Lia Thomas is the Ivy League Champion in the 500 free

Brendan O'Neill article in Spiked: "Trans privilege
It is an outrage that Lia Thomas is allowed to compete against women."

Lays out the ways in which the privilege operates and contrasts the way the media are soft on this testosterone advantage as against the ferocity of their stance on the young female Russian ice skater who took a pill and was destroyed by the onslaught.

www.spiked-online.com/2022/02/23/trans-privilege/

Cisgender really doesn't mean anything. If cisgender exists then transpeople cannot transfer as they are creating binary again as trans and cis are opposite terms. Eventually trans will say they become fully cis, then they'll need a word to explain the difference between before and after transition, and again that recreates binary terms. They cannot be different and exactly the same at the same time.

Gender is an illusion that can never exist in real life.

Noisyprat- I’m quoting from the article

Hopefully Thomas will swim in the swimming mixed relay. That will upset his male competitors.

Firstly the athletes are NOT ‘cisgender female competitors’. They are WOMEN.

I’ve got an idea let’s go back to the original rules that most competitive sport is segregated by sex : XX and XY. There is a resason for this, if you are unsure just watch any of the mixed team events, infact the swimming mixed relay is an excellent example.

Lastly if you are reducing testosterone you are taking DRUGS. Why are we letting drugs in sport? It’s cheating, which is what the likes of Thomas are doing.

This situation is so easily resolved, it’s basic common sense.

www.usaswimming.org/news/2022/02/01/usa-swimming-releases-athlete-inclusion-competitive-equity-and-eligibility-policy

May not help with this season, but rules set to change.
TW will need to prove they do not have innate advantage for elite swimming
Two things need to be proved for TW to compete:
Evidence that the prior physical development of the athlete as a male, as mitigated by any medical intervention, does not give the athlete a competitive advantage over the athlete’s cisgender female competitors.
Evidence that the concentration of testosterone in the athlete’s serum has been less than 5 nmol/L (as measured by liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry) continuously for a period of at least thirty-six (36) months before the date of application.

May be interesting to see how assiduously/ objectively the former will be assessed

They'll know about Thomas. Not necessarily others.

The officials would know who is a liar, cheat and imposter because in 2019 Lia was on the MEN’S swim team…

Women (XX) should compete together and the other separate group is mixed. There's no need to let Thomas or anyone selfIDing as anything else into the women's category. They can pretend to feel like a dolphin if they like, but not in the women's category.

I don't know any trans people who seriously pass, as in unquestioned in all circumstances for all lengths of time.

The trans people I know do however project a mixture of characteristics that means you aren't sure. Sexual characteristics send you one way, gender signals another. Sometimes it's androgyny, sometimes a much broader spread of signals.

Asking officials to do the work - based on what? - is not fair on them or the athletes. Inevitably there would be mistakes; there are lots of women in sport who don't look feminine. That's the point of women's sport for me, and one of the worst things about this entire issue - that the comfortable spaces for masculine looking women are made more unstable.

@GibbonsGoatsGibbons

Sarah Vine's comment is great barring one sub clause "Lia Thomas, while emotionally and psychologically a woman,"

“But while we continue to repeat the ridiculous idea that a man can be 'emotionally and psychologically a woman' then we will continue to tread water in the fight for the rights of women and the safeguarding of children. I struggle to believe Sarah Vine believes this man is actually a woman, so why not speak the truth?”

The shoulders! We are all being taken for idiots.

Male puberty creates the adult male body, it's obvious once puberty has taken place and is an irreversible change. The only way to even things up would be for Thomas to start later, or have weights attached, in a proportional volume to his female competitors to change by percentage his advantage to the point the race is fair. At this point Thomas would not win as he would again become average in the competition. However, he could gain integrity back.

Alternatively, men's sports could become mix gender and female stay as single sex. Then men could compete with men, but some could call themselves women when they felt like it as gender is fluid. Thomas could compete as man or woman in the open gender group depending on how he felt on the day.

Every human being alive knows what a man is and what a woman is. If there is the slightest doubt it is banished a soon as the person moves. The human gait and the sexed differences cannot be masked, cannot be 'surgeried' away and are so obvious that we see them, no matter how the person is dressed.

A split second is all anyone would need.

Sorry to many of you for the repeat, but, as that wise woman Shakira so eloquently said, "Those hips don't lie"

Can't compare their split times with cis people... There's been no proper research into how trans people finish races. hmm

Yep! So bloody transparent - no pun intended but really?

TRAs and their allies like to argue that 'sport isn't fair anyway' and that there will always be people who have a competitive edge...

... so let's see...

The competitive edge that Michael Phelps' physical advantages gave him over his closest male competitors at the peak of his career measured less than 0.5%.

Phelps' edge over the top female swimmers of his era was 9-13% - which is the usual performance gap between females and males in swimming.

At the 2004 Olympics, Phelps won the 200m butterfly with a time of 51.25 seconds. The second place man had a time of 51.29 seconds. That's a performance gap of 0.08%.

Phelps beat the 8th place male finisher by 2.56%.

By contrast, Phelps' winning time in the 2004 men's Olympic 100m butterfly was 12.56% faster than the winning time of the female swimmer who won the same event that year in the women's category.

There have been many elite female swimmers over the years like Sylvia Poll, Claudia Poll, and Missy Franklin who have physical features such as unusually tall height (the three are 6'4, 6'3 and 6'2 respectively), large feet, and enormous shoulder width and long arms resulting in vast wingspan that together have given them natural advantages over their competitors too. But all around the world at every level of swimming, from junior club level to the Olympics, males consistently outperform females by about 10-12%. And swimming, along with running, is a sport where the male-female gap is the lowest. In some sports, the gap is 50% - and in particular activities like throwing a ball or a punch, the male advantage is 160%-350%.

The performance gaps between the male and female competitors in the 100m butterfly finals at the 2004, 2008 and 2012 Olympics were as follows:

2004

1st place: Male>Female +12.62%
2nd place: Male>Female +12.77%
8th place: Male>Female +13.83%

2008

1st place: Male>Female +12.16%
2nd place: Male>Female +12.87%
8th place: Male>Female +12.88%

2012
1st place: Male>Female +9.31%
2nd place: Male>Female +10.55%
8th place: Male>Female +10.97%
...

time and time and time again the only universal competitive edge is male over female.

But would they know who was competing? Obviously Thomas has had lots of publicity but there will be trans competitors who transitioned before college and are much less visually obvious. Swimming is easier because the whole body differences are so stark but eg in athletics it's not quite so dramatic. It would be a lot to ask an official to make a split second judgment on this.

But I imagine the officials (not the coaches) are more like volunteers/not their main form of income etc… Surely they are middle aged and older ex-athletes themselves. A collective walk out?

But the coaches are totally into this. In the US at least professional coaching sounds extremely competitive and you keep your job by results. It's coaches and officials who have historically inducted young athletes into doping cultures, though obviously the athletes retain responsibility.

Actually I'm arguing myself into agreeing with you. The coaches are the ones with power here. The issue has been imposed from the IOC downwards. And it will take officials to rebel.

Here’s a thought. The female athletes can’t refuse to compete as that would be scholarship suicide. However, the OFFICIALS should all refuse to officiate. The races couldn't go ahead without timekeepers etc. One woman already had (she was quoted as saying ‘bodies compete against bodies, not identities against identities…) The officials need to collectively organise and collectively refuse to record/timekeeper/officiate on this madness.

bariweiss.substack.com/p/watching-lia-thomas-win

Another article here. It has a lot of pertinent points to it but in many ways also completely useless because it uses female pronouns and frames Thomas as a type of woman.

Unless we start calling men, men we will constantly be on the back foot in protecting women's sport, prisons etc...

Also Ross Tucker's analysis is quite certain - Thomas did not even swim as fast as possible, that massive speed increase at the end, ridiculous.

Maybe trans individuals have magic finishing powers.

Can't compare their split times with cis people... There's been no proper research into how trans people finish races.

The fact that Isaac came second is hilarious.

Not only does Isaac decide it isn't LiTeRaL ViOlEnCe to not compete against men, you know, given he is a man, and somehow Thomas must swim against females. But also despite swimming 2 seconds faster than 7 weeks ago, and beating Thomas then, Thomas swam so much faster now that magically Thomas came first this time round. You know, in the race that matters, the championship race. So obvious back then they colluded to let Isaac win.

Also Ross Tucker's analysis is quite certain - Thomas did not even swim as fast as possible, that massive speed increase at the end, ridiculous. I go up full gas my local climb regularly and if I had that much power left at the end of it, I would be nowhere near my fastest time for the overall climb.

I wonder what emotions and psychological elements Vine thinks she shares with Thomas that Thomas doesn't share with eg Michael Phelps.