Humans are essentially herd animals, finding safety in numbers. Most fear standing out and can easily be bullied into either silence or complicity. I don’t say this as an insult. It’s just a fact. For a long time, Americans have been socially bullied or economically coerced into accepting the “transgender” fiction. However, the tide seems to be shifting and, as brave people make a stand, others are learning to be brave. That’s the case with Paula Scanlan, who has gone from shy anonymity to open-faced, raw courage regarding UPenn’s psychological warfare against women swimmers who didn’t want to compete with a biological man.

A little over a year ago, Will Thomas, a strapping man, announced he was a woman, took some female hormones, and was suddenly swimming for the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swim team. Given his massive biological advantage, he went from being a mediocre male collegiate swimmer to being a top-level women’s swimmer. He’s a perfect example of the so-called “transgender” people who, not content with being allowed to wear their sexual fetishes out in public, insist that they should be able to force others to engage with them—to their detriment—in that same fetish.

Image: Paula Scanlan. Twitter screen grab.

Initially, only one young woman at the meet where Thomas swam—Riley Gaines—was willing to speak out publicly. (When she first spoke, Gaines was sufficiently brainwashed that she kept referring to Thomas, a biologically intact male, as “she” but I think Gaines is over that problem now.) Gaines has become one of America’s most outspoken people pushing back against “transgender” madness.

Gaines wasn’t the only woman upset that a biological male was stripping down naked in the locker rooms, ogling the women’s bodies, and stealing their places on the championship podium. In Matt Walsh’s important documentary, What Is A Woman?, another woman, this one on the UPenn team with Thomas, talked about her unhappiness and the bullying she experienced when UPenn forced the women to accept Thomas on their team. However, unlike Gaines, this woman maintained her anonymity, insisting that she be filmed in a way that completely obscured her identity.

Now, though, in a 30-minute-long interview with Matt Walsh, that formerly shy woman has revealed herself to be Paula Scanlan. I’ll get to what she says in a minute, but I want to focus, first, on what motivated Scanlan to speak out. In addition to finding herself still angry about the unfairness of it all, Scanlan acknowledged that Gaines’s courage inspired her:

A teammate of Lia Thomas appeared in What Is A Woman anonymously. A few days ago she came to us and said she is ready to come out publicly and tell her story. I had a longer conversation with Paula where she revealed a number of details that weren't covered in the film. Watch: pic.twitter.com/wlknGmslJC

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) June 5, 2023

[Beginning at 1:00] I just spent this last year just kind of living vicariously through “Oh, Riley’s going and doing these great things. She's going to accomplish all these things we need to have done.” And she's made great strides, but I am still feeling so passionately about this that I want to join her. And I know that the more voices we have—and I'm hoping even more people will speak out—the more voices we have, the more powerful this will be.

That’s absolutely correct. A hokey 1940 movie called New Moon, about an uprising against the French, has the hero (Nelson Eddy) seeking men to join him. When ten finally do, the rest realize they can too, so I see this video as a microcosm of what Scanlan describes:

And what about Scanlan’s substantive points? They indict UPenn for putting victory of wokeness ahead of women’s emotional and athletic needs.

Scanlan didn’t like having a man in the locker room and sensed many of her teammates felt the same. (Beginning at 06:08 in the video.)

Thomas denied women on the team the opportunity to stand on the winner’s roster. One woman, who tearfully complained, got a talking-to from management and returned acting as if Thomas’s “swimming was like this magical, beautiful thing.” Paula commented, “There was something going on in that athletic department that wanted to keep us quiet, and I was like, this is getting scary.” (07:33 et seq.)

The athletic department silenced the women who wanted to talk to the media and ordered them to counseling, as if they were the ones with mental problems. (09:02 et seq.)

Scanlan felt intimidated because she understood that speaking out would jeopardize employment opportunities. (11:13 et seq.)

Americans are finally waking up to the dangerous con being played on them. Women are being marginalized and children destroyed. And thankfully, though we humans may be herd animals, once we realize there’s a predator out there, and that a few brave ones are fighting back, many of us will still turn and join that fight.

UPDATE: This post has been corrected to clarify that Riley Gaines swam for the University of Kentucky, not UPenn.