This week, Paula Scanlan, college athlete and former teammate of Lia Thomas, speaks out about what it was like for the girls competing alongside and sharing a pool and locker room with a man. Paula and Inez also discuss the psychological effects of the silencing tactics used by institutions that refuse to acknowledge even the most obvious truths about sex differences.
TRANSCRIPT
Inez Stepman:
Welcome to High Noon, where we talk about controversial subjects with interesting people. And I always exhort everybody, myself included, at the end of each one of these episodes to be brave, and I promised you that I would bring people who are brave to talk, who they’re speaking out on a lot of these subjects when it’s not necessarily comfortable for them to do so. And that’s the reason I’m really proud to welcome Paula Scanlan to High Noon. Paula is a swimmer. She’s a graduate of U-Pennsylvania, U-Penn, and she’s now out in the adult world, but she has joined her former teammate Riley Gaines in speaking out about some of the issues surrounding biological sex in women’s sports. So, Paula, welcome to High Noon. I’m really happy to have you here.
Paula Scanlan:
Thanks for having me.
Inez Stepman:
So, tell me about yourself. Tell our audience about yourself. How did you end up swimming to begin with? How did you find it as a passion? And how did you end up getting mixed up in some of these political and sensitive topics?
Paula Scanlan:
Yeah, so, when I was in third grade, the YMCA in my town actually had finished building an Olympic-sized pool, and that was a really big deal. So, my parents said that I needed to get into a sport to kind of have an afterschool hobby, and it was just coincidental, the year my dad decided to tell me this, in third grade, that the pool had been finished. So, at that point I kind of joined the swim team. It was twice a week, not a huge commitment, and I did it for a few years very un-seriously.
And so when I was in sixth grade, my brother went off to college, and I was… You know, all my friends had moved up onto this program, this more advanced level, and the coaches were like, “She’s not dedicated. She’s not prepared to do this.” My parents were like, “Can we just try?” So, I started as the slowest person in the last lane, and by the end of the month, I had moved up into the second lane. I just started taking it super seriously once my brother went to college, because I wanted to have something that was my own. And then from that point, I didn’t miss any practices. It was all-in. Swimming was the number one thing I wanted to do.
So, that was how I started, and then obviously I kept doing it through high school. My high school had a pretty successful run. We won our high school league my junior and senior year. And when it came to picking colleges, my brother actually went to Penn as well, and so I wanted to kind of follow in his footsteps, but also have my own twist on it, because he wasn’t an athlete in college, and he wasn’t ever that dedicated to athletics, so it was my way of going to the same school, but doing it my way. So, that’s kind of how I ended up at Penn.
Inez Stepman:
And can you tell us a little bit about sort of the timeline of how Lia, formerly Will Thomas, joined the team, sort of how the team initially dealt with that, and then what you thought about it when you heard that a male, biologically male teammate was going to join sort of your half of the locker room between these two male and female sides of the same team.
Paula Scanlan:
Yeah, so, my freshman year of college, there was no talk about transgenders and people competing on other teams, but the first month of my sophomore year… so, the fall of 2019… there was a team meeting, and notably the meeting was very interesting, because the men’s team had a meeting first, and then the women’s team had a meeting after. And our school is a combined program, so meetings where the men and women were separated were very, very, very rare, so we all didn’t really know what to expect.
And we go into this meeting, and at the time, Will Thomas… We go in with our coach. Will Thomas is there, and I’m like, “Oh, why is there a member of the men’s team here?” It was very confusing. And our coach just said, “Will, this is your meeting. Take the floor.” And then just said, “I’m transgender, and I’m going to be transitioning to the women’s team.” It was very, very brief, less than five minutes. There wasn’t really any questions. Everybody was just like, “Oh, congrats. Welcome.” And then our coach said, “Everybody get in the pool,” and that was the last we talked about it formally as a team. And even when the season actually begun, there wasn’t even meetings before the season of fall 2021, when it actually happened. We didn’t have any meetings preempting that season to discuss it. It was just, Lia was there one day, and Lia’s a member of the team.
Inez Stepman:
And how did you feel about that initially? You said it was pretty universally… sort of, “Congrats,” that was the initial response, and I know this happened kind of before and after COVID as well, right? So, there was the big break in the mental… I mean, how did this issue start to bubble up in the team? I mean, did you and the other girls talk about this? Did anyone voice that they might be uncomfortable with it initially? I mean, how did those conversations develop, and how did your coaches and the university respond to them?
Paula Scanlan:
Yeah, so, initially, I couldn’t really read the room on how comfortable people were or weren’t, but this situation, it’s very, very hard to tell when it’s shocking, whether someone’s just shocked, or whether they’re excited, so I personally just kept to myself about the opinions, but I did talk to my friends who were outside the team about it, I talked to my family about it, just saying, “This is crazy!” And at this point, for me, I didn’t know anything about the rules. I said, “Oh, okay. There’s a year of transition. There must be some protocol.” So, I go down and I start researching testosterone, and the effects of testosterone on the body and all of that, and I start reading the NCAA handbook, just because I had no idea what any of the rules were, and what to expect from this entire situation.
And I found immediately that the changes in your testosterone level are very unclear how much that actually affects your athletic ability. There was a lot of studies that were done on lowering men’s testosterone and seeing how they’re affected in an athletic sense, and it was very, very unclear at best. So, that was definitely concerning, but in terms of people on the team, it was just… Obviously you want to be inclusive, and the environment of 20-something-year-old girls is always to be inclusive, so, amongst my team members, it was very much we would just have conversations just saying, “Oh, how is Will feeling? Is Will comfortable?” Or, “Oh, why don’t we invite Will to this event so that they can start being more comfortable with the women’s team when they do eventually join?” So, that was the conversation among the team that transition year after it was announced.
Inez Stepman:
And then after… You took this break, right, because there just was no competition for a while during COVID. After you came back, on the flip side… and by then this had started to become a media sensation, right? There were media outlets reporting on the fact that Will, now calling himself Lia, was swimming and competing against women, because it was just such a sort of shocking, visually shocking thing. He’s not a small guy. He’s physically much more imposing than the women that he was standing next to the podium on. There starts to be a media circus around this. How did the atmosphere in the team behind the scenes change when that started to happen?
Paula Scanlan:
Yeah, so, as competition begun, I would have one-on-one conversations with my teammates, and I would say, “Oh, what do you guys think about this?” And people would voice their concerns one-on-one. Like, there was a teammate of mine who mentioned, “I think we should put an asterisk on the record board,” and another girl who said, “Maybe Lia should compete exhibition,” meaning get to compete with the women’s team, but their times don’t count. And a lot of people had this conversation, but there was never a formal meeting about this, and the thing that’s so interesting to me is, you could have these conversations with people, but then as a group, everyone would always just say, “This is so amazing. We’re really proud of you. We’re part of this great team.” But it was the same people who you would have one-on-one conversations with, knowing that they disagreed.
So, it was a very confusing situation to navigate of, “Is someone telling me this because this is what they think I want to hear, or are they afraid of just seeming bad to a full group?” And it was just so difficult to gauge what everyone actually thought about it, because everyone was saying two different things about the whole situation. So, at this point, I just tried to really limit my conversations to just one-on-one conversations with people… I never talked to more than one person… and just tried to really be careful about who I spoke to, and how I presented my side of what I thought was going on.
Inez Stepman:
And how did your coaches… I mean, did anybody go to the coaches? And then, how did the university respond to these one-on-one conversations that were happening on your team?
Paula Scanlan:
So, a lot of girls went to our coaches individually and just raised concerns about it. I talked a lot to our assistant coach at the time, and she obviously just said, “My job as a coach is to be supportive of my athletes, and there’s nothing I can really do,” and my head coach had similar sentiments. But, other girls went to the athletic department directly. I honestly never did that, because I didn’t really trust them.
But it wasn’t until the media really started picking up that the athletic department came in and actually sat us down and had a team meeting and told us to stay away from the media. Which I thought was very interesting, because I think they should’ve definitely addressed it earlier if that’s what they wanted us to do, but it was already many months into the season that they decided to actually formally have a chat with us about what was going on, and how, “There’s nothing we can do to get Lia off the team. Lia will be completing the season no matter what. You guys just have to be okay with that.”
Inez Stepman:
My family is from… and I think your family’s also, your family’s from Taiwan, are they not?
Paula Scanlan:
Yep. My mom was born there.
Inez Stepman:
My family is from Eastern Europe, and from Communist Poland, and so I obviously grew up with sort of stories about authoritarian systems, about communism, about these kinds of whispered situations, and one of the famous sort of ways to get dissidents to shut up, one of the threats that was use… not as much, I think, in Poland, but in the Soviet Union itself… was to declare them mentally incompetent or insane, right? To suggest that having a different opinion makes you mentally incompetent. It seems like the university almost did this to you. They sent an email to the team. Can you talk a little bit about, one, they told you, “Lia’s going to stay on the team, and if you have a problem with it, don’t talk to the media,” but they also mentioned something that was quite disturbing to me about, basically suggesting that anyone who had a problem with the idea of a man swimming on the women’s team needed to seek psychological help.
Paula Scanlan:
Yeah. So, they actually never put any of this in writing, and again, I actually saw Harvard actually did, which is very interesting. Penn was definitely very smart to do that. So, backtracking this, it really started blowing up in the media at the beginning of December. We get an email from an assistant to the athletic director saying, “Hi, girls,” addressed only to the women’s team. “Team meeting in the stands, 4:00, everyone mandatory. You need to be there.” And the interesting part about this is every other team meeting we’ve ever had has been set up by the captains or the coaches, so the fact that the athletic department was the one who sent this email… and I have the email proof that they did book this meeting… was very weird. And so I was in the early slot of practice, so that meant I practiced before the meeting happened, and I was so anxious because I had no idea what they were going to say, but I knew it wasn’t going to be good.
So, we go to this meeting, and there was, like, 10 people standing there. There was our coaches, there was multiple people from the athletic department, there was someone from the LGBT center, someone from the psychological services, and… Yeah, I think that was pretty much the panel of people that were there. And they just said a few things. The main takeaway was, “Don’t talk to the media. They’re not your friend. You will regret speaking to the media.” Another thing they said is, “Lia swimming is a nonnegotiable.” And the third thing they said is, “If you have issues with that, here are the resources that can help you be okay with that,” one of which, they offered us psychological services.
So, I thought that was very interesting that they were suggesting that we needed therapy in order to be okay with the situation, and that was definitely the most concerning. I mean, the rest of the people that were there like, okay, I would’ve expected them to say not to talk to the media. Every other team in the Ivy League, and other teams, were told the same thing. Riley was told the same thing at the University of Kentucky. But, I think the fact that they brought in psychological services was so, so, so scary, because it was basically suggesting that we needed to be re-educated. That’s the way I took it. It was… They were suggesting they needed to have re-education. And again, like you mentioned about a lot of communist countries were doing that.
And again, I didn’t take them up on that. I don’t think anyone did, but I would’ve been very curious to know what they would’ve said in a therapy session, had you gone and talked to them about this.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, actually, nothing’s new, even in America, because when I was in university around 2009, I was part of the College Republicans. We did some public sort of protest. I can’t even remember what. It was a free speech protest basically, and I also got an email saying… referring me to the psychological department to deal with my psychological, quote/unquote, problems for merely having a different opinion and putting it on a sign, and that also struck me as quite authoritarian and scary.
After that meeting, were your teammates and you able to have even those one-on-one conversations? Did people shut up? At what point did you decide… You ultimately decided, right, to write an anonymous op-ed about this, so how does that all factor into this?
Paula Scanlan:
Yeah. So, immediately after this meeting… The backtrack of this meeting is that I had already gone to the press, but they hadn’t released the story yet. So, they had this meeting, and then the next day basically, my anonymous interview was published, so a lot of people interpreted that as I went to that meeting, and immediately was like, “I hate everyone here. I’m going to go do exactly what they told me not to do,” but in reality I had kind of done that before.
So, I knew that I had done that. I was really scared, because I said, “Oh my gosh. I just want…” around everything that they had just told us, and I didn’t know how people were going to react to it, but obviously I wasn’t going to take it back, because I never said anything that I regretted. And I also wanted people to know that the girls on the team weren’t okay with this. Part of the reason why I went to speak to some outlets anonymously was I didn’t want the narrative to be that the girls on this team were accepting of something so unjust that was happening to us.
So, I didn’t know what to do. I was thinking, “Can I try to contact this reporter and retract it?” I was like, “No, I’m not going to do that.” I was talking to my parents, I was like, “Should I be worried?” Talking to my brother. I just said, “You know, I’m just going to let it play out.”
And at this point comes out people figured out it was me. I told one girl I was doing it; you know, word gets around. And then I started getting nasty text messages from my own teammates telling me I was a horrible, transphobic person, and it was so stressful for me that I didn’t want to talk to anyone on the team. I actually ended up getting physically ill from the entire situation. I got a 102-degree fever, couldn’t practice, couldn’t swim. I called my assistant coach and talked to her for 30 minutes about the whole situation, and she obviously felt for me. She felt bad. She didn’t blame me for anything, but she didn’t know how to handle it either.
So, at that point, I was like, “Okay, I’m never talking to the media ever again. Maybe I will in the future. I’m not sure,” but at that moment in time, I was physically sick from everything that had happened. I just said, “I need to just take a breath from this.” So, I ended up just feeling really horrible. My teammates were really mad at me. No one would speak to me. And then just taking a few months of time… It took about another month. By the beginning of January, I was kind of right back to where I was. It was like, “Okay, no. I’m still going to talk to the media. I’m still going to make sure we do this.”
And so, in January, I was approached by a friend who I actually knew from College Republicans, who wrote for the Daily Pennsylvanian, our school newspaper, and she said that they’re interested in publishing a singular piece in opposition to Lia swimming, because there was a bunch of pro Lia swimming articles coming out. So, she approached me to do this, said it could be anonymous, and I started working with an editor that was somebody else. And it was the most painful back-and-forth process where they gave me a bunch of rules, and we had to just keep going back and forth, and I would write a sentence and they would delete it because it was too harsh, or they would just say, “You can’t say this,” or they would just cut things out. And it was the most frustrating process of my entire life.
When they ended up publishing the article, half the sentences had been cut without my permission anyway, and then they end up retracting the entire thing within a few hours of it being up. So, it was all this time and energy of going back and forth for literally no article, and then the pro-Lia article still came out, and there was no opposition.
Inez Stepman:
You really went out of your way… In places you’ve talked about this op-ed that you wrote, and you just kind of indicated it again, you went out of your way to, for example, I think avoid using pronouns, and to really lay out, in the kindest possible way, why this was unfair to you and your teammates. I guess, how did you feel when the response, even to you bending over backwards, it seems like… When I was looking through what you’ve said about this, you’ve bent over backwards to try to not be offensive to anybody, and just to say the truth in the nicest, kindest way possible, which is that there are differences between males and females, and it’s not fair to you or the other girls on the team, or the women who are swimming against this biological man, not to recognize those differences.
How did you feel after bending over that far and sort of really, really trying your best to not be offensive, when even that attempt was taken down basically a few hours after publication because it was considered so wildly out of the Overton window, so wildly offensive that it needed to be removed and retracted?
Paula Scanlan:
Honestly, I mean, I was shocked. I think my biggest thing is, I had hope at every single stage of everything that happened throughout that year, and then, in things in general, you always hope that the truth will prevail, and the right thing will come in the end, and you have trust, and you have faith, and so I think I just assumed that, “Oh, maybe we’ll come back and we’ll work together, and we’re going to finish this piece.” I actually, once it got retracted, I did actually think this editor was going to come back to me, and we were going to somehow rework the piece and get it back up. I don’t know why I believed that, but he actually stopped responding to me.
And so, I remember actually… Funny enough, I was re-reading my text messages with this editor today just to kind of refresh myself of the situation. And it was like, we had a conversation, he was like, “We’ll keep you posted.” And I said, “Okay,” and he read it and didn’t respond to me, so I messaged him back a week after this whole thing had happened, and I was like, “Hey, any update?” And he read the message and never responded to me.
And so, it was at that point… And then eventually… I literally just kept calling him, and eventually he picked up and just explained to me, “No. I’m frustrated at The Daily Pennsylvanian for this, and I’m really sorry that it happened this way, but we’re done.”
But, the thing that’s so funny to me is… and I’ve published this on my Twitter, and people can read it… the article that ended up getting published was one of the softest pieces that’s ever been written, ever. There is not a single word in there that was controversial or offensive. There was even an entire paragraph that talks about how, “I affirm Lia’s decision to live their life as their true self,” or something along those lines. Do you know what I mean? There are just so many aspects, and so many catering to the transgender individuals, to all this stuff. The article was intended to dissect the NCAA’s policy and how it’s incorrect. That was the intention. It was somehow this wild, crazy, offensive piece… and again, I can’t validate this, but apparently half the staff was threatening to quit over having that article be up, because it didn’t stand for the Daily Pennsylvanian values.
Isn’t the whole point of being a journalist that you’re supposed to be able to read something that you don’t agree with? My grandfather worked as a journalist. He had people he violently disagreed with; so much so that he would scream at them until they were red in the face. But he still worked with them. He still read their papers. He still obviously was published alongside of them. So, it’s just insane.
Inez Stepman:
So, what changed your mind about coming out with your name attached to this? Because at this point, this piece is still written not under your name, right? It’s still anonymous?
Paula Scanlan:
Yeah. So, the piece… I mean, I published… I mean, it’s nowhere on the Daily Pennsylvanian site, so, for what it’s worth, the piece doesn’t exist. I mean, I’ve put it up on my Twitter, but, you know, it doesn’t really exist.
But, in terms of myself, I think for me I just assumed that the situation we were put in was controversial, obviously, but also, I thought it was a unique situation, right? I said, “Okay, you know, I had this horrible experience. The NCAA wronged me, but they’re not going to wrong every single team in the entire country, and they’re not going to do this to every single sport.” So, I just said, “You know what? I need to just forget about it, move on from swimming, and just go to the working world and just move on with my life.” That’s what I had told myself, and I had had conversations with Riley about this, and just said, “You know, I needed one year of my life to just be normal.”
But, it would continue to eat up at me, and I would think about it, and I would cry at night about my experiences, and hearing about this happening to other girls. And Payton McNabb, the volleyball player, when I heard about her story, I almost couldn’t move. She was severely concussed. She was harmed for her… Her entire life was kind of altered by the situation of being spiked the ball… I think the ball that hit her was the speeds of higher than the fastest Olympians in volleyball, the spike speed.
And so, it was just things like that, watching Riley get attacked when she was in San Francisco, and I just… Things just continued to happen, and it just kept getting worse, and I really did think that changes would be made, like, “My voice is not needed in this fight. Everything will be fine.” Again, back to the having hope, having faith. And then I kind of realized at a certain point that if you want something done right, you have to be willing to do it yourself. And that was really when I realized that if I have these opinions that are so strong that I’m not willing to speak about it, then why do I even spend my time and energy thinking about these things?
So, it was just a lot of back-and-forth with myself, and finally I realized the right thing to do is to talk about it, and I’m really happy that I did, because again, there are so many opportunities to share our story, and we actually have an opportunity to really push change to get this right.
Inez Stepman:
One of the things that I think you’re participating in is IW is helping put together this protest up in Knoxville, Tennessee. It’s a different sport, right? Cycling. You’re going to participate in that, right?
Paula Scanlan:
Yes. Yep. I’ll be there.
Inez Stepman:
What message do you want to send to these athletic organizations, whether it’s in cycling or in swimming, or in all these other athletic competitions, about what it means to you, and what it meant to you as an athlete to have your voice completely silenced like this?
Paula Scanlan:
Yeah, I think what these organizations need to know is that women are not second-class citizens in this country. I think a lot of people really weaponize the fact that women are very agreeable. Women do not like to make waves and make people upset, but if you’re going to have women’s sports, you need to be willing to protect us; if not, then we should just get rid of them all together. If that’s what you believe, these organizations, if you believe that biological men can be competing in our spaces, then why even spend the time and money to have women’s sports to begin with? And if you’re not willing to stand by us on this, then no women should compete. Let’s just make our own female leagues. We shouldn’t have to work with you guys if you’re not willing to protect us.
So, that’s my message to these organizations. I really think they need to take a stance and protect women, and if they’re not willing to do that, we need to make it clear that we’re not going to stand for this.
Inez Stepman:
What do you think about the implications? Because obviously this is as important as women’s sports are to the athletes who are actually participating in them, and the spectators, and their families. This really is a species. It’s just one of those places where it’s become so obvious that we’re not allowed to talk about the biological differences between men and women. I’m sure you’ve heard that we’re putting biological males into women’s prisons, for example, in a place where there’s obviously the potential. You talk about the volleyball player who was injured, and we could talk about, I think there’s also an MMA fighter who was injured by a biological man competing an fighting against her. Her skull was cracked open, as far as I recall, so there are obvious dangers, even within the sports context.
But those dangers are even clearer in some of these more, quote/unquote, real-life situations, right? Like between incarcerated women and men. When you and I fly, we go to the airport, we… If we set off the alarm or whatever, and the scanning, we count on the ability of the TSA to assign a woman to pat us down, potentially in an intimate way that certainly would not be comfortable with a man doing that at the airport. There’s all these instances in which the truth of male and female differences is currently recognized. I mean, how do you think about women’s sports in relation to all of these other ways in which… I feel like women… our opportunity to compete, like as on the sports field, our opportunity to have some privacy when we’re changing, for example, our opportunity to actually protect ourselves and feel safe in spaces that are only for us and other women? How do you think this fight relates to that broader sort of assault that’s happening, seemingly in all kinds of… basically, anywhere where our society or law acknowledges that boys and girls are different, that men and women are different?
Paula Scanlan:
Yeah, I think sports is really the public forum that these differences are most obvious, so for me personally… and again, I do personally agree that the attack that’s happening in these bathrooms and these prisons is honestly arguably worse than what’s happening in sports, but I think the importance of winning on sports is that can help set precedent to protect us in other spaces. I think that sports is the most public one. It’s the one everyone can visually see what’s happening, versus in these bathrooms, in these prisons, those are more behind closed doors. So, if we can raise attention to this athletics issue and say, “Okay, this is not fair. Here you can clearly see men are superior to women in these events,” then we can take those wins and apply them to the other female spaces.
So, that’s how I think they’re all related, and obviously I would love to get attention to every single one of those issues all at once, but I do think sports has the best angle, again, because you have public proof of this, versus these prisons. It’s so hard to get in contact with prisoners, and public bathrooms, bathrooms don’t have cameras inside of them generally, right? You can’t really see what’s going on there, so the proof of the attacks are not going to be as evident. So, I definitely think we do need to win on all of these things. I don’t want people to think that we’re forgetting about prisons and bathrooms and other women’s spaces that are being invaded, but sports we can do first.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I mean, sports are such a public, as you say, and physical activity, it’s like a… I mean, how do you think about free speech and living in America, trying to relate back to some of the background that we share, coming from more authoritarian countries, our families coming from more authoritarian countries and regimes? I mean, do you think about us in America differently now, given that you’ve had this experience, not only of this unjust thing happening to you as a member of this swim team, but also the attempt to silence you, right? The attempt to shut you up, to pull your words down from the internet in this very Orwellian sort of fashion for simply noticing something that, as we just discussed, is really obvious in the sports context, right?
It couldn’t be clearer when you look at a man, a big man like Lia Thomas, and you look at, like I said, next to his competitors, his female competitors, this is something that’s so obvious. I mean, did it make you feel crazy to have something that is… to saying something that is that obvious, to have people respond in such a way, to saying something that’s just obviously true if you have a set of eyes?
Paula Scanlan:
Yeah, no, I definitely felt crazy. That’s the tactic that they use, though, and like you mentioned, they want you to feel crazy. They want you to feel isolated. They want to make sure no one wants to talk to you so that you are locked in your own thoughts. And I was a shell of myself second semester of my senior year. I didn’t leave the house. I didn’t go anywhere. I didn’t want to talk to anyone because I just felt so defeated, and I felt so wrong, and psychologically it was very, very challenging. I didn’t even know what to do with myself.
And I think that is the broader issue that this touches on. I think, in general, free speech is starting to become a really big problem in this country. That’s part of the reason why Elon Musk bought Twitter, and now Twitter is pretty close to a free speech platform. Obviously there’s still some policy that has been in there before Elon came in, it’s kind of grandfathered in, but before that happened, there was people getting thrown off Twitter left and right for saying things like, “Men and women are different,” or, “There are two sexes.”
And that’s just scary, because it’s so obvious. I mean, it’s just… Even if you ignore the human race, if you look at plants, if you look at animals, there’s always, there’s male and female in most of these things that just exist around the world, and it’s like, how has that become controversial?
Inez Stepman:
So, how have things changed? I mean, have you gotten any messages from… Since you’ve come out under your real name, your face, not anonymously, and you’ve started speaking out, you’ve done some interviews with FOX. As far as I could see on the internet, you’ve had your story written up in major news outlets. How has your sort of private life reacted to that? Have you been getting messages from your teammates? Do they privately agree with you? Do you think any more athletes, female athletes in similar situations are going to come forward after you and Riley have sort of stepped into the spotlight?
Paula Scanlan:
Yeah, a few of my teammates have thanked me for what I’m doing. And, I mean, they’re not surprises. I pretty much think I knew exactly which girls from the team were going to reach out to me when I did come out, and it was pretty much exactly what I expected. There have been other people that aren’t related to the swimming world that have reached out to me in very, very, very weird ways, like a guy that I knew freshman year of high school messaged me on LinkedIn of all places, someone from my middle school reached out to me; I haven’t talked to this kid in maybe 10 years. So, there’s definitely been a lot of surprises of people I never expected to… let alone see this, but care enough to just tell me that they agree with me, and they support me.
So, it’s definitely been very, very surprising in that sense. Obviously, I do hope other girls from my team feel willing to speak out, and I think that they might eventually. I haven’t given up on that. I think other people in that sphere are still scared, and I hope that they won’t be, and I hope that I can help support them in however they need to feel comfortable, but I think it definitely would be very important to me also to have somebody backing up everything that I’ve said. So, I’m still hopeful for that, but definitely, and I hope other athletes in other sports that have been through this also feel courage to speak up, because the more voices we have, the harder it’s going to be to shut us down.
Inez Stepman:
Paula Scanlan, thank you so much for joining High Noon. It’s been a pleasure to talk with you.
Paula Scanlan:
Thank you so much for having me.
Inez Stepman:
And thank you to our listeners. High Noon with Inez Stepman is a production of the Independent Women’s Forum. As always, you can send comments and questions to [email protected]. Please help us out by hitting the subscribe button and leaving us a comment and review on Apple Podcasts, Acast, Google Play, YouTube, or IWF.org. Be brave like Paula Scanlan, and we’ll see you next time on High Noon.
