To be fervently against transgender women competing in women’s athletic events does not automatically mean you are anti-transgender or are unsympathetic to the social and personal hardships of transgender individuals. However, in today’s hyper-woke culture, pointing out even the mildest reservation in this context is immediately taken to mean you are a hateful trans-phobe. That characterization is used as a sledgehammer to beat down any meaningful conversation on the topic and casts anyone with concerns as too ignorant to take seriously.
We’ve written on this topic before, but thought it was a good time to revisit the subject in light of all the media attention being garnered by University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas.
As is the case with most all transgender women athletes, Lia transitioned from male to female after having gone through male puberty. Thus, she retained the muscle mass, bone structure, heart/lung capacity, and overall size of the adult male body she had grown into prior to her transition. Those physical facts are not changed by the testosterone suppression medication she is required to take to satisfy the NCAA eligibility rules for transgender women to compete in woman’s sports.
Lia knows she has an unnatural (for a woman) physical advantage over her biologically female competitors. With that knowledge, she made the conscious choice to compete knowing full well her fellow competitors had no way of compensating. Athletes who take performance enhancing drugs also know full well they will have an unnatural advantage over their competitors and choose to compete with that knowledge. In their case however, they must hide all evidence of their enhancement to avoid being disqualified.
A transgender woman does not need to hide any evidence of her physical advantage or worry about disqualification. She is protected by an impenetrable shield of cultural wokeness. Every single administrative entity in woman’s swimming with the authority to change the rules and disqualify Lia is scared out of their minds to do so.1 They are frightened even to speak frankly about it. All they can muster is a string of useless cliches that serve to keep the LGBTQ community pacified.
Lia Thomas has had the experience of competing as a male in male swimming competitions. Will Thomas, as she was known then, was a good swimmer, but on a level playing field against other adult male bodies, he was not in the elite class of male swimmers. However, even average male swimmers who finish in the middle of the pack in college level competitions are fast enough to dominate female swimming events at that same level. Lia Thomas knows this better than anyone and chooses to exploit it. This is both selfish and harmful to biologically female swimmers who have trained to be the best and also love their sport.
We believe this is beyond just being unfair. It is cheating – pure and simple. It is cheating because Lia Thomas performs knowing she has a physical advantage that none of her competitors can match no matter how hard they train and dedicate themselves. In our minds this spoils the competition in the same exact way as the use of performance enhancing drugs.
All that being said, it would be unfair to Lia Thomas and any other transgender women athlete to simply say she is banned from competing in a sport she loves because she underwent a gender transformation. The best suggestion we’ve heard to solve this problem is to redefine the men’s division of sporting events to be an “open” division. It would work like this:
- To compete in any women’s sporting event, all competitors must have been born biologically female.
- Men’s sporting events would be open to all competitors, regardless of gender at birth.
Lia Thomas could still compete, but it would be in the ‘open” division on a much more level playing field.
Unfortunately, we don’t see a reasonable solution like this coming anytime soon. Our culture is so poisoned with political correctness that submitting to the woke agenda on things like this has become de rigueur. Where are the voices of all the female swimmers who now compete for 2nd place (at best) in a race that includes Lia Thomas? Have they accepted coming in 2nd as their new reality? Or are they too intimidated to stand up to the LGBTQ mob just like the cowardly NCAA, USA Swimming (the governing body for the sport of swimming in the US), and University Presidents? Either way, women’s sports has taken a big step backwards and lost some of its reason for existing in the first place.
Female athletes protesting en masse against the unfairness of having to race against transgender competitors would make a difference. But except for a small number of brave women voicing their displeasure, a meaningful protest from all female athletes doesn’t appear to be in the cards.
Absent any action to stop it, women’s sports will slowly continue to be exploited and then dominated by competitors in adult male bodies. In addition to swimming, it has already begun to happen in cycling, weightlifting, and running. The accolades and rewards have shown to be too enticing to resist. It is sad and ultimately destructive for women’s sports, yet we continue just to watch it happen like a slow-motion train wreck.
1It’s not just Lia Thomas, but any transgender female who has gone through male puberty.
4 Responses
Just waiting for someone to grab my shoulder and shake me, “Johnny, wake up, time to wake up.” “Oh, thank you for waking me up. You’d never believe the crazy nightmare I just had. There were all these insane things people were doing and saying nonchalantly that you would never believe if I told you.”
We’re right there with you Johnny. In our previous post on this topic (2.5 years ago) we calculated the odds of this situation occurring naturally. It is estimated that 0.3% of the US population is transgender (Williams Institute survey). Less than 0.01% of the population are Olympic class athletes. Therefore, the odds of a transgender woman also being an Olympic class athlete are roughly 0.003%. It would seem to be an extremely rare occurrence. For anyone who thinks we’re overstating this problem, here is just a sampling of current transgender super-athletes who bely those odds:
Rachel McKinnen – Woman’s cycling world champion and world record holder
Cece Telfer – Women’s NCAA 400-meter hurdles national champion (2019)
Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood – Finished 1st and 2nd in the Woman’s 100-meter finals at the Connecticut State high school championships. Miller set a meet record in the process.
Laural Hubbard – Olympic Woman’s weightlifting qualifier at 43, nearly twice the average age of her competitors at the 2020 Tokyo games.
Lia Thomas – Woman’s NCAA swimming champion in the 500-yard freestyle (2022)
The NCAA decides what rules to follow for athletes to participate. The public can question the validity of those rules but ultimately it is the NCAA’s decision. Those athletes compete for schools not for money therefore Ali is not costing anyone prize money.
Point taken about following the rules. Although in this case the NCAA recently made the decision to pass-the-buck and defer to the governing bodies of the individual sports for eligibility rules for transgender women. That meant Lia’s case devolved to “USA Swimming”. They then chose to follow the IOC rules on this topic. No one wants to take responsibility. And while you are correct about college athletes not competing for money, there are non-monetary prizes of great value that are lost forever, like a place on the podium after years of training, a national championship, or a berth on the Olympic team.