Riley Gaines, One of America’s Most Notorious Anti-Trans Activists, Was Appointed to a Tennessee Library Board
Former swimmer Riley Gaines appointed to Tennessee library board amid anti-LGBTQ+ book push.
One of America’s most vocal anti-trans activists has been appointed to a Tennessee library board as conservatives attempt to force an LGBTQ+ book ban.
On Tuesday, former collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines announced her appointment to the Sumner County Library Board in the greater Nashville area, remarking that she was “honored to serve the community I grew up in and the one where we’ll raise our daughter.” “If you want to see change, don’t wait for someone else to make it happen,” Gaines said in a post on X. “Step up and be that change yourself.”
Gaines initially gained attention in 2022 after tying for fifth place in the 200-yard NCAA freestyle championship with University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, who is an out trans woman. Despite the fact that both she and Thomas were beaten by four cis women, Gaines would appear in a campaign ad for Sen. Rand Paul (R) just months later, in which she lamented women’s dreams of glory being “taken away by men competing in women’s sports.” At the time, estimates suggested that just 32 trans athletes, in total, had competed in college sports within the past decade.
Over the past three years, Gaines has used her platform to repeatedly doxx and harass trans people, including a trans student who won homecoming queen at her Missouri high school in 2023. “Another reminder to all girls that men make the best women,” she tweeted at the time. Less than a month after that incident, she would declare October 10 to be “Real Women’s Day,” a fictitious holiday intended to demean trans women. Gaines has also launched a nationwide tour to keep trans women out of sports.
In an interview with The New York Times this August, Gaines admitted the goal of her advocacy is to decimate trans rights. “The gender ideology movement is a house of cards, and I believe it’s lying on that sports issue,” she said. “This will be the card that makes all of it crumble.”
Gaines’ appointment drew sharp criticism from members of the local LGBTQ+ community, who worry about the impact that it could have on Sumner County’s queer population, particularly youth. Morgxn, a singer-songwriter who moved to Gallatin with his husband in 2021, says her installation to the library board is a “sad grab for relevancy for a person who’s made an entire career out of demonizing other people.”
“The thing is: Libraries are meant to be safe spaces,” he tells Queer Agenda. “If you have a problem with a book that your child is reading, then you should not have your child read that book. That is for a parent to have that [conversation] with their child, and to mandate it from a f*cking fifth-place swimmer is a joke.”
Critics of Gaines’ appointment note that her nomination was pushed through under unusual circumstances. Although the Sumner County Commission was scheduled to meet on Monday evening to discuss whether to reduce the number of library board members from nine to seven, the subject turned to Gaines. Earlier the same day, she posted photos to X of two trans-inclusive children’s books allegedly housed at Sumner County Libraries: Call Me Max and Fred Gets Dressed. Gaines urged librarians to “remove this filth” in an accompanying caption, and by the morning, she was the newest member of the Sumner County Library Board.
Emma Diaz, a local psychologist and LGBTQ+ advocate, tells Queer Agenda that the queer community and its allies had no prior notice that Gaines’ candidacy was under consideration, giving them no time to organize against it. It’s unclear, she adds, whether Gaines is even qualified for the position. Although she attended high school in Gallatin and reportedly lives in the area, her background is not in Library and Information Science. She graduated from the University of Kentucky in 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in Health Science.
“I think there are some questions about: Were they allowed to make this nomination without any application process, without any transparency? Were they allowed to put this for a vote?” Diaz says. “Her interest was a mean tweet that was sent. I don’t see any world in which that is the same as applying and showing that you’re qualified for a position as a government official.”
Supporters of inclusion say their hope is to contest Gaines’ appointment, which many believe was intended to stack the deck in favor of a potential LGBTQ+ book ban. Although conservatives have been attempting for months to force through a policy removing queer-affirming literature from the shelves, the vote was gridlocked at 4-3 against the ban. With two open seats on the board, the issue put before the Sumner County Commission on Monday was whether to keep the board the way it was — in which liberals had a slim majority — or fill the two vacancies.
Conservatives elected to seize an opportunity. In a Facebook post the following day, County Commissioner Tim Jones openly admitted that having another right-wing voice on the Sumner County Library Board gave book banners the numbers that they needed.
“The Library Board will return to a conservative board!” he wrote. “The question at stake was the fate of our county libraries. Removing transgender ideological books was not technically on the agenda, but reducing the board from nine to seven was. This would’ve shifted the majority to a nonconservative board, which would bury any attempt [to] get rid of the woke transgender literature that is so damaging to our youth.”
Although Sumner County Indivisible organizer Hilary Lounder admits that the 11th-hour move was “demoralizing,” she says that local progressive groups are already fighting back. But with the necessary votes in place, for now, she predicted that a book ban would nonetheless be imminent. “We’ve got people looking into the legalities of all that — if you can even do that — which won’t slow them down, because they’ll steamroll ahead,” Lounder tells Queer Agenda. “When these kinds of policies get enacted, it’s always hard to backpedal out of them.”
It’s not apparent, at the time of publication, what a possible challenge might entail or whether LGBTQ+ supporters will pursue legal action. For many, that potential fight is not merely over inclusive literature but one of the few safe spaces that queer people in Sumner County have. The northern Tennessee county is deeply red, voting to re-elect U.S. President Donald Trump in the 2024 election by a nearly 41-point margin. Following the assassination of far-right, anti-LGBTQ+ influencer Charlie Kirk in September, the Sumner County School Board chose to recognize October 14 as the “Charlie Kirk Day of Peaceful Discourse.”
The politics of Sumner County, which borders Kentucky to the north, have been so divisive in recent years that the location of its 2025 Pride event wasn’t even announced publicly. According to Loundes, prospective pridegoers were required to RSVP and be personally vetted before they were cleared to attend. “Trying to have anything associated with Pride out in the open was going to be met with some problems,” she says.
For Rex Hoffman, his local library is one of the few places in Sumner County where he feels welcomed and seen. Although his son isn’t yet old enough to read, Hoffman loves browsing the collection together to share what that space meant to him as a child. As a young trans person slowly coming into his own identity, he tells Queer Agenda that the library was the only place knew that he could go to “be myself, find books, find characters that I could relate to.” For someone who “didn’t necessarily fit the norm,” it allowed him to access the outside world and envision what a future might look like, Hoffman adds.
Knowing that those glimpses of the future could be taken away from other kids, including his own, is devastating. “Families don’t always look alike,” says Hoffman, who requested the use of a pseudonym in this story. “You’re saying that my family is going to be invalidated because it doesn’t fit your picture, but I’m also sitting here paying taxes just to make sure that you get the resources that you need.”
Gaines isn’t the first anti-trans activist to be controversially appointed to a local library board. In 2024, far-right influencer Chaya Raichik was named to the Oklahoma Library Media Review committee, even after reportedly instigating bomb threats targeting schools in the state.
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