them in this book, but chose not to. (If you are concerned about the 1960 Olympic Games, I cover my reasoning on that later.)
Gaines repeats the same intention several times through this book about locker rooms and Lia Thomas and her time in college. Gaines says she wished Lia Thomas no ill will or hatred yet continuously refers to Lia Thomas as “a man,” goes out of her way to use Thomas as an example as often as she can, and compares Thomas to herself in the form of completion. Lia Thomas very much lives rent free in Riley Gaines’ mind and all she does in exist and live her life and try and complete in sports in the hopes that people won’t bother her simply for her gender identity. (Oh, no! Did I just refer to Lia Thomas by she/her pronouns? Yes, I did. Because Lia Thomas is a female)
Regarding the issue of locker rooms. This is a very touchy subject and I will not ever dare or venture to tell anyone how to feel on this matter, but I will say that the rhetoric of saying “men just want to go into women’s spaces” and “girls who are raped by one of *these people* will have to call their attacker she/her” is getting very old and tired. The very idea that a man would transition into a woman, to through hormonal changes, go through or attempt to go through physical and or surgical changes, and live their entire existence both in public and private as a woman just so they could use a female bathroom is absolutely absurd (the reverse is also true for those who transition from female to male.)
We already live in a reality where being a woman is so unsafe and horrify. Being a woman or a femme presenting person and fearing for your safety is a daily occurrence. For someone who was born male to give that up to live their life as a female would be an insane idea. Gender identity isn’t something you wake up one day and just decide, it is something that has been part of you your whole life and that you struggle with constantly and most people do not have a support systems when the make the transition. The transgender community knows what it is like to fear for their lives and live under discrimination and oppression as well. The last thing a trans person would want to do is come into a women’s space and make others feel uncomfortable because they know exactly what it is like to have to feel that way and live that way. This is me simply offering an additional perspective that most people do not think about. If someone is reading this and I can at least get them to consider and understand the perspective of another group of people, then that would make me happy. You still don’t have to agree about locker rooms or bathrooms, but I hope you can understand the discrimination and danger the transgender community faces. It’s not the transgender community against women, it’s women and the transgender community banning together against the patriarchy.
Throughout this entire book Riley Gaines pulls together unrelated points to paint a picture of what she wants her audience to take away from her writings. She talks about identity politics, gender ideology, and politics language, but that’s all her book is. That’s all anything political ever really is. Listen less to her words and what she is really saying, the meaning behind her words.
To discuss some of the instances she brings up in her book:
the doping of German Olympic athletes in the 1960s. This is a tragic and unfortunate circumstance than never should have happened and the Olympic record books do deserve to be changed, but this is at the cost of children who were not given freedom or choice or education to choose for themselves. (This also includes Andreas Krieger, who has identified as male since and has also openly stated he was question his gender even before the Olympic injection experiments began, which.) These are children who were forced into a situation that was unavoidable for them and in no way comparable to that of a modern transgender athlete.
Doping of a regular athlete is not comparable to a transgender athlete. It is only comparable to other athletes who dope or use steroids. For any proof of this, studies would need to be conducted and there is no evidence of this.
Gaines brings up some biological questions as to the sex of certain athletes such as Caster Semenya. Caster Semenya is a woman. She is also intersex. Intersex people exists and this is something the world just doesn’t like to acknowledge about people in general. She simply has a high testosterone level, as do some other Olympic athletes. She has been barred from competing because she refuses to lower her testosterone levels. She should not have to lower her testosterone levels because that would mess with the biology of her body in a way that she does not want and a way she does not intend to. Asking Caster Semenya to lower her testosterone levels and complaining about tensgender athletes competing and wanting to alter their hormones levels to reach what it takes to maintain their physicality and not letting trans athletes compete for the same reason is almost hypocritical and a double edged sword.
Caster Semenya is an intersex athlete. There are many other intersex athletes and this doesn’t exclude the fact that intersex individuals exist in all places and in different capacities. Gaines speaks frequently of college and grade school athletics. Intersex athletes exist in these capacities and places as well. Not once does Gaines delve into the science behind Sawyer Syndrome, Tuner Syndrome, Congenital adrenal hyperplasia, Klinefelter Syndrome, 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, androgen sensitivity, or the myriad of other conditions that are, by technicality, considered to make a person intersex. Gaines simply goes about calling Caster Semenya a man and doesn’t once bother to educate herself or the reader on real biology and science on what sex actually is. Intersex biological is vastly more common than society and social stigma leads people to believe. People like Caster Semenya are the real Trail Blazers, not Riley Gaines.
Caster Semenya’s situation also highlights another very important argument in regard to sports, competition, rules, and separation of athletes that people don’t often want to acknowledge or think about, and that is what fairness and standards really are. Not every athlete, regardless of sex or gender - male or female or some identity other than, will have grown up training all their life for that sport, will be the same height as everyone else on their team, will have the same diet, the same muscle mass, will have the same endurance levels, etc. No athlete, even if all of them are the same sex, will be the same in body or experience and this can absolutely and unequivocally be argued that that makes everyone just as unequal and just as unfairly stacked against other athletes they are competing against, even when the opposition is all the same sex as well.
Gaines discusses the Women’s Sport’s Foundation (WSF) founded by Billie Jean King in 1974. Gaines claims that Billie Jean King and her organization used to fight for women’s rights and for Title IX but are not going backwards with their support of transgender and intersex athletes. The WSF has long supported intersex and transgender athletes and what Gaines fails to mention is Billie Jean King’s person history. King was one of the first public figures in sports or otherwise to publicly come out as gay. To expect King to be anything less than progressive and supportive of the LGBTQIA+ movement, especially in athletics, especially considering that she, herself, is part of that community, would be anything other than impractical.
Gaines goes on to discuses the term “evolving science” and treats it like it’s a joke. The fact of the matter is science is always evolving. Science and research is always getting better and we are always improving our technology and learning more as developments are being made. Evolving science is just regular science. There isn’t much more to say about this issue other than - pay less attention to Gaines words and more attention to what she is actually saying and the real meaning behind those words.
The entire concept of approximately forty years of Olympic sports qualification requiring women to go through gender confirmation tests is not only horrifying and absurd but also ironic in the way Gaines frames this for her book. Gaines frames this in a way where it is reported by survey that the vast majority of female athletes were comfortable with these exams and only a small number were not. Gaines claims that this would ensure female athletes wouldn’t have to share a locker room with any transgender “athletes that still have male genitalia” or are “men” as she refers to them. Keep in mind the history behind this includes a brief period of time in 1938 there were members of the Nazi party proposed this idea, chiefly Karl Ritter von Halt, because he was also on the German Olympic committee. The gender verification tests didn’t just include cheek swabs once the technology adapted and no longer included personal physician certificates after 1940, in the 60s this also included physics examinations of the nude body and gynecologist exams. So Gaines is advocating for the possibility that female athletes go back to a world like this and have their privacy and privileges further invaded? Is this not just as bad as her fear of sharing a locker room with a “man?”
“Where are the feminists? Where are the men?” This is simply another example of how Gaines and others don’t understand the true meaning of feminism and what the movement stands for. It also goes to show that Gaines and others don’t understand what toxicity masculinity actually is and what it belies. No one has condemn men for being assertive, especially if it’s for the right reasons, it’s when traits that would normally be considered acceptable or desirable like ambition and discipline and dominance come at the cost of discrimination of others or come at the cost of treating others poorly or when it even affects someone’s personal view of themselves. Micro-agressions are still aggressions.
Gaines states in chapter 10 that she believes it would always be “the winner of the females that changes their body the most” if there were to be a separate category for transgender athletes. She also states that she does not believe there should be a separate category for transgender athletes in sports, writing an entire book on the subject and offering no solution to what she perceives as an issue.
As someone who is a follower of God as Gaines says she is, I raise you this: “the Bible says be who God created you to be.” We are all made on God’s image and we are all siblings in Christ. God doesn’t make mistakes, that means no one is a mistake no matter who they are, this includes transgender people. Transgender people are not mistakes, they are another extension of God’s image. God is beyond man and women and everything and God is greater than all. God created many different types of people. How do you not know God’s purpose and plan for transgender and gender non-conforming individuals is to be on this Earth to show others that they are still made in his image and that God loves and all and we are ALL worthy of God’s love. God has a path for all of us and you do not get to choose someone else’s journey or path. How do you not know that the path he has for one or many transgender people in your life isn’t to teach you how to not judge people or how to love all thy neighbors or how to see that people really aren’t so different no matter who they. Or maybe it’s to teach that gender really isn’t as much of a choice as people think it is. God doesn’t make mistakes, he makes people the way he makes them because it’s in his image and everyone has something to fulfill in life.
I read this book to get a different perspective on this issue, but I disagree completely with this book and I have several reasons to break down why this author is not only wrong but why this book was written as a hate piece and my reasoning for such:
Riley Gaines could have chosen to write a memoir about her life, but instead chose to write little but personal stories. This book is nothing but a discriminatory manifesto that severely lacks quality or any of the common sense that she claims to have. I have several opinions and rebuttals, but I am saving them for later on in this review.
She had little to back up her claims aside from some legal jargon and statements about political bills that have come into play over the past fifty years. This could have been a great opportunity for Gaines to do more vast research and back up her points logically, but she consistently talks about things that hard hardly tangentially related at all and does not circle back to them. The only times she does offer solid or concrete research is in chapter eight and what she contributes is not very expansive. She offers up research from one study on distance cycling and a some research based on the Olympics newest compromises on hormone levels and participation of trans athletics post full transition. She does little more than call the approach on this research lazy and based on bear minimum results, but does not further expand upon it. (I go into further detail on bodily examinations mentioned in chapter 8 later on in my review)
Gaines could have taken the opportunity to conduct interviews with athletes from both sides of this issue, discussed this topic with well research journalists on the matter, even dug into some actual studies and discussed them in this book, but chose not to. (If you are concerned about the 1960 Olympic Games, I cover my reasoning on that later.)
Gaines repeats the same intention several times through this book about locker rooms and Lia Thomas and her time in college. Gaines says she wished Lia Thomas no ill will or hatred yet continuously refers to Lia Thomas as “a man,” goes out of her way to use Thomas as an example as often as she can, and compares Thomas to herself in the form of completion. Lia Thomas very much lives rent free in Riley Gaines’ mind and all she does in exist and live her life and try and complete in sports in the hopes that people won’t bother her simply for her gender identity. (Oh, no! Did I just refer to Lia Thomas by she/her pronouns? Yes, I did. Because Lia Thomas is a female)
Regarding the issue of locker rooms. This is a very touchy subject and I will not ever dare or venture to tell anyone how to feel on this matter, but I will say that the rhetoric of saying “men just want to go into women’s spaces” and “girls who are raped by one of *these people* will have to call their attacker she/her” is getting very old and tired. The very idea that a man would transition into a woman, to through hormonal changes, go through or attempt to go through physical and or surgical changes, and live their entire existence both in public and private as a woman just so they could use a female bathroom is absolutely absurd (the reverse is also true for those who transition from female to male.)
We already live in a reality where being a woman is so unsafe and horrify. Being a woman or a femme presenting person and fearing for your safety is a daily occurrence. For someone who was born male to give that up to live their life as a female would be an insane idea. Gender identity isn’t something you wake up one day and just decide, it is something that has been part of you your whole life and that you struggle with constantly and most people do not have a support systems when the make the transition. The transgender community knows what it is like to fear for their lives and live under discrimination and oppression as well. The last thing a trans person would want to do is come into a women’s space and make others feel uncomfortable because they know exactly what it is like to have to feel that way and live that way. This is me simply offering an additional perspective that most people do not think about. If someone is reading this and I can at least get them to consider and understand the perspective of another group of people, then that would make me happy. You still don’t have to agree about locker rooms or bathrooms, but I hope you can understand the discrimination and danger the transgender community faces. It’s not the transgender community against women, it’s women and the transgender community banning together against the patriarchy.
Throughout this entire book Riley Gaines pulls together unrelated points to paint a picture of what she wants her audience to take away from her writings. She talks about identity politics, gender ideology, and politics language, but that’s all her book is. That’s all anything political ever really is. Listen less to her words and what she is really saying, the meaning behind her words.
To discuss some of the instances she brings up in her book:
the doping of German Olympic athletes in the 1960s. This is a tragic and unfortunate circumstance than never should have happened and the Olympic record books do deserve to be changed, but this is at the cost of children who were not given freedom or choice or education to choose for themselves. (This also includes Andreas Krieger, who has identified as male since and has also openly stated he was question his gender even before the Olympic injection experiments began, which.) These are children who were forced into a situation that was unavoidable for them and in no way comparable to that of a modern transgender athlete.
Doping of a regular athlete is not comparable to a transgender athlete. It is only comparable to other athletes who dope or use steroids. For any proof of this, studies would need to be conducted and there is no evidence of this.
Gaines brings up some biological questions as to the sex of certain athletes such as Caster Semenya. Caster Semenya is a woman. She is also intersex. Intersex people exists and this is something the world just doesn’t like to acknowledge about people in general. She simply has a high testosterone level, as do some other Olympic athletes. She has been barred from competing because she refuses to lower her testosterone levels. She should not have to lower her testosterone levels because that would mess with the biology of her body in a way that she does not want and a way she does not intend to. Asking Caster Semenya to lower her testosterone levels and complaining about tensgender athletes competing and wanting to alter their hormones levels to reach what it takes to maintain their physicality and not letting trans athletes compete for the same reason is almost hypocritical and a double edged sword.
Caster Semenya is an intersex athlete. There are many other intersex athletes and this doesn’t exclude the fact that intersex individuals exist in all places and in different capacities. Gaines speaks frequently of college and grade school athletics. Intersex athletes exist in these capacities and places as well. Not once does Gaines delve into the science behind Sawyer Syndrome, Tuner Syndrome, Congenital adrenal hyperplasia, Klinefelter Syndrome, 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, androgen sensitivity, or the myriad of other conditions that are, by technicality, considered to make a person intersex. Gaines simply goes about calling Caster Semenya a man and doesn’t once bother to educate herself or the reader on real biology and science on what sex actually is. Intersex biological is vastly more common than society and social stigma leads people to believe. People like Caster Semenya are the real Trail Blazers, not Riley Gaines.
Caster Semenya’s situation also highlights another very important argument in regard to sports, competition, rules, and separation of athletes that people don’t often want to acknowledge or think about, and that is what fairness and standards really are. Not every athlete, regardless of sex or gender - male or female or some identity other than, will have grown up training all their life for that sport, will be the same height as everyone else on their team, will have the same diet, the same muscle mass, will have the same endurance levels, etc. No athlete, even if all of them are the same sex, will be the same in body or experience and this can absolutely and unequivocally be argued that that makes everyone just as unequal and just as unfairly stacked against other athletes they are competing against, even when the opposition is all the same sex as well.
Gaines discusses the Women’s Sport’s Foundation (WSF) founded by Billie Jean King in 1974. Gaines claims that Billie Jean King and her organization used to fight for women’s rights and for Title IX but are not going backwards with their support of transgender and intersex athletes. The WSF has long supported intersex and transgender athletes and what Gaines fails to mention is Billie Jean King’s person history. King was one of the first public figures in sports or otherwise to publicly come out as gay. To expect King to be anything less than progressive and supportive of the LGBTQIA+ movement, especially in athletics, especially considering that she, herself, is part of that community, would be anything other than impractical.
Gaines goes on to discuses the term “evolving science” and treats it like it’s a joke. The fact of the matter is science is always evolving. Science and research is always getting better and we are always improving our technology and learning more as developments are being made. Evolving science is just regular science. There isn’t much more to say about this issue other than - pay less attention to Gaines words and more attention to what she is actually saying and the real meaning behind those words.
The entire concept of approximately forty years of Olympic sports qualification requiring women to go through gender confirmation tests is not only horrifying and absurd but also ironic in the way Gaines frames this for her book. Gaines frames this in a way where it is reported by survey that the vast majority of female athletes were comfortable with these exams and only a small number were not. Gaines claims that this would ensure female athletes wouldn’t have to share a locker room with any transgender “athletes that still have male genitalia” or are “men” as she refers to them. Keep in mind the history behind this includes a brief period of time in 1938 there were members of the Nazi party proposed this idea, chiefly Karl Ritter von Halt, because he was also on the German Olympic committee. The gender verification tests didn’t just include cheek swabs once the technology adapted and no longer included personal physician certificates after 1940, in the 60s this also included physics examinations of the nude body and gynecologist exams. So Gaines is advocating for the possibility that female athletes go back to a world like this and have their privacy and privileges further invaded? Is this not just as bad as her fear of sharing a locker room with a “man?”
“Where are the feminists? Where are the men?” This is simply another example of how Gaines and others don’t understand the true meaning of feminism and what the movement stands for. It also goes to show that Gaines and others don’t understand what toxicity masculinity actually is and what it belies. No one has condemn men for being assertive, especially if it’s for the right reasons, it’s when traits that would normally be considered acceptable or desirable like ambition and discipline and dominance come at the cost of discrimination of others or come at the cost of treating others poorly or when it even affects someone’s personal view of themselves. Micro-agressions are still aggressions.
Gaines states in chapter 10 that she believes it would always be “the winner of the females that changes their body the most” if there were to be a separate category for transgender athletes. She also states that she does not believe there should be a separate category for transgender athletes in sports, writing an entire book on the subject and offering no solution to what she perceives as an issue.
As someone who is a follower of God as Gaines says she is, I raise you this: “the Bible says be who God created you to be.” We are all made on God’s image and we are all siblings in Christ. God doesn’t make mistakes, that means no one is a mistake no matter who they are, this includes transgender people. Transgender people are not mistakes, they are another extension of God’s image. God is beyond man and women and everything and God is greater than all. God created many different types of people. How do you not know God’s purpose and plan for transgender and gender non-conforming individuals is to be on this Earth to show others that they are still made in his image and that God loves and all and we are ALL worthy of God’s love. God has a path for all of us and you do not get to choose someone else’s journey or path. How do you not know that the path he has for one or many transgender people in your life isn’t to teach you how to not judge people or how to love all thy neighbors or how to see that people really aren’t so different no matter who they. Or maybe it’s to teach that gender really isn’t as much of a choice as people think it is. God doesn’t make mistakes, he makes people the way he makes them because it’s in his image and everyone has something to fulfill in life.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
informative
inspiring
hopeful
informative
inspiring
informative
inspiring
fast-paced