Opinion: Lia Thomas shouldn’t swim in the Womens team

The Game Room
1

When I say ‘opinion’ I mean my opinion, but also the opinion of quite a lot of more knowledgeable people out there

I wasn’t paying a huge amount of attention to this story as it developed, but just the other day I read this link to a talk given by the mother of one of the other team members:

Honestly the whole situation sounds terrible - especially the enormous psychological pressure put on the other team members to not say anything.

It seems clear from the numbers of trans women winning major events (and the death of trans men winning in the men’s categories) that the rules for trans women competing in women’s events are not fair and balanced and that ‘bring your testosterone down enough and you’re good to go’ doesn’t actually ensure a level playing field

Anyway, I’m sure some people here will disagree with me so - have at it

2

100% agree. People who would decry such critics as TERFs simply are trying to pretend biology makes no difference, or are okay with saying the emperor’s clothes are real clothes.

A TERF is simply a feminist who understands biology and reality.

3

I take it that Lia Thomas is trans? I wasn’t paying attention to this story, either, and a little more context would have helped.

4

Sorry, yes.

This issue has been quite prominent in my social media in the last few days, so I forget not everyone knows everything

5

Ok, so go support politicians who will pass legislation to ban transgender athletes.

6

Yeah, I’m going to disagree, due to the null hypothesis being that trans women should be treated equally, and a complete lack of argument for how Thomas should be an exception. No data specific to Thomas is brought up in your OP. And the last time I saw that, it turned out that the winner had previously lost cis women before, proving she wasn’t somehow superior because she was trans.

I thought maybe your link would add information, but it doesn’t seem to have any, and has a concerning non-news tone. It was already fishy because the URL ends in .pub but TLD made a big deal out of being “feminist news” yet seemingly not popular enough to have a decent URL. And then I read the article, and see that it’s very much emotional baiting and with little data, and refers to Thomas as “he.” I look up the site, and it’s basically a single person’s blog who makes a big deal out of being “radical feiminist.”

In short, it’s a TERF website doing typical TERF-y emotional manipulation instead of argument. It goes out of its way to try and provoke empathy only for one side, rather than argument. Similarly, the OP also only shows empathy for the non-trans people involved, suggesting that the article affected their POV on the subject.

Without any actual data to show that Thomas is performing well above the rest and an argument for how this is unfair, I cannot side against her. And the lack of vetting of sources in the OP is a enough of a ding that I’m not going to go out looking for other sources for them.

Finally, a cautionary note to others about being careful about this subject. There is a legitimate discussion on this topic. But there are also a lot of people who seem to use it as a backdoor to argue that trans women aren’t women. (The OP’s source seems to be one of these.) So it’s good to be very careful of your sources on these sorts of topics. Be very wary of emotional appeals or appeals to “just so” arguments, like the assumption that trans people in athletics is unfair, or that a trans athlete must be better because she is trans. Make sure they give data. Check the credibility of the author, as well as their biases.

There is a concentrated effort right now in demonizing trans people. You’ve got to be careful to read from people who see all humans as equal, and not those who have a bias towards or against a particular minority.

7

Clicking through the website linked in the OP shows me that it’s an anti trans hate website, equivalent to a white supremacist cite that documents every crime, especially crimes that hurt children, committed by a Black person or Jew in order to support hateful conclusions about them.

8

That “article” is just nasty transphobic trash talking with zero substance and I say that as a parent of a trans-son (assigned female at birth). Start off with referring to “Lia Thomas” as “Thomas” and not “Ms. Thomas” or “Lia” or “Lia Thomas” is the first red flag. The second using transphobic author JK Rowling as an authoritative source.

9

For this swimmer, they went from being somewhere in the low hundreds best swimmer as a man and being nowhere near record times, to winning womens events by massive margins and setting records.

That is the scale of the male/female advantage in most athletic events.

If there is no or minimal gatekeeping being done, or if the restrictions put in place are ineffective in narrowing that massive biological advantage then this is entirely predictable and certainly more examples of this will emerge and will be hugely damaging to the credibility of women’s sport.

All of that is fine if what you care about is inclusive competition rather than fair competition.

10

I believe that trans women are women, and trans men are men. My sister is nonbinary, my father is a trans woman, and I give to the Human Rights Campaign and the Trevor Project.

But I don’t believe trans women should be competing in sports with cis women. Being born and living for a certain amount of time as a biological male could potentially give one a huge advantage in sporting competitions. AMAB people are generally taller and stronger.

And I’m not sure there’s an easy solution to this problem. Putting trans women with men’s teams could cause problems, as well. Like how the challenge for trans women in choosing which bathroom to use is the difference between getting yelled at and getting beaten up.

I mean, not every AMAB athlete taking part in women’s athletics is going to be Lia Thomas, or like that South Park episode starring “Macho Ma’am” Randy Savage, which was criticized for being transphobic but now seems a little bit prescient to some.

Here’s my take.

Allow trans women to share locker rooms and restroom facilities with cis women. Allow them to go to all-women’s colleges if they want to. Don’t hesitate to take off your hijab in front of a close trans woman friend, as I heard someone freely did.

In almost every way that’s important, treat trans women like cis women, because trans women are real women, whether they’re pre-op or post-op, whether they’re on HRT or not. My dad is a real woman, even though she’s my biological father. She’s on HRT and is pre-op.

Being transgender is hard. There’s a lot of discrimination, both against trans men and trans women. A lot of people will find reasons not to hire them for jobs, or rent to them, and in some states, that’s not even illegal, though it should be. Suicidal ideation is high in the transgender community. I wrote a paper in college about the need to treat transgender people fairly.

But in situations in which being AMAB would put one at an advantage, such as competitive sports, it’s not unreasonable to consider limiting trans women’s ability to participate so they don’t run roughshod over cis women who don’t have that advantage. I mean, the fact that Lia Thomas is setting records as a woman when she was nowhere near being the best as a man goes to show that a competitive advantage exists from the fact that she was AMAB.

If the rules and times between the two leagues were the same, how many more points per game do you think Michael Jordan, or even a mid-level NBA player like J.R. Smith, could have gotten in the WNBA if they had identified as women and been on hormone replacement therapy? Not too many WNBA players of their height and skill running around.

I mean, the Republicans are transphobic assholes, and I hate that Texas Governor Greg Abbott is trying to get his attorneys general onboard with the idea that parents allowing their transgender children to have gender-affirming care amounts to child abuse, and he wants the system to use its power to remove those children from their loving parents and put them in foster care.

I think they’re wrong on the North Carolina bathroom bill. Is that still a thing?

But I don’t think they’re necessarily wrong on the sports issue, and though I still think it comes from a deep-rooted transphobia, they’ve actually got an interesting point (in an “even a broken clock is right twice a day” sort of way).

11

Biological men should not compete against biological women at elite levels. It is nonsense to suggest that if we add a little hormone here and take one away here you’re creating an equal field.

12

So, those of you dismissing the link on the grounds that the website hosting it is a ‘hate group’ - do you think that the mother in the video is lying about her experiences? Misinterpreting something? Or do you think that the experiences themselves just aren’t that bad?

In particular, if the video in question was truly removed from Spotify, YouTube and iTunes then it’s probably good that it was put up somewhere don’t you think? So that people can look at it and make up their minds about the situation

13

IMO trans athletes should be allowed to compete unless their inclusion negatively impacts competitive fairness or player safety. It should be case by case, since, from what I can tell, most trans athletes will not have a negative impact on competitive fairness or safety (despite what trans-haters would like us to believe). I don’t know the specifics of the Lia Thomas case to determine if her inclusion in competition has such a negative impact on competitive fairness (for non-contact sports like swimming, safety is obviously not an issue). I do think people should be very careful with trusting the reports and advocacy of those who despise trans people – trans haters are no better than white supremacists and other bigots and should be considered just as despicable by decent people.

Cases like Lia Thomas appear to be MASSIVELY RARE – every single specific case gets focused news coverage, mostly due to the efforts of trans haters. Most trans athletes compete in sports with no national attention, and no records broken.

14

And that seems fair but how would we go about judging whether competitive fairness has been impacted? That seems to be the key question.

Sure, but it only takes one such athlete to skew the competition completely.
It is likely of little comfort to a distraught silver medallist to tell them that at least they weren’t beaten by half a dozen other trans athletes as well.

This is competitive sport we are talking about here and as such, what happens in general is of far less interest than what happens at the extreme tail of the ability bell curve. That’s where the medals are decided and where such immense advantageous biological benefits will ultimately manifest, even if such an occurrence is massively rare.

15

I also have a close family member who is trans. Although she is not athletic in the least, she feels allowing AMABs to compete in women’s sports is like allowing college-level athletes to join a high school team. As we can see here, there is resentment from the other members of the team.

Personally I think competitive sports are a waste of time, energy, and money. But if we are going to have them (and society seems to demand such) then they should be made as fair as possible to those who participate. That isn’t happening here.

16

Record setting athletes are massively rare.

17

In case anyone wants to read an article about it from a more neutral source, here’s a good story from Sports Illustrated:

18

This cuts both ways. We should all be very wary of trusting the reports and advocacy of any group with an ideological dog in the fight, pro or anti.
There seems to be an inbuilt assumption from many that only one side of this debate distorts, misrepresents or shows selective bias. That’s naive at best but of course it is in line with human nature.

What actually matters are the facts. Those that can be uncovered and shown to be valid are independent of any advocacy groups and it is those facts that should form the basis of the our assessment of “inclusivity, fairness and safety”.
Something that well-meaning an neutral groups have indeed tried to do and who have found that it is a very difficult circle to square.

19

This is how my thought process went:

If a biological male feels that they are really female inside and wishes to transition, I wish them all the best and hope that they’re able to have the full experience of what it means to be a female.

But, teams are separated into mens’ and womens’ versions for a reason- because, in general, men are faster and stronger than women. Just a biological fact. So, it isn’t fair that that a trans female should be allowed to compete with cis females. What if Caitlyn Jenner had decided to transition back at the top of her Olympic game and continued to compete, but as a woman? That would hardly have seemed fair.

But, what about the reverse- if a trans male wants to compete on the mens’ team? If they think they can be competitive, I don’t see what the problem should be with that. Is that hypocritical of me?

And then, what about athletes who are double amputees and run with those blade-like prosthetics? I would argue that you can draw a parallel between that and trans females competing with cis women. Those modern prosthetics are so advanced they actually give the runner an advantage, and that was a controversial subject as well (Oscar Pistorius being the most (in)famous example). I can’t say I believe amputees with advanced prosthetics should be banned from competition. So why would I think trans females should be banned from womens’ teams?

In short, I’m still in an internal debate with myself over it.

20

It seems straightforward to me, but maybe I’m being reductive or something. If you believe trans women are women, then they should compete in women’s events. That’s it. A particular trans woman may indeed have an advantage over her competitors, but so what? Somebody has to win.