It is not only unedifying when a female politician — a woman who might well one day aspire to the presidency — stoops to the catty theatrics of an American high-school movie, it’s a gift to old-school sexists.
On the other hand, it is tremendous fun to watch.
Earlier this week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unsheathed her manicured claws to swipe at Riley Gaines, the former college swimmer who campaigns for fairness in women’s sport.
Gaines had posted a photograph of Ocasio-Cortez at a rally alongside Senator Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, with the caption: “We’re being destroyed from within.” Ocasio-Cortez shot back: “Maybe if you channelled all this anger into swimming faster you wouldn’t have come in fifth.”
It was not just undignified but staggeringly disingenuous. Gaines tied for fifth place with Lia Thomas — a male swimmer who competed in the women’s category — at the 2022 NCAA championships.
“It’s always hilarious when they think they’ve landed a ‘gotcha’ by pointing out I was the fifth-fastest woman in the nation,” she wrote in response, “Yet conveniently forget the mediocre man who ranked 462nd in the men’s division.”
Thomas, a 6’1” man first allowed to compete on the University of Pennsylvania women’s team that year, became the accidental poster boy for anyone concerned about fairness in sport. The sight of him standing on the women’s podium, a head taller than the other competitors, forced pundits and politicians to confront the absurdity of the claim that “transwomen are women.”
His teammates paid the price for everyone else’s denial. Paula Scanlan told the U.S. Congress that she and her fellow female swimmers were expected to change alongside Thomas 18 times a week. When they objected, university officials told them they needed to be “re-educated”. Speaking later to the New York Post, Scanlan — who had turned to swimming to recover from a sexual assault at sixteen — said being forced to share a changing room with an obviously male teammate gave her “nightmares for weeks about men being there while we were dressing.”
It wasn’t just Thomas’s teammates who were affected. When Gaines tied with him at nationals, he was handed the women’s trophy and she was not. Infuriated by the injustice, Gaines was propelled into activism, becoming a leading advocate for single-sex sporting categories. Fighting for fairness has come at a cost: later that year she was forced to barricade herself inside a room at San Francisco State University after a mob of around 100 trans activists tried to prevent her from speaking. As one might expect from an athlete, rather than backing away from the challenge, Gaines pushed on.
That Ocasio-Cortez should mock a woman like Gaines — a campaigner for women’s rights without the staffers and security afforded to high-profile politicians — is particularly grotesque. This is the same congresswoman who once told her colleagues, “As elected officials, we are expected to do better, to act as an example of how we can debate passionately but treat one another with compassion, dignity, and respect.” It seems her compassion extends only to men unjustly rewarded for claiming to be women.
It was a cheap shot even by social media standards
Unwilling to let the matter drop, Gaines went on Fox News to challenge Ocasio-Cortez to a debate on women’s sport. “Any of the radical, insane Democratic policies and platforms that they stand for, I will debate the opposite,” she said. Ocasio-Cortez replied online: “And I would like to challenge this person to get a real job.”
It was a cheap shot even by social media standards. Gaines, who now works full-time campaigning for sex-based sport and is the mother of a young daughter, hit back that motherhood is “the most important and rewarding job in the world.” She added that if Ocasio-Cortez “had a baby girl like I do, you’d understand my positions a little better.”
The episode was revealing. Ocasio-Cortez, the self-styled champion of kindness in politics, could have taken the opportunity to engage with an issue that matters to millions of women. Instead, she reached for the reflexive sneer. It’s the politics of performance — heavy on self-promotion and one-liners, light on substance — and it’s why so many women now find the self-described progressives every bit as condescending as the old boys they claim to have replaced.
