The Washington Post shared a “perspective” piece about transgender collegiate swimmer Lia Thomas — who is still biologically male and has spent the NCAA women’s swimming season smashing records and dominating the scoreboards — and declared in the opening sentence, “Everyone is trans.”
The article, written by columnist Sally Jenkins, opens with the following paragraph:
Hate to tell you, but in a way, everyone is trans. As writer T Cooper observed, all of us in life’s competitive arena are on the way to become someone profoundly different than than we were, and keeping score is just a way to track the arc of a person from youth to prime to past it. If you subtract the aim of becomingness from competition just because you’re afraid of a Lia Thomas and make it strictly about the chance to win a prize, then you might as well go to an amusement park and shoot a squirt gun at a clown face because it will have about as much meaning.
Jenkins goes on to argue that the science regarding whether or not biological males have a physical advantage over biological females “remains unsettled” — despite the fact that Thomas has spent the last season effectively blowing biologically female competitors out of the water after years of being unable to crack the top 400 in men’s competition.
The only possible reason for people to argue for transgender athletes like Thomas to be barred from competition, Jenkins asserts, is their own “constricting fears and uncertainty” — which she claims would be “wrong, and harmfully so.”
The goal of the NCAA, she says, is to push athletes to grow — and barring transgender athletes like Thomas from competition would fly in the face of that goal.
But the biologically female swimmers who have to compete against Thomas don’t all share that view — and one swimmer’s mother is speaking out about that.
As The Daily Wire reported:
“Holy cow, we’re going to talk about a male swimmer — a full-grown male — attempting to take down female icon records, and taking a spot on an Ivy team from one of the Penn swimmers, who have rightfully deserved it,” she told Independent Women’s Forum, according to the Post Millennial. “And we’re talking about, this person’s gonna swim on every relay going forward at championship meets, is going to take the position of a woman on a travel team, is going to take a space in every finals.”
Girls are “frightened” to speak out about the inequality after they were warned to keep their mouths shut, the mother explained.
“And they’re frightened,” the woman said, her voice shaking with emotion. “They’re frightened of losing friends. They’re frightened of being kicked off their teams. They’re frightened of being told by their universities that they’re transphobic and hateful.”
One of Thomas’ own teammates spoke to The Daily Wire about the way transgender athletes have impacted the spirit of competition in women’s sports, saying on condition of anonymity that knowing the outcome ahead of what would normally be a hotly contested race took away some of the excitement about the event.
“For a lot of the other girls on our team who are really talented … if they win the race, it would be a question whether they would win. It’s like, ‘Oh yeah, they got first and we weren’t sure if they were going to beat that girl from Harvard, or that girl from Princeton,’” she said. “But with Lia, we went into the meet knowing that she was going to win all of these events. It’s kind of when you know the outcome already, it’s not so exciting when it does eventually happen.”