Gaines for Girls with Riley Gaines - RILEY GAINES PODCAST： Taylor Silverman's Fight for Fairness

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00:00:30.000 Welcome back to the Gains for Girls podcast.

00:00:36.200 Today we are having on Taylor Silberman,

00:00:38.520 which really this feels like a full circle moment.

00:00:41.360 She is someone, she really was actually the first athlete I saw speak out after I had.

00:00:47.540 And so when I saw this, I was overjoyed to have someone else joining the team.

00:00:53.380 So you can expect to hear her story.

00:00:56.320 She's a skateboarder. 0.99

00:00:57.180 You can expect to hear what that looks like,

00:00:59.160 where skateboarding stands now.

00:01:01.260 And of course, other incidents that continue to happen across the nation.

00:01:06.120 And so I couldn't be more excited.

00:01:07.720 Check out the interview with Taylor Silberman.

00:01:11.060 Taylor, I remember when you first took a stand.

00:01:15.560 And it was like the greatest day ever for me.

00:01:18.980 Because you were like the,

00:01:20.440 really the only other athlete at that time

00:01:23.160 who hadn't done that.

00:01:25.060 And so I want to give you the opportunity to talk about your story.

00:01:28.980 Talk about how you were impacted and really affected by this.

00:01:32.860 And how that has led you to where you are now.

00:01:36.720 Okay.

00:01:37.180 Well, first off, I want to say congrats on the new show.

00:01:39.800 I didn't say that yet.

00:01:40.880 And I was really happy for you when I saw that on Twitter.

00:01:43.560 And even more happy to be invited to be a guest.

00:01:47.280 And you probably, I've told you this before,

00:01:50.340 but I don't know if I've stressed enough,

00:01:52.220 like how much you speaking up helped me to speak up.

00:01:55.940 And we didn't know each other at the time,

00:01:57.360 but I had seen interviews of you.

00:01:59.320 I had also seen in Selena's soul.

00:02:01.840 That was the other interview that I had seen of an athlete speaking up.

00:02:05.620 But basically, I've been skateboarding for several years,

00:02:10.380 I think like 12 now,

00:02:12.000 and competed all over the country for years.

00:02:16.400 And I had encountered male athletes

00:02:20.900 entering women's skateboarding divisions three different times. 0.73

00:02:25.160 And the first couple times I really thought that this was so ridiculous

00:02:28.620 that it was going to be solved pretty quickly.

00:02:30.980 People were going to put an end to it,

00:02:32.360 say we're not going to handle it this way.

00:02:33.840 But I understood that it was probably a difficult situation

00:02:37.440 for contest organizers when everyone's showing up that day.

00:02:41.940 But then I went to this Red Bull contest

00:02:44.120 that I qualified for in my home state at the time of Michigan.

00:02:48.460 And I was made aware the day of the finals

00:02:51.060 that there was a male skateboarder

00:02:53.020 who had also been traveling from stop to stop around the country,

00:02:56.540 collecting prize money at every stop,

00:02:58.660 and would be competing in the finals.

00:03:00.160 I was shocked, despite having actually seen this before,

00:03:04.880 but especially in a contest where I had had to do qualifying events to get there,

00:03:09.720 where they were well aware of who was going to show up to the finals,

00:03:12.560 and where there was thousands of dollars of prize money involved,

00:03:16.160 and women had traveled all over the country to be there. 0.92

00:03:18.900 So I competed that day knowing what was happening was wrong.

00:03:23.160 And I reached out to Red Bull after the contest,

00:03:26.980 telling them that I thought it wasn't handled correctly.

00:03:29.720 I sent them an email, which is now publicly posted online.

00:03:33.720 And they never responded to me.

00:03:36.560 And I feel like the email I sent them was very kind and professional.

00:03:40.000 I was raising my concerns.

00:03:41.760 I went through exactly how I was financially impacted

00:03:45.160 and the other girls who placed below me,

00:03:47.760 being in second place to the male competitor who got first.

00:03:51.140 And I basically told them that I knew what I was saying might not be popular,

00:03:57.080 but it was the right thing to do,

00:03:58.460 and I wanted to schedule a time to talk about what they could do moving forward.

00:04:02.320 But that was ignored.

00:04:04.300 And in that time, like the weeks, months that I spent after that,

00:04:11.120 thinking about what to do, I did a lot of research.

00:04:14.980 I found your interview where you talked about what had happened

00:04:18.320 with Leah Thomas and swimming in college.

00:04:21.800 And I went through a very dark time for a bit,

00:04:26.160 feeling very guilty about not saying anything.

00:04:28.980 I wondered what it would be like if this actually became the norm

00:04:33.480 and I have daughters one day and how I would explain this to them

00:04:38.100 and tell them that I hadn't spoken up when it happened to me

00:04:41.040 when it first started happening.

00:04:42.320 And I found a lot of strength in watching you speak up and Selena also,

00:04:49.200 but you were a huge voice in this right in the beginning.

00:04:52.400 And I decided to just post what had happened.

00:04:56.540 And when I posted it, it was on my Instagram,

00:04:59.100 which had like a few thousand followers who just followed me for skateboarding clips.

00:05:03.860 And it went viral within like an hour, which I did not expect at all.

00:05:09.560 But it reassured me how much people really cared about this

00:05:13.920 and how many people were being impacted.

00:05:16.640 And I kind of had to make a decision like that day

00:05:19.500 because I start getting all these calls like,

00:05:22.500 will you do this interview?

00:05:23.440 Will you do this show tonight?

00:05:24.720 We're going to send the camera crew to your studio right now.

00:05:27.160 And I had to decide I'm either in this

00:05:30.140 or I'm going to leave the post as is and not go any further with it.

00:05:33.960 And I decided to just go with it

00:05:35.720 because I knew that a lot of people will not speak up

00:05:38.580 and we needed more people speaking up like you were.

00:05:41.560 And from there, it's history.

00:05:44.280 I just kept going.

00:05:45.860 And it's been like well over a year now.

00:05:48.960 And my life has changed significantly.

00:05:51.820 I think some progress has been made in some sports.

00:05:54.760 Because skateboarding has still not had a solution.

00:05:59.020 But I'm not going to stop until there is one.

00:06:02.560 Oh, my gosh.

00:06:03.580 Well, I couldn't be more grateful the direction that you went

00:06:06.820 because the impact that you have had on your platforms

00:06:11.380 and what you've done is monumental.

00:06:14.980 And it really is inspiring for so many others.

00:06:17.160 And so you mentioned the skateboarding community.

00:06:21.220 This happens relatively frequently.

00:06:25.460 And skateboarding.

00:06:26.160 So can you touch on that and how really your experience,

00:06:30.820 again, in the skateboarding world is not unique?

00:06:35.920 Yeah.

00:06:36.240 So the first time that I actually was at a contest where this happened

00:06:40.380 was back in 2018.

00:06:43.140 So it's been happening for a long time.

00:06:45.560 And that was just my first time actually traveling out of state

00:06:48.600 to go compete back when I first started

00:06:50.920 and was kind of going out of Michigan

00:06:53.740 and past these small local contests.

00:06:56.660 And I didn't expect to do well.

00:06:58.280 I was just starting out.

00:06:59.280 I just wanted to go see what it was like,

00:07:01.220 meet other women who were traveling to skate too. 0.98

00:07:03.980 And it was actually a qualifier where this happened.

00:07:07.400 And I actually placed above the person.

00:07:09.980 But I still thought this is really odd that they're allowing this.

00:07:13.640 And it wasn't a particularly great skateboarder in a men's division.

00:07:18.640 I don't think they would have even been in the contests at all.

00:07:22.400 But I saw this happening more and more.

00:07:25.920 And I saw that women's spaces in skateboarding 1.00

00:07:29.200 that weren't even competitive spaces,

00:07:31.700 but girls who would have like meetup groups, 0.89

00:07:34.740 they were always catering towards like transgender crowds. 0.88

00:07:40.820 You could not really have just a women's thing in skateboarding anymore. 1.00

00:07:44.820 And I thought that was very strange.

00:07:46.820 And I actually had a women's meetup group in Kalamazoo for a while

00:07:50.360 called Galamazoo because it was the gals of Kalamazoo.

00:07:53.680 And I got a lot of criticism from people in the community

00:07:57.260 because I would just put a girls' and women's skateboarding meetup on the flyers.

00:08:03.680 And they were like, why don't you write transgender and queer?

00:08:07.440 And I was like, because this is really about creating a community for the girls

00:08:11.740 and also letting families in the area know that there's a space

00:08:15.860 where they can take their young daughters to get free lessons

00:08:18.640 and have something to look forward to every month.

00:08:21.660 And I really want to focus on that.

00:08:23.680 Now, these are at public parks.

00:08:25.560 Anybody is welcome to come, but I'm not going to make the whole event about that.

00:08:29.680 And people got really upset about it, at least a few people.

00:08:32.680 Most people didn't care, to be honest.

00:08:34.260 But the next time I saw this happen was in 2020.

00:08:38.360 And it was a skater who was actually pretty well known.

00:08:43.040 And that was another thing I was noticing is a lot of these male skaters who identified as trans women

00:08:49.040 were getting sponsored, going pro, and getting a lot of attention for being mediocre male skateboarders,

00:08:55.520 to be completely honest.

00:08:56.680 And, you know, I don't think I'm the best skater in the world or anything,

00:09:00.640 but it is pretty clear that these individuals would not be getting the attention and sometimes even like the money that they're making

00:09:13.560 if they were recognized for what they are, which is men.

00:09:17.840 But in 2020, placed second, and I blew it off because I thought, you know what, this is a few hours from home.

00:09:26.060 It was in Chicago.

00:09:27.080 It was a locally organized thing.

00:09:28.760 There was no money involved.

00:09:29.900 And whatever, if this is how they want to run it.

00:09:33.160 I was kind of black-pilled at the time, to be honest.

00:09:35.400 I thought, well, the world is going to hurt, and what can I do about it?

00:09:41.060 But I heard of this happening more and more.

00:09:45.920 It happened at Red Bull, which was shocking to me because at this point it's financially impacting me.

00:09:51.700 And as soon as I spoke up, I got, I'm talking like not exaggerating,

00:09:57.040 hundreds of thousands of messages from people all over the world.

00:09:59.900 And a lot of these messages were from women who skated competitively,

00:10:03.860 who had been through something similar, or parents whose daughters or daughter had been through something similar.

00:10:10.540 And I get sent, you know, these photos from podiums, and I've actually shared some of those since,

00:10:16.880 obviously in other sports as well, but skateboarding is my realm.

00:10:22.060 And it's not like in swimming where there's one person doing this.

00:10:26.560 There are several.

00:10:27.360 I think there's like near a dozen that I know about, and I'm sure there's a lot more that I don't know about

00:10:32.960 because so many people are scared to say something or speak out about it.

00:10:36.720 But in skateboarding, it's very common.

00:10:39.320 And one thing I love about skateboarding is anybody can do it.

00:10:44.720 It does not matter, you know, how you identify or how you dress.

00:10:50.640 All you have to do is get a skateboard, go to the park and skate.

00:10:53.280 And honestly, I'm happy to skate with anybody who is at the skate park or at a spot and just wants to skate and have a good time.

00:10:59.360 And that's actually a really cool thing about skateboarding.

00:11:03.160 You don't have to try out for a team.

00:11:04.720 You don't have to get a bunch of crazy, fancy equipment.

00:11:07.080 You just need a board and some shoes and hopefully a helmet.

00:11:10.380 But when it gets into the competitive realm, it's clear that it's taking away opportunities from girls who are working really hard. 0.99

00:11:20.380 And I was a lot older than a lot of the girls in the group.

00:11:25.900 I was like in my late 20s now.

00:11:28.620 So I thought about like girls who are young, very young, like starting as children and getting really, really good.

00:11:37.340 And they're going to miss out on the opportunities that I had in the beginning.

00:11:42.440 And I don't want that to happen.

00:11:44.320 I want girls to actually have a place in skateboarding because it has always been male dominated. 1.00

00:11:49.320 And it's not easy to go and be the only girl at a skate park.

00:11:52.800 It's very intimidating.

00:11:54.500 And especially if you do have a women's space and you want it to be exclusively for women to be celebrated and to have opportunities.

00:12:04.100 And you're called all sorts of horrible names for that.

00:12:07.620 Girls are just not going to want to do it. 1.00

00:12:10.600 No, and I think all of that's really interesting.

00:12:14.380 But the piece to me that stuck out initially about your story was the financial impact because we didn't see this in swimming.

00:12:22.840 But it goes to show that this is affecting women's livelihoods, not just impacting their safety and their privacy and, you know, equal opportunity.

00:12:32.500 A lot of times this is their income.

00:12:35.660 This is their job.

00:12:36.740 This is how they provide for their families.

00:12:38.600 And now that I've seen it in skateboarding, I've seen it in a slew of other sports.

00:12:43.940 And again, it typically is sports people don't tend to watch, you know, like cycling and disc golf.

00:12:52.680 Yeah.

00:12:52.960 Weirdly enough, there's a lot of money in disc golf.

00:12:55.120 I don't know why we didn't do that.

00:12:57.020 Maybe we should have been disc golfers.

00:12:58.440 Here's a disc golfer, a male, who has taken, I think, $47,000 in prize money away from women just this year alone.

00:13:08.620 So I think the financial aspect piece is incredibly interesting.

00:13:13.980 After this, you spoke out.

00:13:15.660 I remember it going viral in such a short amount of time as well.

00:13:19.840 And you mentioned some of the support and stuff you got from parents and other athletes and I'm sure coaches and different things.

00:13:26.700 But what about the backlash, the negative response?

00:13:31.900 What seems to be a common trend, do you think?

00:13:35.300 Because in myself, I notice a trend of these comments and what they tend to be.

00:13:40.420 Have you noticed any kind of trend or really what has this backlash looked like for you?

00:13:45.540 Absolutely.

00:13:47.440 For me, actually, in a weird way, I'm really grateful for the backlash because I feel like it made the story blow up more.

00:13:54.800 In the post that I made originally, I talked about being done, being bullied into silence, and all the comments showed exactly what I was talking about.

00:14:06.180 And I think that's happened for you, too.

00:14:07.820 Like when you were in San Francisco and were assaulted, that was absolutely horrific.

00:14:14.220 But what happened is your story ended up blowing up so much bigger.

00:14:20.040 You were able to use it for positives.

00:14:22.440 And I am still so angry that that happened.

00:14:26.140 But now you have a lot more people aware of what had happened to you.

00:14:31.840 But I think a lot of the comments were not, you know, I disagree and this is why and this is my stance.

00:14:43.680 They were personal attacks.

00:14:45.820 They were threats.

00:14:47.200 I received death threats.

00:14:48.640 In my case, one factor that was kind of interesting, that was something I don't think we had seen from other female athletes who'd spoken up, is there was a huge amount of anti-Semitism.

00:14:59.380 In fact, I think there were more anti-Semitic comments than there were comments about what I was talking about with males and women in sports.

00:15:06.840 So, it showed that people did not have a firm stance that they could argue.

00:15:15.360 They just wanted to say the worst thing that they could think of to try to make you feel bad or try to shut you up or try to scare you.

00:15:21.840 But I think that's pretty much what's happened to all of us.

00:15:26.260 I know you shared messages where people attack you for your looks, which is insane because you're beautiful.

00:15:31.180 And it's always someone who has no business talking smack about the way you look.

00:15:38.240 But that's been a similar thing with me.

00:15:41.380 And what was really scary, though, is there were people I had posts that I ended up removing because I was so disturbed by the content or by the comments, like people threatening to kill my pets.

00:15:55.720 Yeah, that was really messed up.

00:15:58.140 But I got called, like, a war criminal because I'm a Jew.

00:16:03.760 I got called a Mossad agent, which I thought that was kind of cool that they were accusing me of being a Mossad agent.

00:16:12.360 No, I'm just kidding.

00:16:13.440 But, you know, colonizer.

00:16:17.300 There are people telling me that I was a white supremacist, which it was mostly white people calling me a white supremacist.

00:16:25.460 And then it was people, like, saying horrible things about me being a Jew while calling me a bigot, which is a very interesting dynamic there.

00:16:35.260 But, yeah, they go after you to try to shut you up because they don't want to have to deal with the reality that we're speaking facts.

00:16:42.840 And if someone actually leaves a respectful comment that is like, I disagree, that's one thing.

00:16:50.580 And, you know, you have every right to have your opinion.

00:16:53.920 I think you're wrong.

00:16:54.860 But at least you can present it in a way that isn't just personal attacks or threatening to kill my family.

00:17:02.460 You know?

00:17:02.760 No, absolutely.

00:17:04.980 What was some of the worst stuff that you got?

00:17:08.200 You know, it's just as you mentioned, it's always, it's because they can't dissuade from the argument.

00:17:15.500 And so they resort to, you know, maybe you should have just swam faster.

00:17:19.620 You're not even a nice swimmer if you were losing to begin with.

00:17:23.200 Maybe you should have just swam faster.

00:17:24.780 Which, as you said, it cracks me up because it's like, have you ever played a sport in your entire life?

00:17:32.080 It's laughable.

00:17:33.360 Like, yeah, I got, I got a lot of that, too. 1.00

00:17:36.200 Like, you just suck at skateboarding. 0.50

00:17:38.160 I'm like, well, I did play second above all the other women who were there. 0.97

00:17:42.220 And my contest history for that whole previous year is pretty good.

00:17:46.060 And, you know, I've had contests where I do really well, ones where I do really poorly.

00:17:50.500 And that's fine.

00:17:51.720 That's part of being an athlete.

00:17:53.400 But when someone's cheating, like, that doesn't say anything about my skill.

00:17:59.620 No, it doesn't.

00:18:01.120 And people don't realize that if they've never played.

00:18:04.720 Yeah.

00:18:05.640 Lemons to Lemonade.

00:18:07.020 You have now, as you said, your life has changed.

00:18:10.880 The direction that you were going in has now been redirected.

00:18:15.460 And so talk about where you're working now.

00:18:19.020 It has brought you a fiance.

00:18:22.440 Yeah.

00:18:22.820 You've recently engaged, which is just incredible.

00:18:26.900 And it shows you how really not everything that has come from this has been entirely negative.

00:18:34.020 So talk about that.

00:18:35.520 Oh, yeah.

00:18:36.240 Most of it has been positive.

00:18:37.820 But at the time that I spoke up, I was actually planning to do something completely differently.

00:18:45.940 I was working on getting set up to do this program in Israel where I was going to go do work trade on a farm and learn how to grow strawberries in the desert, basically.

00:18:58.800 And, like, get a stipend and get a stipend and live there.

00:19:03.220 And instead, I came back to America, which I was planning to do regardless. 0.93

00:19:09.060 But I had ended up getting a lot of people reaching out to me, supporting me.

00:19:15.620 But one of those people was Tim Pool.

00:19:17.800 And I didn't know who Tim was at the time.

00:19:20.480 But he reached out and called me after posting on Twitter that TimCast will pay Taylor Silverman the two thousand whatever dollars that was cut from her paycheck for placing second.

00:19:34.140 And I watched them talk about me on TimCast IRL that night.

00:19:39.620 And it was the first time that I felt like the story was covered completely accurate.

00:19:44.640 Because any time that something blows up in the news, like, especially with skateboarding and anything like that, where you may not fully understand it if you don't do it.

00:19:54.420 There was a lot of stuff that I cringed at the way that they talked about it.

00:19:58.460 And I felt like it wasn't quite exactly right.

00:20:01.020 But I didn't have control over it.

00:20:02.780 It's the media.

00:20:04.140 And they're doing their best.

00:20:05.800 But Tim and the IRL crew, they talked about it exactly as it was.

00:20:11.120 He understood how these contests worked because he skates.

00:20:13.960 And he skated longer than me.

00:20:16.440 But he gave me a call and he asked if I would come out as a guest and hang out and skate.

00:20:21.900 He told me about some of the plans that he had for the company.

00:20:25.800 And he basically told me, you know, you really should think about what you want to do next.

00:20:30.440 And I was really grateful because at the time I thought, OK, this is a good person to have as a mentor and to, you know, kind of talk about what I should plan to do after this.

00:20:44.560 Because I probably had a lot of opportunities and I wanted to use them.

00:20:48.640 But I didn't understand that he was saying, what do you want to do working for me?

00:20:53.840 So I ended up going out there a few weeks later.

00:20:58.980 At the time, I was really scared to come back to America because I was still in Israel.

00:21:03.260 And I thought if I went back to America, there would be people with like pitchforks and like coming outside my house to try to kill me, which wasn't the case at all.

00:21:16.300 But because of all the online stuff, I had this like illusion in my head that this was real.

00:21:22.860 But a few weeks passed.

00:21:24.520 I go back.

00:21:25.420 I made a couple of stops, went out to Timcast, hung out for a couple of days.

00:21:29.780 And he asked if I'd stay for a week.

00:21:31.180 Like I stayed and at the end of the week, he said, do you want to just move down here and join Timcast and just do some work here?

00:21:40.640 And I was like, this is probably the best place for me to be right now.

00:21:44.340 I didn't really want to go back to Kalamazoo, which is a college town in Michigan, three colleges in one city.

00:21:51.200 And I thought this isn't the best place for me.

00:21:55.300 So I came out to Timcast not really knowing what to expect.

00:21:59.400 And I have been here ever since.

00:22:01.180 I still work on a show called Cast Castle, which is a comedy show where I kind of make fun of woke stuff and spoof current events, which is a lot of fun.

00:22:12.900 And working out here, I met my fiancee because he was hired not long after me as a writer and filmer.

00:22:23.720 And at the time, we were just friends for many months.

00:22:28.180 And then finally, we started dating and pretty much everyone at work was like, yeah, it's about time.

00:22:35.360 We knew that was going to happen, but we just got engaged back in May.

00:22:40.660 And now I'm currently working on some new projects at Timcast.

00:22:45.220 I can't really talk about them too much, but stay tuned.

00:22:49.200 And hopefully, we'll be able to announce more soon.

00:22:53.340 We love a teaser.

00:22:55.560 But as you mentioned, you're from Kalamazoo.

00:22:59.960 And the other day, I was watching Jesse Waters on Fox.

00:23:03.300 And this dad comes on and he talks about an incident that's happening and continuing.

00:23:11.760 It's ongoing right next to Kalamazoo in Vicksburg, Michigan.

00:23:15.900 I remember being appalled watching this.

00:23:20.160 Actually, at this point, I'm not surprised anymore.

00:23:22.280 Of course, it's still appalling, but I wasn't necessarily surprised when this dad got on to talk about the incident that was happening.

00:23:31.120 Because this is close to home for you, do you kind of want to fill us in on what I'm talking about and what they're doing moving forward to trying to try and, I guess, combat this?

00:23:43.940 Yeah, so I found out about this just a few days before the Jesse Waters interview.

00:23:51.160 Someone from Kalamazoo reached out to me, sent me the article, and immediately I wanted to do whatever I could to help these families and this attorney.

00:24:00.280 So I sent out some statements and tried to get media aware of what was going on.

00:24:08.520 And luckily, it was covered by several different outlets.

00:24:11.740 But basically, in Vicksburg, Michigan, which is southwest Michigan, there are four families who are suing the school because they have allowed a male student to use the girls' bathroom and locker room.

00:24:28.660 And there have been really uncomfortable incidents that have occurred from this for the girls in the school.

00:24:33.880 And in the beginning, the girls actually went to school officials, went to the principal, and raised their concerns and said they were uncomfortable, they didn't feel safe.

00:24:45.360 And the school told them to just deal with it and to not bully the student and to just basically look the other way or that they could use a different bathroom if they didn't feel comfortable.

00:24:58.780 And the lawsuit states a lot, you can look it up and seek it online, but there was girls who had said that they had been exposed to male undressed.

00:25:13.720 There was an incident where, it doesn't go into complete detail, but you can probably guess what happened, where someone had an embarrassing experience with their menstrual cycle because they were scared to go to the bathroom.

00:25:29.880 Which, like, I can't imagine as a teenage girl how mortifying that would be, or being at school and being uncomfortable all day because you're trying to hold it because you are too scared to go to the restroom.

00:25:43.140 Like, school is a place where girls and all students should feel safe and comfortable.

00:25:48.420 And unfortunately, these families' daughters were not able to have that at their school. 1.00

00:25:53.660 And there has been a lot of really interesting stuff that has come out since this family spoke up.

00:26:01.480 And the interview was with Rich Cutshaw, he's one of the dads in the case, and Matthew DiPerno, who's the attorney.

00:26:09.260 And they have been reached out to by other families now, some at the middle school, who had children in middle school.

00:26:21.860 I believe it was both sixth and eighth grade, who came home from school the first week of school and said to their parents that there was a teacher in the middle school, I believe by the name of Ashley Mann, who had been telling students that they could switch their pronouns and it would be a special secret between her and them.

00:26:42.660 And their parents didn't have to know.

00:26:44.260 And luckily, these parents and children have good relationships where the kids can come straight to their parents and tell them what's going on.

00:26:52.220 But I'm sure there's a lot of students who didn't feel comfortable doing that, too.

00:26:57.200 But these parents have really had enough.

00:27:00.520 And there's more and more things that keep coming out.

00:27:03.400 Like, the school board president, who has basically said, we can't do anything about this, and the girls can just deal with it. 0.99

00:27:11.300 It turns out that his son is a convicted pedophile.

00:27:15.240 And that he had made some statements, like, that almost sound like he was defending him. 0.74

00:27:23.820 Which I understand, he's your kid, but it's just really crazy.

00:27:30.640 Like, it's just a deep rabbit hole that keeps going.

00:27:33.840 And I'm really interested to see what happens next.

00:27:37.080 But, unfortunately, what's already been done can't be undone.

00:27:42.560 And what these girls went through is something that they can't, like, unexperience.

00:27:49.900 And I'm sure it was very traumatic, especially at that age.

00:27:52.780 But I'm very grateful that they're speaking up now and families are speaking up now because hopefully that will prevent future students and current students from going through the same thing.

00:28:04.420 But it reminded me a lot of the Loudoun County case, which was out in Virginia, where there was a young girl who was sexually assaulted in a restroom by a student who I believe was transferred from another school.

00:28:22.780 Where they had done the same thing to a different girl.

00:28:26.080 Oh, my gosh.

00:28:27.280 No, I know.

00:28:27.820 And speaking of, what I think is so interesting about this case is the man who was using the women's restroom, he was still standing while urinating.

00:28:38.160 Yeah, yeah.

00:28:38.960 There's a perfect hell sign that this is not gender dysphoria. 0.97

00:28:45.600 Because if you were truly struggling with, and you were truly dysphoric about your gender, you would never stand in a woman's restroom to urinate. 0.56

00:28:57.100 I mean, you just wouldn't do it because it would make you even more dysphoric than you were.

00:29:00.460 If you really thought in the wrong body, you would not be doing that.

00:29:04.360 But that shows you, it tells you, it perfectly highlights with women being the collateral damage, those poor young girls, as you said, I mean, it's traumatic.

00:29:16.660 It shows you that it's a bigger problem than just live and let be with this whole, all the gender ideology stuff. 0.94

00:29:27.200 Yes.

00:29:27.880 And that's not in place or being taken advantage of.

00:29:29.980 And to my knowledge, it was the mother of this male student who actually was threatening the school, saying, if you don't let my child use whatever bathroom they're comfortable with, we're going to sue you.

00:29:43.680 And it seemed like it was orchestrated by the mother based on what I've heard, which is very sad that there are parents now who are actually encouraging their kids to do this sort of stuff.

00:29:54.600 And kids can't consent.

00:29:58.500 I think that the parents do play a big role in it.

00:30:01.940 But what's funny is the school was scared of being sued by that mother and now is getting sued by multiple families.

00:30:09.200 But I think that needs to happen more often.

00:30:11.800 Yeah.

00:30:12.000 I think more and more people need to hit these people where it hurts, which is, of course, the pocket.

00:30:19.720 And I think we, I mean, we saw that with Bud Light.

00:30:22.020 We've seen that in several instances now.

00:30:24.220 And so I think people are becoming more bold.

00:30:27.860 They're understanding the power that they have as consumers, as parents.

00:30:33.740 I mean, those are their children.

00:30:36.060 Yeah.

00:30:36.960 So as we talked about the school board leader and or the principal, whoever he was, who said, there's nothing we can do.

00:30:44.940 I'm sick of hearing that.

00:30:46.760 I'm sick of hearing that excuse.

00:30:48.300 I'm sick of people saying it, whether that's, you know, your everyday American who hasn't been impacted, the parent to someone who has.

00:30:57.400 I'm sick of people saying that there's nothing they can do because there is something they can do.

00:31:03.500 There's always something you can do, even if it's as simple as a saying no, which is not hard to do.

00:31:11.820 That doesn't require any sort of I mean, it doesn't require anything.

00:31:17.820 It requires common sense and to understand that women deserve that. 1.00

00:31:23.460 Children deserve that.

00:31:25.140 And so I'm me personally, if I have to hear one more person say, you know, they're scared to speak out or whatever.

00:31:33.100 I don't want to hear it.

00:31:34.260 I'm sick of that excuse.

00:31:35.480 And I really don't have a lot of sympathy for it anymore.

00:31:37.880 If I'm being totally honest.

00:31:39.140 I can relate to that in the beginning.

00:31:42.280 I think I had more sympathy for it, especially when I was facing all the heat with the online harassment.

00:31:48.820 But it blew over.

00:31:51.520 I've had a lot of positive things come from this.

00:31:54.480 I think some progress has been made.

00:31:56.860 But I think it's really messed up that we have to advocate for ourselves on this.

00:32:00.920 Like you should never have had to speak up about this in the first place.

00:32:04.400 Your school should have taken action.

00:32:06.400 I shouldn't have had to speak up about this.

00:32:08.660 Red Bull and the contest organizer, The Border, they should have taken action.

00:32:14.000 The girls should not have had to face harassment over this. 1.00

00:32:17.380 And a lot of people, unfortunately, can't handle bullying like that.

00:32:23.120 That is too terrifying for them.

00:32:25.440 Like there was recently, just like a week or a little over a week ago, a downhill skateboarder.

00:32:33.340 It's not the same as like park skateboarding and like doing tricks like I do.

00:32:38.200 But like downhill racing and they slide and it's really cool.

00:32:41.620 They they're like hauling ass down a hill. 0.94

00:32:43.760 And like it's it's not something I can do, but they're totally separate things.

00:32:51.340 It'd be like comparing like you're swimming to synchronized swimming.

00:32:54.860 Like, yes, you're both in a pool, but totally separate things.

00:32:57.500 But a downhill skateboarder spoke up and I believe a meeting was actually held on like Zoom or something.

00:33:05.720 I haven't seen the whole meeting.

00:33:07.140 But what followed is she made an Instagram post saying, you know, I've been accused of being transphobic.

00:33:12.760 I'm not.

00:33:13.460 But she was still trying to hold the position that like trans women are women, which I thought it might be difficult to get support while still saying that because it kind of defeats your own argument. 0.98

00:33:26.620 But she was saying, you know, how much how much fairness are we willing to sacrifice for inclusivity?

00:33:35.040 And within a few days, unfortunately, due to the harassment that she faced and she said like violent threats, even she not only deleted the post, she deleted her entire Instagram.

00:33:48.220 And there was an there was a skateboarder as well, another skateboarder who had placed third, I believe, in one of the contests that I posted about that I wasn't in, but it was one that was sent to me in New York.

00:34:02.060 One of the girls who was bumped back in placings, she made a video talking about it. 0.58

00:34:07.700 And within a couple of days, possibly even less, she deleted the video because people go after you.

00:34:14.420 And it makes me lucky.

00:34:16.560 Like, it makes me feel lucky that I was like the youngest child and I had older siblings who teased me and bullied me all the time because you should be able to take that.

00:34:26.460 It's it's most of its strangers on anonymous accounts anyway.

00:34:29.900 Like, who really cares what they have to say?

00:34:32.200 You should be more focused about the people in your life, your family, your friends, and also doing what is right and what I believe God would want us to do.

00:34:42.660 I think that's really important.

00:34:44.360 And people should know that they're never alone in speaking up with this.

00:34:47.600 Even if you're alone here, God is always with you in speaking up with us.

00:34:51.760 At least that's my experience.

00:34:53.880 And I think a lot of people's experience.

00:34:56.940 But, yeah, a lot of people, they can't handle the bullying and they want to just step out of it and not be involved.

00:35:06.040 And or many are scared to even say anything in the first place because they know that could happen.

00:35:10.800 And I think it's really unfortunate.

00:35:13.560 And I hope that people see stories like yours, stories like mine, where you get through that part of it and actually a lot of positive things come out of it.

00:35:24.360 And I hope they recognize that's the only way we're going to make a change.

00:35:29.600 But until then, like, get used to not having rights, basically.

00:35:36.400 If you're not willing to stand up for yourself.

00:35:38.700 Exactly.

00:35:40.340 Which is why more people than you know are grateful for you and for your platform and how you continue to advocate.

00:35:50.180 For you as well.

00:35:51.840 Yeah, well, we're in it together.

00:35:54.320 We have been from the beginning, pretty much.

00:35:57.840 I think that's going to continue in the future.

00:36:01.460 And so I'm grateful you came on here.

00:36:03.760 This is like a full circle moment.

00:36:05.200 If you think, yeah, you little us at CPAC a few, what, two years ago, a year ago, whenever it was.

00:36:13.060 I mean, it's been a lot of learning, a lot of adapting, a lot of growing and maturing and understanding the different nuances of it and how to communicate and blah, blah, blah since that point.

00:36:25.700 But here we are still fighting.

00:36:27.880 So I couldn't be more grateful for you.

00:36:57.880 And leaders, whether that's community leaders, national leaders, school board leaders, with effective communication tools and resources to be inspired and empowered to know that we are the majority.

00:37:10.060 And you can find that at www.rallygaincenter.org.

00:37:13.940 I'll catch you all next week.

00:37:14.900 I'll catch you all next week.

Gaines for Girls with Riley Gaines - September 27, 2023

RILEY GAINES PODCAST： Taylor Silverman's Fight for Fairness

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