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| Lia Thomas, who wants a place in the Olympic women's team |
A few days ago the New York Times published an article by Michael Powell, "a national reporter covering issues around free speech and expression, and stories capturing intellectual and campus debate", on the impact on women's sports of Lia Thomas, a swimmer who identifies as a woman, and who been allowed to compete against biological females.
Powell has done us a valuable service by bringing together voices who are largely ignored by the mainstream media, including the NY Times, on how men who have transitioned can affect the lives, including the sporting lives, of women. However, credit where it is due, as in Powell's article.
The issue is contentious because of the different perspectives — the scientific reality of biology versus the wish to fulfil what has come to be taken as a personal right based on hopes and dreams, largely by men who identify as women. The Times article reports the opposing stances:
Sebastian Coe, the Olympic champion runner and head of World Athletics, which governs international track, speaks of biological difference as inescapable. “Gender,” he said recently, “cannot trump biology.”
The American Civil Liberties Union offers a counterpoint. “It’s not a women’s sport if it doesn’t include ALL women athletes,” the group tweeted. “Lia Thomas belongs on the Penn swimming and diving team.”
The ACLU has had an illustrious history of activism in pursuit of human rights, but it has become just one more example of an organisation being captured by proponents of the transgender ideology that ignores scientific evidence and, in doing so, thrusts women's rights into the background. It has become so extreme in its stance that it has had to declare that it still upholds free speech. See this article by David Cole, ACLU national legal director. And see this NY Times article on its attempts to limit free speech
The British equivalent, the Stonewall organisation, once much respected as being in the vanguard of gay rights activism, has likewise been captured by trans ideologists, and has been disowned by one of its founders after it was mocked after statements by one of its principal officers that there is no such thing as a woman.
The key matter that points to the danger of taking an absolute view of self-invention that Lia Thomas embraces, as seen in the interview with ABC News earlier this month, is what she told Sports Illustrated: “I’m not a man. I’m a woman, so I belong on the women’s team.” She wants to compete in the Olympics on the women's team.
This where the NY Times article is valuable—it highlights the views of others affected by the transgender absolutism. We come to understand why Thomas should not expect other people to comply with her wish to identify as a woman when it is a male body, and a male's achievement's, that they see.
For example, "Martina Navratilova, the retired tennis legend, a champion of liberal and lesbian causes [...] Navratilova argues that transgender female athletes possess insurmountable biological advantages." The Times quotes her as saying:
“I played against taller women, I played against stronger women, and I beat them all. But if I faced the male equivalent of Lia in tennis, that’s biology. I would have had no shot. And I would have been livid.”
As to the reasons why males who transition to a woman's identity should not expect to be accepted in girls' or women's sport without complaint, the Times reports:
For example, Thomas ranked 65th in the men’s 500-yard freestyle but when performing as a woman, Thomas won the title.Michael J. Joyner, a doctor at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., studies the physiology of male and female athletes. He sees in competitive swimming a petri dish. It is a century old, and the sexes follow similar practice and nutrition regimens.
Since prepubescent girls grow faster than boys, they have a competitive advantage early on. Puberty washes away that advantage. “You see the divergence immediately as the testosterone surges into the boys,” Dr. Joyner said. “There are dramatic differences in performances.”
The records for elite adult male swimmers are on average 10 percent to 12 percent faster than the records of elite female swimmers, an advantage that has held for decades.
Little mystery attends to this. Beginning in the womb, men are bathed in testosterone and puberty accelerates that. Men on average have broader shoulders, bigger hands and longer torsos, and greater lung and heart capacity. Muscles are denser.
“There are social aspects to sport, but physiology and biology underpin it,” Dr. Joyner noted. “Testosterone is the 800-pound gorilla.”
When a male athlete transitions to female, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which governs college sports, requires a year of hormone-suppressing therapy to bring down testosterone levels. The N.C.A.A. put this in place to diminish the inherent biological advantage held by those born male.
Ms. Thomas followed this regimen.
But peer reviewed studies show that even after testosterone suppression, top trans women retain a substantial edge when racing against top biological women.
“Lia Thomas is the manifestation of the scientific evidence,” said Dr. Ross Tucker, a sports physiologist who consults on world athletics. “The reduction in testosterone did not remove her biological advantage.”
It's worth noting his corroboration of Dr Joyner's findings. Elsewhere, he says it's a "travesty" that women are expected to bow to the demands of athletes who, after treatment, retain enough of the male physiology to outperform women.
"But I'm now a woman!" won't hack it. The Times continues:
Most scientists, however, view performance differences between elite male and female athletes as near immutable. The Israeli physicist Ira S. Hammerman in 2010 examined 82 events across six sports and found women’s world record times were 10 percent slower than those of men’s records.
“Activists conflate sex and gender in a way that is really confusing,” noted Dr. Carole Hooven, lecturer and co-director of undergraduate studies in human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. She wrote the book T: The Story of Testosterone. “There is a large performance gap between healthy normal populations of males and females, and that is driven by testosterone.”
The sprinter Allyson Felix won the most world championship medals in history. Her lifetime best in the 400 meters was 49.26 seconds; in 2018, 275 high school boys ran faster.
Renée Richards was a pioneer among transgender athletes. An ophthalmologist and accomplished amateur tennis player — she played in the U.S. Open and ranked 13th in the men’s 35-and-over division — she transitioned in 1975 at age 41. She joined the women’s pro tennis tour at age 43, ancient in athletic terms. Ms. Richards then made it to the doubles final at Wimbledon and ranked 19th in the world before retiring at 47. Ms. Richards then made it to the doubles final at Wimbledon and ranked 19th in the world before retiring at 47.
Ms. Richards has said she no longer believes it is fair for transgender women to compete at the elite level.
“I know if I’d had surgery at the age of 22, and then at 24 went on the tour, no genetic woman in the world would have been able to come close to me,” she said in an interview. “I’ve reconsidered my opinion.”
Joanna Harper, a competitive transgender female runner and Ph.D. student studying elite transgender athletic performance at Loughborough University in Britain, agreed that testosterone gives transgender female athletes some advantage.
But she spoke of inexorable emotional and psychological pressures on transgender athletes.
“Is it so horrible,” she said, “if a handful of us are more successful than they were in men’s sports?”
Reka Gyorgy, a 2016 Olympian and a swimmer at Virginia Tech, offered a response of sort. She placed 17th in the preliminaries for the 500-yard freestyle in the N.C.A.A. championships — a slot short of making the finals. She wrote an open letter, affirming her respect for Ms. Thomas’s work ethic.
She was less forgiving of the N.C.A.A.
“This was my last college meet ever and I feel frustrated,” she wrote. “It feels like that final spot was taken away from me because of the N.C.A.A.’s decision to let someone who is not a biological female compete.”
That decision prevented her from qualifying for All-America honors.
Powell talked to families of female swimmers. They emphasised "that transgender people should have the same right to housing, jobs, marriage and happiness as any American".
But they talked of the thousands of hours the young women put into their sport. From early childhood, they swam hundreds of laps daily, nursing injuries and watching nutrition. Why, having reached the pinnacle, should they race against a swimmer who retains many biological advantages of a male athlete?
It potentially places biology and gender identity on the same footing in sport. Dr. Doriane Lambelet Coleman, a Duke University law professor and former top track runner, supports legal protections for transgender people but foresees havoc in the arena of sports. The legal rationale for keeping women’s sports sex-segregated would fall away. “We are bringing a male body into a female sport,” Dr. Coleman said. “Once you cross that line, there’s no more rationale for women’s sport.”Of course, some who have absorbed transgender ideology advocate for no sex segregation in sport, saying athletes should learn to live with the "discomfort” such a change would prompt. The Times continues:
This strikes some feminists and scientists as a walk into strange territory. Kathleen Stock, a British philosopher whose work is often grounded in her feminist and lesbian identity, has carved out positions on transgender rights that have made her a lightning rod. She has written “Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism,” and argues against the insistence that one’s gender identity is all. That is to miss, she said, the profound importance of the lived experience of being born a biological female.
“We are caught up in this fever dream,” she said in an interview. “How could it be that a social construct and not the material reality of being a woman is guiding our thoughts and our physical performance?
“I find it incredible that we have to point this out.”
The metaphysical aspect of all this, though — the trans stuff, I mean — is that the culture in which we swim is teaching us to despise the givenness of our bodies, and to think that we can change Nature with a sufficient application of technology, law, and cultural command (including persecuting dissenters). You think this stuff is only about happy-clappy affirmation? Think about what you are affirming: the erasure of masculinity and femininity as biological facts. And we wonder why so many young people in our culture are so psychologically distressed. They are born into an unreal world, and told by the gatekeepers of this culture that they must deny among the most fundamental truths that we can know: the facts of our maleness and femaleness.
💢 The battle over trans ideology in schools
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