That said, if I am going to spend 30 seconds engaging on this topic, here are some questions I have to which the answers in the public discourse are inconsistent and arbitrary:
What is the purpose of gender division in athletics?
What physical attributes are required for a person to be allowed to compete in a particular gender category?
What physical attributes are required for a person to be prohibited from competing in a particular gender category?
What does it even mean to “allow” or “prohibit” (and who does that gatekeeping) someone from competing in a particular gender category? At the grade school level? High school level? Collegiate? Semi-pro? Pro?
No two bodies are the same. Why is it “fair” for one set of people with different bodies to compete, while it’s “unfair” for another set of people with different bodies to compete?
How much of this is all about supporting the structure of a money-making athletics industry? Why does that industry matter?
. . . unless we can come to some agreement on these meta-questions, arguments about keeping women with particular biologies out of women’s sports does nothing but reflect the narrow personal bias of the person making that argument.
It looks like she realized she was a woman “near the end of high school”. She arrived at Penn late summer, 2017. As a freshman in college she was part of the men’s team and placed well. “In her first Ivy League championships, in February 2018, she had top-eight finishes in the 500-yard freestyle, the 1,000-yard freestyle and the 1,650-yard freestyle.” That would have been the men’s Ivy League championship for the 2017-2018 season.
She came out to family the summer of 2018, but for the 2018-2019 season would still compete on the men’s team. “The 2018–19 season proved to be Thomas’s best yet. She earned second-place finishes in the same trio of Ivy championship races in which she’d excelled the previous year, earning her multiple spots on the All-Ivy team.”
She started hormone replacement therapy in May of 2019, at the age of either 20 or 21. She came out to her coaches, and the men and women’s teams, later that year. NCAA rules allowed her to change her gender but require a year of hormone replacement therapy before she could compete against other women. She competed “sporadically” on the men’s team for the 2019-2020 season, due to the therapy.
Ms. Thomas took the 2020-2021 year off because she wanted to compete on a women’s team, but COVID-19 threatened to cancel swim for that year. (I believe the NCAA rules for college swim only allow a person to compete in 4 seasons)
The article describes the changes to her body after two years of hormone replacement therapy,
When she started practicing with Penn again in the late summer of 2021, she felt physically different from the person who’d come close to hitting NCAA championship–qualifying times in men’s distance races. She’d been on HRT a little more than two years by then. Thomas says she shrunk about an inch. She noticed her strength wasn’t the same; fat had also had been redistributed within her body. Holding her old practice paces was an impossibility. […] Against other women, though, she was still extremely fast in the water. At a November 2021 meet against Princeton and Cornell, Thomas posted the NCAA season-best times in the 200-yard freestyle and the 500-yard freestyle, set Penn records in those events and won three individual races. In the blowout 500 free, she beat the second-place finisher by nearly 13 seconds.
And Ms. Thomas’s opinion,
There is no such thing as half-support: Either you back her fully as a woman or you don’t. “The very simple answer is that I’m not a man,” she says. “I’m a woman, so I belong on the women’s team. Trans people deserve that same respect every other athlete gets.”
The NCAA, as previously mentioned, required 1 year of hormone replacement therapy for a student-athlete to transition from men’s to women’s sports. They dropped trans eligibility guidelines late January to punt the question to each national sports body, which is USA Swimming for swim.
USA Swimming released new guidelines Feb. 1, laying out a series of requirements and establishing a three-person medical panel to determine whether transgender women have “a competitive advantage over the athlete’s cisgender female competitors.” The new guidelines set a ceiling testosterone level of five nanomoles per liter—half the threshold used by previous Olympic rules—that transgender athletes would need to register, continuously, for 36 months before applying to swim as a woman.
By the NCAA championships, Thomas would be on her HRT regimen for only 34 months.
The NCAA promptly delayed implementation of those guidelines, and Ms. Thomas competed in the championships this February. She beat Olympian Kate Ziegler’s 4:47.78 500-yard freestyle pool record by just over twelve seconds, at 4:37.12. The world record (or U.S. record since only the U.S. does 500 yards) is held by Katie Ledecky at 4:24.06, when she was age 18.
I’m not an expert on the subject, and I don’t know whether Ms. Thomas is doing well because of a biological advantage or if she is putting in the work any other woman would have to put in. That’s what it hinges on, in my opinion. It looks like she was placing second in certain races while on the men’s team, and is now placing first and second on the women’s team, which is conceivably consistent with the treatment countering any male advantage.
But I don’t think it’s fair to take her viewpoint, that simply being a woman means you should compete against women. Having a panel determine if there is a competitive advantage sounds good on paper but I don’t know how one may determine that.
The problem is that she’s seeing support in terms of black and white, with no room for a nuanced opinion. Swimming isn’t a sport that I’m well-versed in, but 13 seconds seems like an eternity in a 500-yard race, and the fact is, she is setting NCAA season-best times and school records in certain events.
How much of that is due to pure talent, and how much of it is due to the fact that she’s competing against people who are AFAB? I think that’s a question that has to be asked, and should be asked without thinking less of the people asking questions, or calling them unworthy allies, or transphobic. (And I’m grateful that, when I looked at the response to my previous post, no one did that.)
As I understand it, prior to transitioning Lia Thomas’ record against male swimmers was decidedly mediocre. If hormone treatments truly nullified any inherent advantages, shouldn’t her record against female swimmers also be mediocre? Why is she leading the pack of Penn University girls when, just a year ago, she was in the bottom third of the pack of Penn University boys?
As for the question of whether she should compete against girls, I think a fair compromise would be if she was allowed to compete but any victories she accrues aren’t formally counted. So, if Lia Thomas and Jane Smith place first and second respectively then Jane would be recorded as the winner.
Great! Here’s another compromise: we can let Black people vote, we just won’t count their votes! Who could argue with such a reasonable middle-ground position?
The whole kerfuffle seems to be based on the assumption that the only reason to participate is to win. Nothing about fellowship, camaraderie, improving skills, etc.
No doubt I’m naive, but if we want to change anything, that might be a good place to start.
If one reason to compete is to set records, or personal bests, that shouldn’t be affected by who you’re swimming against anyway. It’s you against the pool.
Transitioning is not a lifestyle choice, and your misgendering of Lia did not go unnoticed. It is unfortunate that these discussions cannot be had without bigotry entering the picture.
Her story is probably broadly true. However, it is, as I said, emotional manipulation.
This is a woman who, with no actual facts to back her up, assumed that Lia Thomas was at an unfair advantage. And, despite this lack of facts to back her up, she wanted to sue, and lawyers reasonably turned her down, seeing it for what it was. If you jump straight to the conclusion that a trans person is unfair, without data, that’s prejudice. And obviously they can’t win a case based on their client’s prejudice.
From there we see more of her prejudice, where she sought out only sources that attack trans people. At no point does she describe looking at the counterarguments against people like JK Rowling. She instead inflates the whole thing to some sort of attack by trans women on cis women.
Imagine that she assumed that a black person was winning because of their inherent athleticism. The exact same thing would happen to her. Lawyers wouldn’t take her case. And if she then sought out the “Scientific racists” and white supremacists who claim black people are out to get white people, you’d clearly know she was a racist.
There’s nothing to her story, other than inflammatory rhetoric designed to be biased against trans people. There is, as I said, NO FACTS. And that’s kinda essential if you’re going to discriminate against someone.
There is one way you can argue the video is useful: the video is that it is yet another example of this sort of emotional manipulation, and we can use it to point out the flaws. It does not present facts, and thus does not allow people to “make their own decisions.”
However, it is also detrimental in that it continues to allow hate groups to push their agenda. These groups rarely care about facts. They care about the emotional appeal of the anecdote. They know that enough strong emotion can get people to ignore the holes, the unsupported assumptions, etc.
Again, the only data that is remotely relevant here would be data showing Thomas in particular and trans women athletes in general had an advantage. None of the rest matters in determining if Thomas should swim in the Women’s team.
That’s why, as I said, this “news” article is just emotional manipulation.
This is probably going to go down like a lead balloon, but it’s self-evident to me that completing puberty as a male confers physical advantages which hormone therapy cannot fully undo. Transwomen who’ve completed male puberty tend, on average, to be taller, to have stronger cardiovascular systems, to have greater lung capacity, greater upper body strength, more fast-twitch muscle, bigger hands and feet (particularly important in swimming), and a whole host of other advantages which give them a significant competitive edge over cisgender female athletes.
This study in Sports Medicine shows that these advantages are only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed in line with the current guidelines for transgender athletes.
To me, letting a transwoman who has gone through puberty as a male compete against ciswomen is as absurd and unfair as letting a ciswoman who’s spent the last ten years juicing compete against women who haven’t.
I didn’t always think this way. In fact, my opinion was, up until recently, considerably more moderate. It’s largely thanks to this specific case that I’ve started questioning the wisdom of letting transwomen who’ve gone through male puberty compete against ciswomen.
This video shows Lia Thomas coming first in the 1,650m freestyle at the Zippy Invitational by a staggering 38 seconds. To the best of my awareness, Lia Thomas never came close to winning a race against cisgender male swimmers by anything close to that. So what’s the difference that makes the difference? Is it the case that this year’s batch of U. Penn cisgender female swimmers are just especially talentless? Or is it the case that, having gone through male puberty, Lia Thomas has an insurmountable advantage over this year’s batch of U. Penn cisgender female swimmers? I can’t see a third option.
Lia Thomas has unfair advantages, and I don’t think cisgender female swimmers should be required to affirm Lia Thomas’s gender identity to their own detriment. That’s why I suggested letting Thomas compete against cisgender females (thereby affirming her own gender identity) while prohibiting her from using her innate advantages to claim titles and records. Is it perfect? No. But it’s a concession. If that’s not acceptable, I’d be perfectly happy not allowing her to compete against cisgender women at all.
Actually, the article says:
“The 2018–19 season proved to be Thomas’s best yet. She earned second-place finishes in the same trio of Ivy championship races in which she’d excelled the previous year, earning her multiple spots on the All-Ivy team.”
The wording here seems rather odd. The way I’m reading it, she didn’t come second in an Ivy League Championship. She came second in three races which are included in the Ivy League Championship events roster. It’s like, if a kid at 5th grade school sports day comes first in a 100 meter sprint, you could say he came first in an Olympic Championship race, because the 100 meter sprint is an Olympic event. But that’s not the same as saying he won a Gold medal in Tokyo. Still, I will concede that her record against cisgender males was better than I originally believed it to be.
However, the fact remains that, post-transition, Lia Thomas’s performance is far more comparable to that of a cisgender male than a cisgender female. This chart compares her performance at the Zippy Invitational to the performances of cisgender male and cisgender female competitors respectively.
Furthermore, this article states that, prior to her transition, Lia Thomas was ranked 554th in the men’s 200m freestyle. Her ranking against cisgender women today? First.
Also, I take exception to the idea that I want to oppress any minorities. In my opinion (and the opinion of scientists published in Sports Medicine and The British Journal of Sports Medicine) members of this particular minority have an unfair advantage over the cisgender female majority against whom they’re competing. In this one, very specific, very narrow arena, it’s the minority who are doing the oppressing. From the moment Lia Thomas steps into the pool to the moment she steps out, she’s operating with the benefit of a host of unfair physical advantages. And her performance against cisgender women thus far shows that the hormone treatments she’s taking have done little to nullify that advantage. She may be unfairly disadvantaged and oppressed in literally every other area of her life, but in the pool she’s the one with the power and her performance rankings prove it.
I also have no problem with transgender males competing against cisgender males, because transgender males aren’t operating with the benefit of inherent, unfair physical advantages.
Furthermore, I also have no objection to transwomen who haven’t gone through male puberty competing against cisgender women. If Lia Thomas had realised she was trans earlier, and had started puberty blockers when she was 12, and was still achieving the same times she’s achieving now, I’d have absolutely nothing but praise for her. The problem I have isn’t with her being transgender per se. It’s with her competing as a transgender woman after having gone through male puberty.
With all due respect, I think that’s a pretty silly comparison. Taken in isolation, a black person’s vote is worth no more or less than that of his white next door neighbor’s. A better analogy would be this: Under the electoral college system - which I believe to be anti-democratic - votes from rural states like Wisconsin are weighted more heavily than votes from coastal states like California. Comparing Lia Thomas to, say, the girl she thrashed by 38 seconds at the Zippy International, is like comparing the weight of a vote cast in Wisconsin to that of a vote cast in California. One is inherently stronger than the other, and that disparity is unfair. And I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with wanting to change the system to nullify that inherent, unfair advantage. That’s kind of what I want to do here.
But you know what? I’ll take back my previous suggestion. It was a spur of the moment thought and I didn’t fully think it through. In retrospect, it was pretty stupid. But I don’t think that letting her compete against cisgender women under the current guidelines is any smarter, or fairer.
We should do away with gender divisions in sport entirely, and find a more neutral metric to use instead. Pass a series of appropriately targeted physical prowess tests (as determined by an international sporting authority), and the higher up you get, the higher the division you are placed in. Compete against those who are in the same division. Gender would then be deemed irrelevant.
Ok, I literally just found this out today but… turns out Lia Thomas was not actually the only trans person at the meet. Turns out that Iszaac Hennig (who I think I remember as being second place in at least one of Lia’s races) is also trans. Specifically, a trans man.
This really makes no sense. If Lia must swim in the women’s race because she’s a woman, why is Iszaac not swimming in the men’s competition?
I understand that Iszaac’s not taking any hormones yet, so his body is still comparable to the women’s but if it’s bodies that are being judged, Lia‘s body is not comparable. She’s over 99 percentile for height and also probably has male bone density and also has male body mechanics and I don’t think she’s being made to meet a female standard for testosterone either