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.

Quite telling that no one cheered for Thomas. Usually it would, at least, be the team mates.

This is an interesting article from Australia.

www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/transgender-sport-debate-new-polling-shows-support-for-womens-sport/news-story/24cdbb922dc3068cec993a1e06ffe023

Katherine Deves brings up a very interesting point.

Ninety six per cent of female business leaders and CEOs in the USA have a competitive sports background, so every time a male exploits the opportunity to take up space in female competitions and teams, he is depriving those young women of the opportunity to excel in life.”

However, it also discusses the latest opinion poll taken that stated 67% of Australians (sample of 1500) agreed that female sports should be single sex only. I will go and see if I can find the poll results. It might be interesting.

Yes. Being in my university rowing squad, competing and training at that level, changed my life. In terms of performance I was 16th out of 16 which means that a single male body in that squad would have pushed me out even if he wasn't that great.

The coaches we had then were lovely older men. One of them is still alive and just had a birthday party surrounded by generations women he coached. I don't know, if a male had turned up to the development squad, how they would have reacted. If they'd been told that this is how it was now, they'd probably have gone ahead. It takes more than one person deciding to do this, it takes an entire system.

Sorry, I just realised that link is not going to work unless you are a subscriber (it was shared via twitter.)

Try this

twitter.com/RitaPanahi/status/1470631883553718272?s=20

Or look on archive md.

<a class="break-all" href="https://archive.md/2021.12.15-015001/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10310305/Female-competitor-speaks-saying-IMPOSSIBLE-beat-UPenn-transgender-swimmer-Lia-Thomas.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">archive.md/2021.12.15-015001/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10310305/Female-competitor-speaks-saying-IMPOSSIBLE-beat-UPenn-transgender-swimmer-Lia-Thomas.html

A competitor now speaking to the press. Another brave young woman robbed of fairness in her sport. (And yes, it is brave speaking to the press, even anonymously. There's always a chance your name gets out.)

CharlieParley Just seen this in the Daily Mail on line. Have not read the whole article yet but see there are over 2k comments.
The Mail also has Sarah Vine writing about JKR and a second article on JKR and being her name being almost excluded from the credits of Fantastic Beasts.

The cat is well and truly out of the bag now. As long as it was mediocre and/or middle-aged males in women's sports, it was easier to ignore, but Thomas is young and was still competitive in the male field before transitioning. Perfectly placed to smash female records.

As for those lovelies shunning JKR, I think that will not serve them well in the long run.

Well done the mail for following up.

If this doesn't start forcing sporting federations to reconsider, then I don't know what will. But of course, we are all also waiting for the GB cyclist to start officially competing as a female too. That one will be the UK's very own 'moment'.

I am still waiting though for the usual posters to drop though, berate us for being hateful, and provide us with the evidence that proves that this person has absolutely NO advantage.... strangely, we have not had one.

Maybe even their usual 'scale' argument has been blown to fucking pieces now too. They cannot even argue that it is only a few so, they will never dominate..... (conveniently forgetting there are two methods of domination - number and performance).

4,000 comments on that DT article now.

I’m just so horrified by this I don’t know where to begin. Sorry, not an erudite comment but I’m just flabbergasted how we even got to the point that ANYONE thought and still thinks this is ok.

My daughters are heavily into sport - I cannot imagine how they’d feel if the boys were just allowed to oust them from their teams after all the work they’ve put in. It beggars belief.

@Truthlikeness

The Sean Ingle article is pretty good but still uses what is known as the 'Phelps's arm fallacy'. Almost all of Phelps's records have since been beaten by other men. He was an exceptional swimmer of his time, but he's no superman.

Precisely, Phelps did have the perfect body for swimming, but he also trained 7 days a week, developed optimum nutrition , strength building and body conditioning and focussed on chipping microseconds off swimming techniques such as his starts, breathing, turns, strokes and kicks. He made other swimmers re examine the sport technically, much as the Williams sisters did in women’s tennis, he earned every single one of those titles and medals by hard work, unlike lazy entitled Thomas who has taken the cheats way of stealing titles from female athletes. And moreover doesn’t seem to have any understanding of why this is wrong. He is morally bankrupt, I would be ashamed if he was my son.

That’s very interesting about Phelps.

It isn't new. And is hardly ever/never reported by mainsteam newspapers or media outlets here (other than Fox - but I don't call that mainstream)

www.letsrun.com/news/2019/05/what-no-one-is-telling-you-an-athlete-who-ran-ncaa-track-as-a-man-for-3-years-just-won-an-ncaa-womens-title/

Well, it's moderately new; I'd say 2015 was the watershed year due to the IOC change.

Here's a report on Telfer from the Guardian earlier this year.
Guardian link

I’ve just seen in the Daily Mail that parents from Penn have written complaining. Distressed parents.

67% of Australians (sample of 1500) agreed that female sports should be single sex only

So low? Why would anyone think anything else. How many were “don’t know”?

I genuinely find this story sickening and cannot understand why it is being allowed to continue when this has occurred literally days after the new policies were introduced. Nobody in the woman possibly think it’s fair. Which means there are many people in positions of power who are continuing to push this despite knowing that.

In fact the longer all this continues, the more amazed I become. Not just with sport, but with everything. It’s so difficult to know, having been aware of it for years, whether it really is as astonishing as it seems, or whether I have a skewed perspective.

I thought a while back, that it would be lawsuits and medical scandal that would end this, and that prediction might turn out to be correct, but I hadn’t thought that things would get quite this mad while we were waiting for the medical gender complex to implode.

…nobody in the world….

Disgraceful, how can anyone see this and think it is far!

@BigGreenOlives

I’ve just seen in the Daily Mail that parents from Penn have written complaining. Distressed parents.

That’s a good article. How frustrating that the parents have had to anonymously step in for their teens who cannot speak openly about their safety and fairness in sport.

Also frustrating are all the comments saying they should ‘just’ refuse to race or the feminists aren’t saying anything about this.

TBH I think a lot of people are slowly waking up to what has been going on. I have a DD in her early twenties who says that all the usual suspects on her SM were banging on about 'JKR terf bigot!' but when Laurel Hubbard was all over the press, there was just.... Tumbleweed.

Which means that those young adults were probably suffering some pretty acute cognitive dissonance.

67% of Australians (sample of 1500) agreed that female sports should be single sex only

So low? Why would anyone think anything else. How many were “don’t know”?

I haven’t had time to look at the survey results yet. I am sorry. I suspect from the article it could be the wording. It maybe worded in a way that is not clear that it refers to males in female only events. If it is not made clear, the respondents may be thinking of mixed sport events. If you see what I mean.

I posted on the first page of this thread about Phelps explaining that fallacy. He is only 1.4% better than others in one race. Others are faster than him now.

@BigGreenOlives

I’ve just seen in the Daily Mail that parents from Penn have written complaining. Distressed parents.

Thank you for that link.

The Mail continues to get yds and metres mixed up.

But apart from that, a good article. And it looks like the college believes this is ‘sore losers’ from the tone of that reply (I checked the photo of the communication).

Helping to navigate the success of their teammate!!! Nice one. Nice way to deflect from reality.

Honestly though, is this not the way many complaints from women about many things in the past have been dealt with? I think misogyny is still at large at that university.