On Monday, former USA Swimming official Cynthia Millen, who resigned to protest allowing biological male Lia Thomas to swim against female competitors, spoke out on Fox News against the idea of men competing against women in swimming, asserting, “It’s horrible; the statement for women then is you don’t matter, what you do is not important, and little girls are going to be thrown under the bus by all of this.”
“Millen stepped down last week after officiating USA Swimming meets for over three decades. Her decision came days before the U.S. Paralympics Swimming National Championships in Greensboro, N.C.,” Fox News noted. In her resignation letter, Millen wrote, “I told my fellow officials that I can no longer participate in a sport which allows biological men to compete against women. Everything fair about swimming is being destroyed. If Lia came on my deck as a referee, I would pull the coach aside and say, ‘Lia can swim, but Lia can swim exhibition or a time trial. Lia cannot compete against those women because that’s not fair,’” Swimming World reported.
Asked by Fox News’ Sean Duffy what kind of response she had gotten since she resigned, Millen stated, “I’ve gotten a lot of kind comments from fellow officials, former officials, and from parents of swimmers and swimmers. The fact is that swimming is a sport in which bodies compete against bodies. Identities do not compete against identities. And from the very beginning , when you start out as an age-grouper, swimmers are divided by sex and by age group: eight and under, nine-ten, etc., all the way up, because from the very beginning, this is just accentuated when boys and girls go through puberty.”
“Boys will always have larger lung capacity, larger hearts, greater circulation, a bigger skeleton, and less fat,” she declared. “Girls go through puberty and they have a double whammy; they not only have breasts and hips, but they have periods, and they often have a totally different center of gravity; they have to learn how to swim over again.”
She turned to Thomas: “So while Lia Thomas is a child of God, he is a biological male who is competing against women. And no matter how much testosterone suppression drugs he takes, he will always be a biological male and have this advantage. And it’s horrible; the statement for women then is you don’t matter, what you do is not important, and little girls are going to be thrown under the bus by all of this. He’s going to be destroying women’s swimming.”
Duffy asked if Millen had seen any effort by mothers of girl swimmers or the leading female swimmers in the world, such as Olympic competitors, to stand up for the female swimmers in college and high school dealing with biological boys and men competing against them. Millen replied, “I’m getting great letters from dads of daughters and also moms of daughters, but we’re also seeing some past Olympians stepping up and saying, ‘No, this is wrong.’ We must remember that Olympic swimming for women was built on great swimmers like Jill Sterkel, Shirley Babashoff, Janet Evans, Jenny Thompson; all of these women who worked so hard before Title IX when they didn’t have the opportunities that men had. And It would be such a shame, it would such a travesty to throw it all away now. And this is what will happen. We must face facts: Men are different from women; men swimmers are different from women, and they will always be faster than women.”
Thomas utterly dominated the female swimmers at the University of Akron’s Zippy Invitational in early December, winning the 1650 free by a gargantuan 38 seconds ahead of the young woman finishing second, winning the 500 free by a whopping twelve seconds ahead of the woman finishing second, and winning the 200 free by a still-huge seven seconds.