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Honestly? Well, Yes, Probably: Bari Weiss on Lia Thomas
I’ve written before about how much I appreciate Bari Weiss’s reporting, including her Honestly podcast. Hers is currently the only Substack publication for which I am a paying subscriber. I think she is important, a loud voice — albeit from the left — for free speech and open discussion of topics the left would generally like to have censored.
Her podcast today is about Lia Thomas, the man who swims on the University of Pennsylvania women’s swimming team. This is obviously a sensitive topic: Say the wrong thing and, if you’re a public figure, you can expect to be canceled; if you’re just a regular person, anticipate abuse directed at you and, in this case, your daughter if she happens to swim on the team with Mr. Thomas.
Once again, I commend Ms. Weiss for engaging with a contentious issue. You can listen to the 25-minute podcast here.
I think it’s an honest account from Ms. Weiss’s perspective. That is, she refers to Mr. Thomas using feminine pronouns, as is the popular convention, and calls him “a trans-woman,” because, I think, she honestly believes this to be the appropriate way to deal with so-called “trans people.” Those concessions to fanciful terminology don’t strike me as dishonest if the speaker believes that so-called “trans people” should be accorded the courtesy of being referenced by their preferred pronouns. I disagree, but even many generally conservative people are uncomfortable doing otherwise.
I will speak more plainly: Lia Thomas is, like all “trans-women,” a transvestite man posing as a woman. His competition against women disgraces the University of Pennsylvania and, worse, is a betrayal of women. The entire “trans” movement is a betrayal of women, the undermining of centuries of gradual progress toward giving women the protection they need to be secure and to thrive in a culture dominated by the stronger and more aggressive half of the species.
Though she doesn’t actually say it, I suspect Ms. Weiss thinks what Mr. Thomas is doing is wrong. I don’t know how anyone could listen to the podcast and not come to share that view: nothing in the account suggests that this is other than a mockery of women’s athleticism and a terrible injustice to the young ladies who have to compete against this young man. This is a story that needs to be told frankly, and this podcast does that, even as it avoids offering an editorial opinion that, while unnecessary, I would have found more satisfying. It’s straight reporting, and that’s refreshing.
I would prefer that we all stop referring to male transvestites like Mr. Thomas using feminine pronouns, and that we eliminate the confusing labels of “trans-woman” and “trans-man,” which always leave me guessing whether we’re talking about a man pretending he’s a woman or a woman pretending she’s a man. I would prefer that because I think that would bring some much-needed clarity to the discussion — clarity, and honesty.
My children were homeschooled most of their lives. The older three never attended an actual school until they went to college. When I became a single father and homeschooling was no longer a viable option, I placed the younger three in a small Catholic high school, where they discovered sports — something unheard of in our family. They excelled academically and athletically, but I think it was their participation in athletics (and they played almost everything, an advantage of going to a very small school) that was the best and perhaps most important part of their educations and social lives.
It would have broken my heart to watch my daughter trapped in hopeless competition against boys — broken my heart and enraged me. I feel for the families who are being betrayed by the NCAA, by the University of Pennsylvania, and by this selfish young man who, while a mediocre swimmer against other males, is easily good enough to crush in unfair competition the spirit and dreams of countless real women.
Published in Culture
I wonder if anyone ever asked Thomas himself whether his competing with women or girls is fair? And if he has the guts to say yes (I think he’d dodge the question) the reason(s) it is fair.
What would be the University posture if the sport were boxing?
That was touched on briefly in the podcast (which I encourage everyone to hear). It was suggested that Mr. Thomas seems completely disinterested in the impact he’s having, never talks to the girls on the team about it. He apparently is isolated from, or isolates himself from, the rest of the team. I would guess that he has a spectrum disorder, but that might simply be me being charitable.
This illustrates what I think is a very important point about student sports in the 21st century. In academic sport, as long as general enrolment continues to increase it follows that the pool of competitors also gets larger every year. However, the number of prizes does not increase which means that the quality of so-called “mediocre” competitors will also increase every year, because more and more excellent athletes will be finishing just out of reach of the medal podium. This naturally leads to a lot of athletic alienation. What are these athletes who might have been champions in previous generations to do when they are shut out from the top echelons of academic sports in the 21st Century? Where do they get their motivation? What is their reward for the personal sacrifice and the many hours of hard work? What is the point of it all? And that’s not even to mention the many excellent athletes who won’t even qualify for the teams because there is so much more competition now.
Let’s not fool ourselves, the word “mediocre” is a synonym for “failure”, and yet a “mediocre” athlete is still a hell of a lot more of an athlete than the average human being.
“I will speak more plainly: Lia Thomas is, like all “trans-women,” a transvestite man posing as a woman. His competition against women disgraces the University of Pennsylvania and, worse, is a betrayal of women. The entire “trans” movement is a betrayal of women, the undermining of centuries of gradual progress toward giving women the protection they need to be secure and to thrive in a culture dominated by the stronger and more aggressive half of the species.”
Christine Rosen had an insightful article on this subject, titled “The New Misogyny,” in the January 2022 issue of Commentary.
Well, he might use the men’s locker room etc and would be the only one on the team to do so, so yes, isolated.
He might, but, per the interview, it seems he doesn’t — at least, if one women swimmer’s mother is to be believed. He uses the ladies’ locker room.
Then I hope the women use the men’s.
Does the rugged Señor Thomas still have his penis? It doesn’t matter ultimately, but it speaks to his level of commitment to this charade.
My understanding is that he does, which is a source of some of the complaints about his use of the women’s locker room. Also, he competed in swimming as a male up until just a year or so ago. So he went through puberty and post-puberty growth as a male. Which means physiologically he is a male.
What a sham.
I wonder if he thinks any records he “breaks,” pretending to be a woman, mean anything? If there are official trackings of these things, anything he “wins” should have a huge asterisk next to it: “not really a woman.”
Imagine the damage he could do if he were allowed into women’s boxing.
What, men aren’t already allowed to box with women? Someone’s gonna get sued!
Wouldn’t surprise me if he “transitioned” for the sole purpose of becoming the best rated swimmer on his team, and probably the best rated female swimmer anywhere. He was #400 or something before. He obviously doesn’t care that his presence on the team could literally rob another swimmer of a scholarship or place on the Olympic team.
Well people with a spectrum disorder can’t understand how other people feel but they can understand that cheating is bad.
It would be interesting to hear the response if one of our “investigative” reporters were to ask him that question.
I would hope the “woke” disease would be stopped before it reaches that level. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
He will always be a male. Why do we indulge the elites by discussing this as if it were a real issue?
Both the elites and the at least arguably mentally ill, if not just frauds.
We have already crossed that bridge: There are men competing as women in wrestling and martial arts, with predictable results — though, understandably, some women have refused to compete against them, claiming fear of being injured. I don’t know if any swimmers have refused to compete against Mr. Thomas. Certainly female swimmers can’t make a plausible case that they will receive grievous bodily harm from competition against a man, so they don’t have that excuse to fall back upon.
Commitment.
There’s an old saying about involvement and commitment. If you have bacon and eggs for breakfast, the chicken was involved. The pig was committed.
I believe that, yes, Mr. Thomas remains intact.
And/But even if he’d had a Limbaugh-ist “Lopitoffofme” he’d still have male bone structure and muscles…
Oh, absolutely. The benefits of being a mature male-turned-ersatz-female-(if-only-in-his-mind) are extraordinary, when it comes to most competitive athletics.
The Weiss podcasts mentions, in passing, Carole Hooven’s book about testosterone (linked here). It’s a good book that makes very clear just what those advantages are.
I wonder if we will see this sort of thing catch on with people who have a disorder that makes them feel substantially older or younger than they really are? If an 18-year-old feels like he is 11, can he play on the T-ball team? If a 12-year-old feels like she is 16, will she be able to get a driver’s license? Maybe I can tell the Social Security Administration that I feel like I am 70 so they should start sending me my checks.
There have been what I would call “atrocities” in mixed martial arts . . .
Hank, great post. I agree with just about everything that you say.
As usual, I respond to the one area in which we appear to be in disagreement.
It is dishonest, I think. If someone agrees to call a cat a dog, that’s dishonest, even if saying otherwise would upset the kooky person who thinks his cat is a dog. If someone agrees to say that the sky is orange, that’s dishonest, even if saying otherwise would upset the kooky person who insists that the sky is orange and will throw a tantrum if you say otherwise.
I think that the idea that “courtesy” demands that we accommodate the delusion, dysphoria, or other motivation of a person claiming to be “trans” is a linguistic and social weapon, the purpose of which is to delegitimize opposition to the trans agenda. I recommend against conceding the point.
By this, I mean not only that we decline to use such language ourselves, but that we decline to excuse the dishonesty of those who go along with the charade, supposedly in the name of courtesy.
First, they are lying. Second, they have no good reason to lie. To the contrary, the lie is made in the service of this dreadful agenda.
One more point. I’m not a specialist in the specific area of discrimination law, and I haven’t parsed the anti-discrimination statutes applicable to an institution like the U of P. I assume that there is at least one law prohibiting the school from discriminating on the basis of “sex” in its sports programs.
In the Bostock case in 2020, SCOTUS ruled that the term “sex” in some of the federal anti-discrimination statutes applies to homosexuality (sexual orientation) and trans (gender identity).
So, it appears that under current law as interpreted by SCOTUS, the school cannot “discriminate” against Mr. Thomas by banning him from the women’s swim team.
The Bostock ruling occurred before Justice Barrett replaced Justice Ginsburg, increasing the theoretical conservative majority from 5-4 to 6-3. However, both Justice Gorsuch and Chief Justice Roberts were in the majority in Bostock.
A final question. What is Mr. Bostock’s real first name? His Wikipedia entry doesn’t say.
It does say that Thomas “has an older brother.” Maybe it should say that he, or she, “has an older brother, at the moment, but maybe that brother will turn out to be a sister after all, who knows.”
Since I am retired I am able to deal with this completely by my choice of association. No compulsion, no pretensions, no lies.
On what basis would this law be applied? Birth certificate information, current genital physicality, the person’s preferences, or something else?
And notice that the above quoted sentence is gender inconsistent indicating a complete turnaround in the meaning of the term as applying to English grammar.