It’s almost time to delete my account so I am sticking my neck out to potentially getting blasted.
I will preface by stating that gender identity is not an issue for me. Be who you want, use whatever bathroom you want. Just wash your hands/paws/tentacles.
My ignorant question is: for transgender athletes in competitive sports, should records be categorized differently or asterisked? Isn’t it kind of like using performance-enhancing drugs?
I don’t mind about actually competing, however if someone had 5-10 years of hormonal growth advantage during puberty, even if they no longer have that advantage, it seems like a big gray area. Yes, someone could naturally have that chemical makeup. Similarly, some exceptionally elite athletes have genetic variations that give them natural physical advantage.
When I was in school I was decent at swimming, in the top 5% of men. If I competed against women I would be like top 0.01% and making a career out of it. Though, if I started setting records I don’t know how I’d feel about it, given my advantage.
Honestly, writing these thoughts down is giving me some existential dread. What does it mean to be human, and why? Does anything even really matter?
I hope everyone has a nice day and is kind to each other.
It may not be an issue to you, but it’s an issue to every woman whose ranking is lower as a result. I imagine it especially hurts if you’re pushed out of first place in that way.
Wow, the 200m freestyle, the 500m freestyle, and the 1650m freestyle, huh? Did she ever compete in anything else, or were those numbers perhaps cherry-picked to make the situation look more dramatic than it actually is? Because if you look at her results holistically, she’s a very good swimmer, but she’s clearly not dominating 100% of the time the way she’s been portrayed.
At the NCAA competition where Thomas won one (1) race that conservatives cried and shit their pants over, a cis woman named Kate Douglass set 18 new records. Lia Thomas set zero new records. And crunching the rest of the numbers bears this out: she was a good swimmer before and after transition, but she’s not some unbeatable powerhouse that cis women have no chance at winning against.
It should also be noted that a college athlete’s times and rankings would presumably improve every year. Freshmen competing against seniors are just less likely to win (in most sports at least). IIRC I saw an analysis of her rankings that indicated the jump was within normal bounds for year-over-year improvement.
No one goes from 500th to 1st year over year competing against the same people lol.
She swam for the men’s team 2019-2020 while undergoing hormone therapy. Then there was a year break because of COVID. Then she swam for the women’s team 2021-2022. The difference was over two years.
EDIT: Actually, the 500th place stat was from 2018-2019, so it was over three years.
EDIT 2: Also, she went from 554th to 5th. The other two are basically not even worth mentioning since she went from 65th to 1st and 32nd to 8th over three years.
EDIT 3: Also, regarding your “the same people” bit, a large chunk of the people she’d have competed against would have graduated and been replaced by underclassmen. This is how college works.
Incorrect.
Lia Thomas jumped up from around 500 in mens to 1 in womens while having slower times than when ranked ~500 in the mens. That says all that needs to be said.
The numbers you are using I’ve only seen from that letter made by people complaining about her, frequently posted everywhere by conservative sources. Also, it’s fucking obvious she’d have slower times. That is the entire purpose of requiring trans atheletes to be on hormones for a couple years.
EDIT: I’ve looked into the 462 number more, and I’m further convinced it’s either made up or not an official ranking (i.e. from some practice run). Also, if you’re gonna pull some random quote, give your source. One of the very first results when I search “lia thomas 462” is the Daily Wire, which does not inspire much confidence in your sources. The other results are a Wikipedia quote from the letter I mentioned, and a random comment on the site for a swimming magazine.
You missed the point about the slower times. The point was that the times of a ~500 ranked male are faster than the times of the number 1 ranked female. You don’t see how this is a problem with trans men competing against women?
Thomas’ times only decreased by roughly 2-3% after transition. Male swimmers are on average 10-15% faster than women’s. This shows that male physical advantage doesn’t just disappear, as should be obvious simply by looking at the physical differences between males and females.
It’s obvious you don’t actually have a researched opinion since you just used the wrong term for a trans woman (they said trans men, in case they edit it).
You seem to, once again, be ignoring that on top of the decrease from transitioning, they are still a human being, and thus age and practice like any other human being. From sophomore year to their redshirt senior year, they grew, trained, etc. like any athlete. Expecting them to just drop 15% or whatever from their sophomore time and never improve from that is completely idiotic.
If anyone can go from 554th to 5th in any sport/event just by competing among the other sex, nothing else changing, then that obviously indicates something. You can’t handwave that away.
Her personal 100m freestyle time dropping less than a quarter of a second post-transition is honestly a bigger indicator that transition is not making a substantial difference, because that angle completely removes the ‘chance’ element in your opponents being different people.
Really? “Every”? You asked every single one of them, did you? Or are you just talking out your arse on the behalf of hundreds of people you don’t even know?
The very fact that their ranking is lower than what it should be is an issue in and of itself, your disingenuous mockery notwithstanding.
Former competitive swimmer here. I’m fine with it.
But they’re placed exactly where they should be? If they should be placed higher, that’s where they’d be… seems like you’re the one getting mad over a skill issue on other people’s behalf tbh. It’s weird.
You’re acting as though Lia Thomas didn’t have every right to compete as she did, despite fulfilling all the eligibility criteria that were in place at the time, so your argument at this stage seems equally applicable to all the cis women who outperformed her, too, but you’re not whining for the benefit of all the poor womanses that were denied the opportunity to place higher than they did by them, are you?