Univ of Pennsylvania agrees to strip Lia Thomas of titles

[HelleneS]

Under an agreement reached on 1 June with the U.S. Dept of Education (DOE), the Univ of Pennsylvania has agreed to rescind swimmer Lia Thomas's wins and records, to prohibit transgender athletes from participating in women's athletics, and to restore the records and titles previously set by female U Penn swimmers.

U Penn has also agreed to issue personal letters of apology to all women athletes who were affected by Thomas's year-long participation on the women's swimming team.

The agreement will settle a DOE investigation into U Penn's violation of U.S. law against sex discrimination in education.

We've been told.

If the 'women's team' is actually 100% entirely men who identify as women that's fine.

Terra nullis. Unused ground. Whatever women are doing or using is seen as pointless and worthless unless it's being useful somehow to a man, so adding men in is like building on brownfield land. Much better for everyone.

Sexism in action.

In 2022, before joining Sutton, Clark wrote on social media: “At some point we will field a team solely of trans women for the first time in history. How good is that?”

https://sports.yahoo.com/first-transgender-manager-ignites-controversy-161339258.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAFKfHNl7_UENLGm75t4EqQtso1DPAHbC4lzv-8-FRNQLHcoy4T8VvopSKcYXldHkrLqe4FuKVf8vT986TKF4PgIHyaVUgKXHWA3_9mcd6qwYppgz8ZebkHh_Hw0C4pg31ZJfHVyIElV-Tk1Ltyv0Au23b91i9keMeFRF6G3WOzwf

I agree with you but they don't see it that way. I don't think most TRAs understand how different the male and female body are. They don't know about muscle insertions, twitch muscles, limb length, all of that -- to point it out to them is transphobic and bigoted lol

Oh boo hoo. What about all the girls publicly humiliated by him? What about the absolute piss-taking arrogance of him stealing their medals and their sporting achievements while he was flaunting his fully male dick in their communal changing rooms?

‘Slightly sorry’? Ffs. This is abuse of young women. Wake up.

Oh, come on! Everyone on the planet knows men are stronger than women, we all see the evidence every day. There's no need to have even heard of twitch muscles, etc. They know well enough. They choose to ignore it.

Yeah, equally not impressed that anyone can feel “slightly sorry” for a man who stood and watched women get unchanged in and out of swimming race wear.

Let's hope this is the start of stripping medals from all the other trans women and rewrite the lists of winners.

Then what's the point of even engaging with them? There is a core group of TRAs who will never agree no matter what evidence you present before them. If they thought it would help them you could say "look, it's raining outside" and they would say "no it's not". There's simply no point talking to them. I think they're finally being bypassed now which is why we're seeing things like the SC decision.

The thing is that I absolutely agree with TRAs that there is misogyny stopping women participating in sport, and reducing female participation in sport, and that women’s sports categories were restricted due to prejudice. I used to row at quite a high level, it really isn’t new to me to experience misogyny or a kind of breezy assumption among men that their sport is and always will be much more important.

Victoria Hood gave a good speech at WPUK expounding on the the history of women's cycling, and how letting men in is just more of the same attitudes:

Some PPs have expressed misgiving about how UPenn's agreement was reached—as a result of seemingly dictatorial exercise of power by the current administration. I get that.

But both the Obama and Biden administrations did the same thing, in the opposite direction—each using the president's power over federal agencies to ensure that “sex discrimination” law also prohibited discrimination on the basis of gender identity. In fact, on Biden's first day in office in 2021, he signed an Executive Order to that effect.

Virtually all schools & universities in the U.S. rely on federal funding, so failure to observe federal education policy on gender identity risked losing needed funds, then as now. This was the federal Department of Education's policy at the time Lia Thomas was competing.

Policy by the President isn't supposed to replace legislation by Congress, but it has that effect, and it feels like a game of ping-pong, depending on who's in the White House. Hopefully, as time passes more voters wake up to what gender identity means for women's and girls' civil rights, beginning with sports.

I'm afraid I'm finding it difficult to escape the conclusion that they must be very stupid.

What do they actually learn in American schools?

I don't honestly care how the decision has come about. It is the right decision and won't be reversed without evidence as too many people are now aware of this issue. As the evidence in favour of allowing TIMs to compete in women's sport doesn't exist then I wouldn't expect the decision to be reversed any time soon.

I think a lot of decision makers have been hanging back and waiting, hoping to understand the trans argument. It should now be very readily apparent that they're not holding back on some big, secret, truth. There is nothing else coming, nothing to understand. Just hulking Lia Thomas with no clothes covering his erect penis as women say "please, stop".

There's this one too - 'Spot the difference'.

Quite. You cannot reason with someone who is living in an alternative reality of their own which requires the blocking out of all unwanted information. Mentioning that information to them becomes dismissable 'hate', because it jars the illusion.

Major Tom is beyond all reach of Ground Control at that point.

This is an excellent point ^^

I think photos are the only means to highlight the ridiculousness of pretending there’s no physical differences between men and women.

Does anyone recall when Beth Rigby did a long interview with the former head of Stonewall. She brought up the question of men in women's sport with a backdrop of a blown up pic of one of the podium shots highlighting the obvious unfairness. He did a typical 'it's complicated' answer and tried to move on. The pic stayed up and he squirmed and shifted around. He was way out of his comfort zone.
Pictures do matter. This was mainstream Sky News and Beth knew what she was doing. Look at the impact on public opinion of the Khelif boxing match of his crying opponent when the match was halted after a few seconds.
You don't need to manipulate the pictures. They speak a 1000 words without Photoshopping.

I remember it well!

I read an article about this in the Washington Post. They AI summary of the comments section said that the vast majority of comments agreed with the decision and that there was some discussion of how this issue has harmed the Democrats.

Am I right in thinking he the WP is a left-leanimg newspaper with a lot of Democrats voters as readers?

The trans lobby is never going to win this issue. They need to give it up and focus on actual discrimination against people who identity as trans. Despite there being some morons bleating on about poor trans girls being discriminated against (many of them working for human rights orgs 🙄), the majority of people understand that this is fundamentally an issue of fairness and safety. If the trans lobby keeps pushing it, they will lose support in other areas too.

This.

Yes, the Washington Post is a left-leaning paper with as is the New York Times. Both have nationwide mostly Democratic readerships. Both WaPo and NYT have covered the trans issue by (1) not covering it, then (2) covering it only supportively, but turning off comments, then (3) cautiously raising questions, still disallowing comments, and then (4) recently by NYT, anyway, with a couple of pieces allowing comments that overwhelmingly showed readership concern that past Dem top-down trans policies have hurt the party. (I used to skim both, now just NYT.)

I'm seeing Dems and also trans people who consider themselves moderate advancing the point about Dem trans policy hurting the party also, in a way that suggests the problem is with the policy not the electorate. Will be interesting to see if this becomes discussed more openly in those circles.

I listened to the rest is politics podcast the other day which was an extended interview with an American journalist (Ezra something?). He said that there has been trans overreach in areas like women's sport but the problem for the Democrats is that as Trump now dominates in this area, they can't back down no matter how ludicrous they sound. It really does make you want to give them a good slapping.

Get used to losing elections, then.

This is a great point!!

i dont know how but I'd actually forgotten Biden did that on day 1.
I was so angry about it at the time as well.... 😅