As modern feminism applauds ‘365 days’ of a man caricaturing women, female athletes across the country are still fighting to be recognized for their merit. Society has once again conflated women’s demand for recognition with a petulant plea for a gold star.
Earlier this month, Drew Barrymore hosted ubiquitous social media presence Dylan Mulvaney on her morning talk show. Mulvaney, a Broadway actor turned trans-activist, has amassed 10.8 million TikTok and 1.7 million Instagram followers for a video series detailing his gender transition entitled ‘Days of Girlhood’.
The initial posts promoted pithy and upbeat caricatures of womanhood, relying largely on stereotypes that women have fought to overcome. “I have already cried three times. I wrote a scathing email that I did not send,” he said on his inaugural ‘day of being a girl’ early last March. "I ordered dresses online that I couldn’t afford, and then when someone asked me how I was, I said, “I’m fine,” when I wasn’t fine.”
Dylan applied lipgloss and spiked the camera. “So, how’d I do, ladies?”
On Day 66, Mulvaney traversed the outdoors in a sports bra and Lululemon shorts. “Trees? I love ‘em. Water, lakes? I love ‘em. Heels? They’re my hiking heels,” he said, pointing to the heeled sandals on his feet. “I love ‘em!” Just moments later, Mulvaney falls to the ground in a panic to avoid a bug.
Mulvaney began to tackle more weighty topics (walking viewers through facial feminization surgery in gruesome detail), and was awarded substantial opportunities for women in business — an Ulta Beauty podcast titled The Beauty of…Girlhood. A panel at the Forbes Power Women Summit. Even an audience with the leader of the free world, Joe Biden.
Today’s feminists are on-board, with President Biden’s administration at the helm of the ship. In his Biden Agenda for Women, the President pledged to ensure coverage for comprehensive care, including surgeries related to transitioning, like Dylan’s mentioned above.
“Transgender Americans continue to face discrimination, harassment, and barriers to opportunity,” he said in a 2022 Proclamation on Transgender Day of Visibility. “Transgender people are some of the bravest Americans I know, and our nation and the world are stronger, more vibrant, and more prosperous because of them. To transgender Americans of all ages, I want you to know that you are so brave. You belong. I have your back.”
Mulvaney appeared on The Barrymore Show to promote the culmination of his rousing success — a performance at the iconic Rainbow Room in New York City, entitled Dylan Mulvaney’s Day 365 Live! In a widely circulated moment, Barrymore grasped his hand as the pair discussed filtering out critics and negativity. “It’s interesting,” he said, “because I look at you, and I can’t imagine anyone disliking you.”
“Oh please,” Drew scoffed, sliding off of her chair and onto her knees in front of him. “Do you want to know, ironically, who dislikes me most sometimes? Myself.”
By now, you may think you know where this is going. This moment has been cited ad-nauseum in the media, with conservative commentators painting child-star Barrymore as a poster child for today’s feminists – a woman on her knees in a gesture of saccharine self-loathing, ingratiating herself to the patriarchy.
However, little nuanced conversation has been had about the more complicated questions at play. When did the feminist movement shift to affirming identity and away from affirming merit? How might this seemingly harmless cultural affirmation devalue the accomplishments of women and girls? And, importantly, who has their back?
Swimmer Riley Gaines has answers.
Gaines, who began training at the age of 4, was recruited by the University of Kentucky in 2018 where her “major time commitment” and “lifelong journey” paid off. In her first three years of competition, she became a five-time SEC champion and twelve-time NCAA All-American.
However, the emergence of transgender athlete Lia Thomas rocked the sport she once knew and raised new questions about transgender inclusion and fairness in women’s sports.
Thomas, who competed on the men’s team at the University of Pennsylvania for three years, joined the women’s team in 2022 after a gap-year necessitated by the COVID pandemic. After smashing numerous records, Thomas became the first transgender person to compete in the NCAA Swimming and Diving Championships, winning the 500-meter freestyle, placing eighth in the 100-meter, and tying Gaines for fifth in the 200-meter competition (an event in which he ranked 554th in the 2018-19 men’s competition).
“I was going into the race with my hands tied behind my back,” Gaines later said.
There was only one fifth place trophy to be awarded. NCAA officials gave it to Thomas. Gaines, they said, would receive hers in the mail.
“They said that Lia had to have it for pictures because the NCAA wanted to be seen as welcoming and virtuous and kind,” Gaines told me over the phone. “It reduced everything I had done, everything my teammates, all of the women at that meet, and every elite athlete had done.”
“It’s not kind to degrade the accomplishments of the very female athletes who Title IX was created to showcase and recognize and celebrate. It's not virtuous to allow a biological male equipped with and exposing male genitalia to be in our locker room,” she continued. “That's traumatic. That is not kind.”
Later in the season, Thomas was nominated for the prestigious NCAA Woman of the Year award. Other transgender athletes have recently risen to similar acclaim including power-lifters JayCee Cooper and Laurel Hubbard (the first transgender person to compete at the Olympics) and basketball player Layshia Clarendon (who won the WNBA Community Assist Award in 2021).
Thomas has publicly pushed back on claims that he transitioned for a competitive edge. However, according to a study released last year by the National Library of Medicine entitled Transwoman Elite Athletes: Their Extra Percentage Relative to Female Physiology, biology doesn’t care much about intent. “Male anatomical sex differences driven by testosterone levels,” it says, “are not reversible.”
“Given that sports are currently segregated into male and female divisions because of superior male athletic performance, and that estrogen therapy will not reverse most athletic performance parameters,” says the study, “it follows that transgender women will enter the female division with an inherent advantage because of their prior male physiology.”
Gaines, who graduated in 2022, has continued to fight from the sidelines as a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum. Last week, she was physically attacked and held for ransom by trans-rights activists after a speech at San Francisco State University.
Although she never considered herself a feminist, she is inadvertently at the helm of a new gender movement. “It’s almost comical,” she said to me. “I’m simply saying that men should not take from women, and I am described by Fox News as the country’s number one defender of women’s rights.” This stance, which used to be the basic tenet of feminism, has been cast aside by modern feminists ingratiating themselves to the patriarchy.
In a recent interview for the Daily Signal, she asked, “where’s Billie Jean King, who’s a trailblazer? She’s fighting for trans inclusion. Where’s Megan Rapinoe, who fought relentlessly for equal pay and equal resources, and equal access for women’s sports? Oh, she’s fighting for trans inclusion.”
“Where are the people who once believed that women, real women in all of their uniqueness, could conquer the world and deserved respect and deserved equal opportunities?”
Athletes like surfer Bethany Hamilton, tennis legend Martina Navratilova and cyclist Hannah Arensman have joined Gaines in calling attention to this dissonance. “We’re watching the denial of the most basic of truths,” Gaines said. “When you can’t acknowledge what a woman is, there’s a huge problem.”
“Now, a year later, I see a clear link. This is more than just sports,” she told me. If transgender identity is affirmed and celebrated on a cultural level, it follows logically that it must be affirmed on all levels – in sports, locker rooms, bathrooms, scholarships, schools, prisons. “The systems that we have in place are just setting women and children up to be taken advantage of.”
As a “new feminist,” Gaines fights for respect, equal opportunity and sex protected spaces. “Women have our own set of struggles and our own physical ceilings and limitations that our bodies have that a man could never understand,” she said, “regardless of hormone suppressors and estrogen that you take, because we as women are more than just a testosterone level.”
“If I’m labeled a transphobic person for that,” she said, “then they’re misogynist.”
Dylan Mulvaney’s Day 365 Live! was the event of the season, drawing the who’s who of Broadway to Rockefeller Center. No detail was overlooked, no expense spared in Mulvaney’s honor – including a stay at the Plaza Hotel, sponsorships by K18 Hair and Maybelline, intricate ball gowns by Christian Siriano and a letter of congratulations from Vice President Kamala Harris. Even Bud Light joined the conversation and sponsored Mulvaney in April.
“For the next hour and change, she will sing, dance, cry, have multiple costume changes, and be held by a family that has chosen her again and again,” said CT Jones of the performance for Rolling Stone. “It’s not her wedding. Or her birthday. The girl is trans-TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney — and it’s her 365th day of being a girl.”
Riley Gaines received her trophy in the mail unceremoniously months after the meet. “It was totally devalued to me at that point. I don't even want that stupid trophy. I'm a twelve-time All American – I have lots of those at home.”
To this day, she hasn’t taken it out of the box.
Grace Bydalek is a Nebraska native living on the Upper West Side. She is the Director of the Dissident Project, a theatre critic for the New York Sun, and an independent journalist focused on culture, politics and faith.
Published in The Conservateur on April 13th, 2023.