Penn’s Lia Thomas breaks 200/500 Free records in meet with Princeton, Cornell

[Helleofabore]

USA women’s freestyle swimming records were broken this weekend!!!

To all those who keep using the ‘scale’ argument to justify inclusion of males in female sport, tell us again how it takes more than one male competing in female sport to significantly and negatively impact that sport?

I am very happy to hear your well thought out and evidenced reasoning.

swimswam.com/penns-lia-thomas-breaks-200-500-free-records-in-meet-with-princeton-cornell/

Penn’s Lia Thomas blasted the number one 200 free time and the second-fastest 500 free time in the nation on Saturday, breaking Penn program records in both events. She swept the 100-200-500 free individual events and contributed to the first-place 400 free relay in a tri-meet against Princeton and Cornell in her home pool.

Sounds wonderful until you realise that for their first three years competing in the competition, they competed as a male.

twitter.com/coachblade/status/1465517693386121217?s=21

Coach Linda Blade’s tweet says :

Well of course women’s records are being smashed!

Lia competed as male for first three years in #NCAA.

This is not right!

We need to return to #SexBasedSports!

#SexNotGender to preserve fairness for female athletes.

@OperationDessertStorm

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10342703/Longtime-USA-Swimming-official-QUITS-protest-Penn-transgender-student-Lia-Thomas.html

Swimming official (with 30 years experience) quits over the end of single sex sports.

What a brave woman. Hopefully more will speak out. She seems to say everything required in the article.

That Mail article is outstanding. Comprehensive, clear and detailed. A nice little present in the Christmas stocking.

Reported in SwimSwam too.

swimswam.com/official-cynthia-millen-quits-protesting-lia-thomas-swimming-participation/

Referees leaving the sport is going to create a massive problem.

Well done Daily Mail! As per usual though, deafening silence from BBC, Channel 4 news and the Guardian.
BBC and Channel 4 are meant to represent the public, that's 50% of the population whose interests they are not looking out for.

Great article. I really wish the BBC and the rest would bloody well step up.

I've just renewed our TV licence. I'm totally behind having a non-commercial public service broadcaster, but WTF am I paying for?

Ross Tucker nails it again, just a short listen but worth it:

podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-real-science-of-sport-podcast/id1461719225?i=1000545175817

I listened to that podcast earlier this month. Ross is utterly fed up of covering the transwomen in women’s sports issue and says so in the podcast, but also says he cannot not cover it because the unfairness is so obvious.

Upthread I predicted that the parents of female swimmers at UPenn would not accept this without a fight. As one of them says in the article, they are paying USD 80,000 a year for their children to be there.

When DD swam with a central London club the parents of the kids aiming for US colleges like UPenn were both rich and influential. They ran things. European operations of US law firms, of big American brands, or major investment banks. Kids turned up to swim training driven by chauffeurs or with body guards.

Till now this debate has not affected those who move in or close to political circles. Lia is doing us a huge favour. Even though the Ivy League is not a strong one, swimmers will have given up their teenage years to training and their parents won’t want to see their dreams wrecked by something so patently unfair. And if it is decided that Lia is not a woman….well who is. Perhaps people with XX chromosomes.

It's also a little hard to spin Lia as a downtrodden oppressed minority. Lia is a white jock at UPenn from presumably a similar social background to the girls she is beating in the pool.

Yet another senior voice calling this out for what it is

swimswam.com/dave-salo-calls-ncaa-transgender-policy-an-assault-on-womens-sports/

“I’m 63. I’m at nearly the end of my career in coaching, and I can’t be canceled. So I can speak out against what I think is an assault on women’s sports.”

Thank you needmoresleep.

More and more sports professionals are coming out now. I imagine this coming year with the commonwealth games and other competitions (probably the Winter Olympics too) that we are going to see so many more sporting professionals speaking out because I expect at least one transitioned male will be included at each of these major events.

It will start putting paid to the ‘scale’ argument - the ‘they will never dominate’ argument.

The swimswam article references one in Daily Mail today

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10350803/UPenn-swimmers-considered-boycotting-final-meet-transgender-teammate-Lia-Thomas.html

I am convinced the DM follow this board, and now it appears that mainstream US media follow UK media, perhaps because they report things that US journalists dare not report. The ripples spread outwards.

Thanks for this one too!!

I'm in the US and haven't seen this reported in any mainstream media. I read the NYT, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe as well as the Atlantic and a few other magazines. Listen to NPR every day. It is not covered.

I am very depressed at the idea that the womens swim team at U Penn (and presumably the women's swim team at Dartmouth too since they are going to be beaten by this swimmer) have to suck this up and don't even feel safe protesting in any way about it. They can't even state out loud their grievance for fear of being "transphobic" These are women who worked all their lives at swimming. They also worked so hard at grades/school/etc to get into these schools. DDs have friends who have gone to elite colleges for sport. It is a very hard regime. Dd's best friend is on crew at Berkely - she has been up training at 5 in the morning every morning of her college life. That's commitment. I wonder how dd would feel if this friend was dropped from the team because a member of the male crew decided to transition.

The women's swim team are silenced for fear of reprisals. It is all wrong but this is very very wrong.

Off topic!

Pallisers, I agree. I have long had a subscription to the New Yorker, and then at the start of lockdown got one for the Washington Post. (It was very cheap and DH follows US politics.) I find the NYT unreadable: woke with a strange anti British slant, and long ago gave up on Vanity Fair. A big surprise for me is how poor much of US journalism, whether TV or print, actually is. The BBC is not what it was but is clearly authoritative compared with news programmes in places like Florida.

The Mail is often written off in the US as an example of those dreadful British tabloids, but they put out some good articles on US topics that simply could not be written in the US.

Another lockdown hobby, alongside reading the Washington Post has been to lurk on Lipstick Alley. Bright interesting posters who call things as they see them, including some refreshing GC views. What I learned there is that the MailOnline is the place to look when a storm hits, as readers post their experience in the comments sections and articles are updated regularly.

I don’t know. The Mail coming to the rescue of free speech in America, the land of the First Amendment. That needs a bit of thinking about. But yes, on current issues affecting women’s right to their own spaces, they have the bit between their teeth.

Hi Needmoresleep. I don't think US journalism is that poor as journalism. The spotlight team on the Boston Globe are absolutely terrific. And tbh I find most of the NPR journalists way better than the bbc (I listen to bbc world service on NPR every day)

It is just that this has become the thing no one can report on/comment on/talk about. This is the black spot that no mainstream journalist can write about in even a nuanced way without being utterly cancelled and villified.

And I know full well that the daily mail has its own agenda when it reports this and it has nothing to do with women's rights.

How did this happen?

I have to disagree, US journalism is horrible. The NPR is left leaning, they will never cover this. The only mainstream media which talks about transgender issues is Fox news, which is right leaning. They have talked about Lia Thomas a lot. They were also the only mainstream media to talk about the Louden County, VA, trans bathroom sexual assault and cover up.

I love Lipstick Alley! They do tell it like it is.

Long time lurker posting for the first time. I’m obsessed with the feminist chat, I have learned so much.

"And I know full well that the daily mail has its own agenda when it reports this and it has nothing to do with women's rights."

@palisser - I'm not a Mail reader but am glad they're reporting on this issue. What do you think their agenda is?

I'm in the US and haven't seen this reported in any mainstream media. I read the NYT, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe as well as the Atlantic and a few other magazines. Listen to NPR every day. It is not covered.

If they really thought that this person was competing fairly, they'd be reporting on it to say how great their record-breaking achievements are and how wrong it is that people are complaining. Their silence says that they know this is cheating.

@OldCrone

I'm in the US and haven't seen this reported in any mainstream media. I read the NYT, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe as well as the Atlantic and a few other magazines. Listen to NPR every day. It is not covered.

If they really thought that this person was competing fairly, they'd be reporting on it to say how great their record-breaking achievements are and how wrong it is that people are complaining. Their silence says that they know this is cheating.

They realised that they had a severe imbalance of reporting back in 2016 (when they were taken aback by Trump's victory). In so many ways, they're still failing to rectify that in many spheres.

www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter

The Mail is not letting this one go…

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10359229/UPenn-parent-slams-college-banning-spectators-controversy-rages-transgender-swimmer.html

(I assume in part because the story is generating a lot of clicks stateside as the Mail’s coverage is better than that available in the normal liberal East Coast media that affluent and influential Ivy League parents more normally read.)

FWIW Omicron is blazing through US campuses and restrictions are being reimposed quickly so I suspect the colleges decision to ban spectators is nothing to do with Lia. DS’ university in the US has just gone back to online teaching, in part because a recent student ski trip turned into a super spreader event.

The Mail's agenda in the UK is that this issue distracts from the egregious crapness of the Tories in so many other areas, and is an obvious weak spot for Labour in appealing to voters outside a limited section of their own voting base. A significant number of people believe that women 'naturally' behave one way and men 'naturally' behave another way - that sex=gender behaviour. This is not the analysis that most feminist women who are gender critical want to promote; it undermines feminism.

I do think that those of us with GC views are naive if we don't think there will be, or is, a right-wing backlash against any attempt to argue that women have particular needs as a sex.

I don’t agree, but that is irrelevant. My point was that the Mail has a surprisingly high readership in the US, where politics and media can be extremely polarised.

Them reporting on this issue with proper journalism will do them no harm in the US.