Women’s sports advocate Riley Gaines announced over the weekend that she is expecting her first child.
Gaines made the announcement at a Turning Point USA conference, where she touched on her public feud with Olympic gymnast Simone Biles that occurred earlier this month.
To recap, the feud started when Gaines posted a photo of a high school softball league that won a state championship. Gaines noted that the “star player” on the squad is a boy who thinks he is a girl.
“To be expected when your star player is a boy,” Gaines said in response to the post about the team.
Biles saw Gaines’ post, and wrote: “Bully someone your own size, which would ironically be a male.”
Predictably, many users pointed out that Biles was body-shaming Gaines by comparing her to the size of a man. Biles eventually posted a cringey apology to Gaines.
At the Turning Point conference, Gaines said: “I think the funniest thing about this to me, and her [Biles] saying, ‘Bully someone your own size, which would ironically be a man,’ How many men do you know that have this?”
Gaines showed her baby bump and ultrasound photos during her remarks.
In a follow-up post, she confirmed that she is 26 weeks pregnant with her daughter.
Gaines and her husband, Louis Barker, got married in 2022. Around this time, she began publicly speaking out about her experience competing against Will “Lia” Thomas, a man who masquerades as a woman and competed on the University of Pennsylvania women’s swim team.
Gaines was required to share a locker room with Thomas, she told me in an interview in 2023. At the NCAA swimming championships in 2022, she tied with Thomas. Thomas was permitted to take the trophy home from the competition while Gaines left empty-handed.
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