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Penn Swimmers Speak to Crushing Reality of Males Invading Female Sports
As male swimmer Lia Thomas trounces women’s swim records, Penn female swimmers are speaking out.
Writing at Outkick.com, reporter Joe Kinsey provides readers with this unique perspective, thanks to his anonymous interview with a female swimmer at University of Pennsylvania. The young woman’s teammate, Lia Thomas, has recently garnered media attention from all sides of the political spectrum after breaking a series of league and program records in the 200, 500, and 1650 freestyle events.
So far this year, two of Thomas’ best times in those three events are good enough for a podium finish at the NCAA championship, with the 1650 free time comfortably within the top 15 based on last year’s results across the nation.
Yet, as Kinsey relates, beyond the performative congratulations of Thomas’ female teammates lies a deep sense of disappointment. And it’s not hard to understand why. After having worked their entire lives for the chance to compete at the collegiate level, Thomas’ teammates—including a second who has also spoken out anonymously—are now relegated to supporting cast members in a politically motivated drama that has the real-world consequence of erasing women from the very sports set aside for their own competition.
Women losing spots on podiums is far from the only negative result of denying or flattening the differences between men and women, but it’s quickly become entrenched as the most easily identifiable cost that young women are being forced to bear.
Kinsey’s article is worth reading in its entirety, but it’s the following quote from Thomas’ anonymous teammate that perhaps packs the most punch, punctuating the incredibly deflating reality that more and more young women and girls are experiencing as sex-separated sports take a back seat to the prevailing ideology.
“When I have kids, I kinda hope they’re all boys because if I have any girls that want to play sports in college, good luck,” she told Outkick. “[Their opponents] are all going to be biological men saying that they’re women. Right now we have one, but what if we had three on the team? There’d be three less girls competing.”
You don’t have to be an avowed feminist to feel the heartbreak in a statement like that. After all, the disillusionment and outright deflation are palpable. It’s hard to imagine a more dire status report on equal opportunities on the field of play for women than a college female athlete hoping that she has sons rather than daughters, so that at least her children can get a fair chance at victory in athletics.
Federal legislation like Title IX ensures that young women have every opportunity to compete on a level playing field—and that in doing so, they have a fair chance at winning and enjoying the benefits of their success.
But Title IX and any other protection of women’s opportunities in the playing field or elsewhere—not to mention any protection of women’s privacy in female-only spaces like locker rooms, changing rooms, and restrooms—rests on biological differences between the sexes.
Males will always have physical advantages over comparably gifted and fit females—that’s the reason we have women’s sports. But young women will always pay the price, as long as the recent push to ignore biological reality in favor of radical gender ideology continues.
Of course, Lia Thomas’ teammate is far from the only female athlete pushing back against this distinctively anti-female agenda. In West Virginia, for instance, women’s soccer player Lainey Armistead recently joined a lawsuit to defend her state’s newly passed law ensuring that only females can compete in female athletics.
Armistead’s defense of her state’s commonsense law reflects a similar case involving Madison Kenyon and Mary Kate Marshall, teammates on Idaho State University’s track and cross-country squads who are also defending their state’s version of a similar law against a challenge from the ACLU. Meanwhile, Florida Atlantic University sophomore Selina Soule—who is still involved in taking to task her home state’s athletic association over the same issue—is waiting for the court to grant her the ability to intervene in a lawsuit challenging Florida’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act.
Each of these young women faced a choice along the way. Either they could sit in silence and endure the wholesale overturning of the whole notion underlying women’s sports, or they could stand up and do something about it.
As we’re seeing in the case of at least one Penn female swimmer, faced with those two options, fewer women seem willing to remain silent while the differences between sexes—and the promises based on those differences—are jettisoned by a culture that prizes radical theory over biological reality.
Published in Sports
I just love it when “The Party of Science” tries to pretend the Y chromosome can be erased with lipstick.
It really is bad when it comes to sports like Mixed Martial Arts
It’s the party of emotions first and foremost. Science too, but only when the outcome would be the same.
Yep, as clear as it is when you bump up times in swimming or track, those contact sports are absolutely brutal.
Where do you find the largest number of beneficiaries of Title IX? The middle class, and the largest constituency within that are middle class whites. And these are the people who, because of their voting patterns, are really the only thing standing between the Democrat party and total power.
So, like most everything else the Dems are doing, forcing girls to compete against boys is best understood not as some kind of misguided ideological crusade to rectify an injustice, but as an attack on the opponents of the Democracy. We will make your daughters use bathrooms with men, and there’s nothing you can do about it. We will make them compete against boys, and there’s nothing you can do about it. We will confuse them by asking them to publicly declare their pronouns. We will force them to get vaccines they don’t need. We will teach them that they are bad people because of what they look like. We will make you watch as we facilitate the invasion of your country over the southern border. And there’s nothing you can do about any of it.
The Republican messiah is the one who will make sure we all understand that everything they do is an attack on you for not voting for them. And who will refuse to engage in a meaningless ideological debate about these issues, and will inspire us instead to fight back with massive disobedience.
I have little sympathy for any feminist complaining about this situation. Feminists created this situation.
For decades, feminists have constantly told us that gender is a social construct. Any differences in performance or preference between the sexes were proof of misogyny because there’s no inherent difference between men and women. If we’d all just give our sons dolls to play with and our girls Tonka trucks, all the differences would go away. And if you disagreed, that just proved that you were a misogynist trying to prop up the patriarchy.
This current madness is the logical result of the feminist agenda. If gender is only a social construct, then why shouldn’t males be able to compete against females? They broke it, they can fix it. I’m just gonna sit here and “laugh my way through the fall of the Republic,” as Andrew Klavan puts it.
This has to be the quintessential hollow victory. What have they won?
All they are doing is proving the point, as my daughter’s gymnastics coach once told me, that while it is true that some women are faster and stronger than some men, the strongest woman will never be faster and stronger than the fastest and strongest man.
Perhaps these mixed competitions are a good thing. At some point, seeing these competitions, perhaps the reality of our biological life will be proven beyond question and we can go back to being mostly and simply men and women.
Funny you brought up the Klavan line at the end–I thought what you had to say up until that had a ring of Klavany goodness to it. Totally agree with you on this. Gender ideology is a subspecies of feminism, so it really is a case of the snake eating its own tail. The only way out of this is a rejection of both and a return to God’s reality by God’s grace (individually and corporately).
The story of the “Emperor’s New Clothes” is taking on a whole new perspective.
Totally agreed. Nobody wins in these scenarios–least of all the person confused about their gender, and certainly not any women.
The feminists always denied scientific facts b/c science is misogynist- like the woke decry science as white supremacy. More than 10 years ago studies demonstrated that even young monkeys have sex differences in toy preferences- and that is hard to blame on white men-
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/
The difference is actually striking-amateur teen boy’s teams can beat professional adult women’s teams (face it the women’s national isn’t amateurs):
https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-under-15-boys-squad-beat-the-u-s-womens-national-team-in-a-scrimmage/
similar outcomes have been seen in Australia
I’m saving that line.
I believe this happened once, and it was very ugly. Women, real women, will die in the boxing ring or after being transported to the hospital. Same for MMA and any other heavy striking combat sport. The best outcome will be permanent, life altering damage from biological male arm or leg bones, driven by biological male muscles and connective tissue, striking biological female heads.
If more people listened to Klavan, the world would be a better place.
The Women have a choice not to do it. And if They decide to do it, perhaps They’d get some sense knocked into Them.
Let’s go Rolanda!
I’m thinking of changing my gender identity and competing against J.K. Rowling for number of books sold. Watch for my come-from-behind victory!
Yes, it’s already happened and it’s sickening . . .
Yep, that was Fallon Fox, who fractured an opponent’s skull shortly after Fox began competing against (i.e. beating) women. https://www.sportskeeda.com/mma/news-when-transgender-fighter-fallon-fox-broke-opponent-s-skull-mma-fight
Such a good one!