The Absurd Attempt to Defend Lia Thomas’s Competing as a Woman

By Jenna Stocker

Thursday, March 24, 2022

 

Writing in last Thursday’s Washington Post, Sally Jenkins poses several questions regarding the nature of college athletics, the purpose of the NCAA, and the role of competition in collegiate sports — all in the context of transgender swimmer Lia Thomas. But what Jenkins is really doing is ignoring the essential element of sport: competition — specifically, fair competition. Removing fair competition from the debate and making it about “becomingness” obscures the inherent biological advantage of transgender women, because admitting to unfair competition means drawing the conclusion that transgender women are not women, and revealing that the whole progressive argument for gender identity being equal to immutable biological fact is a farce.

 

Thomas, up until the spring 2019, identified as a man and swam on the University of Pennsylvania’s men’s swimming team and just recently competed in the NCAA women’s swimming championships, where he placed in the prestigious top eight in all three of his individual events, including a first-place finish in the 500-yard freestyle. But Jenkins, and many like her, want to move the transgender-in-sports debate from one about fairness and competition to one about bigotry and inclusiveness. Jenkins uses abstruse concepts about personal growth, esoteric philosophy, and recondite musings to separate competition from sport. Jenkins asks, “What is the real aim and value of NCAA competition?” and insists the goal of athletic competition is not . . . competition. “It’s supposed to be about exploring who you are, whether on the pool deck or starting block or basketball floor. . . .” After all, “everyone is trans” because we are all “on the way to becoming someone profoundly different than we were.” Jenkins adds:

 

If you subtract the aim of becomingness from competition just because you’re afraid of a Lia Thomas and make it strictly about the chance to win a prize, then you might as well go to an amusement park and shoot a squirt gun at a clown face because it will have about as much meaning.

 

As a former Division I college swimmer, I find this absurd. Whether on a court, rink, or in my case, a pool, the ultimate goal is to win. The drive to be the best in my sport and my events — distance freestyle — is why I rode my bike through the snow for predawn practices at the University of Minnesota. It is why I swam countless laps, pushing myself through the silence of my own thoughts staring at a bottom of a pool. It is why I spent my college years forgoing other activities, parties, even internships in pursuit of my dreams.

 

Of course, personal growth is a benefit of participating in sports. I learned the value of hard work, perseverance, determination, fortitude, and how to be a humble winner and graceful loser. But primarily, athletes want to compete, and compete to win or lose fairly. Jenkins asks, “Is Thomas’s presence preventing other swimmers from finding out who they are?” No. But Thomas’s presence is preventing other swimmers from competing in a fair environment — one in which these young women trained and sacrificed their whole lives to reach, and the starting point of athletic competition.

 

The NCAA is supposed to set the parameters of fairness and act judiciously in implementing the rules it sets forth. According to its website, the NCAA’s mission is “focused on cultivating an environment that emphasizes academics, fairness and well-being across college sports.” Without fairness, competition, and therefore sports, is meaningless. David Timmerman of St. Charles, Mo., is the father of a young girl who competes for her local swimming team and hopes to one day swim in college. I asked Timmerman, himself a former athlete, if he worries about fairness in women’s sports. “What concerns me is that my daughter will be forced to compete for a spot on a college team against biological men. The NCAA is allowing men to compete against women on the basis of some measure of hormones and calls it ‘fair.’ Women are not just hormone-suppressed men. They are separate, special, humans with inherent qualities they are born with. I can see it with my own eyes and to ask me to ignore that is simply wrong.”

 

Jenkins uses emotional and cultural arguments, as well as outlier athletic examples, to obfuscate the fact that as a group, men have a biological advantage in athletic competition. Insisting that Lia Thomas makes women’s swimming more interesting and is therefore justification for allowing transgender inclusion is again to ignore that NCAA athletics is foremost about students’ athletic achievements. It is true that the human-interest stories we have been conditioned to expect, such as the spectacle found in modern television coverage of the Olympics, are a byproduct of competition. But to argue that this is the main purpose of college athletics is overwrought.

 

Jenkins’ main point echoes that of many on the trans activists’ side who advocate allowing biological males to compete against females: Every human is born with certain advantages and disadvantages — genetic variances that manifest in physical attributes such as height, arm span, or natural endurance — and gender is just another normal attribute. Therefore, to deny it is to act against the spirit of “inclusivity.” Jenkins cites former world-record holder and five-time Olympic gold medalist swimmer Missy Franklin who, at 6-foot-2, certainly had an advantage from her height. But what she did not have was years of testosterone that would have given her many more and even greater advantages in the pool, something glaringly apparent when Lia Thomas swims. And if we allowed bigger, faster, stronger males to compete against females, would we even have heard of Missy Franklin — or, for that matter, Serena Williams, Megan Rapinoe, or Allyson Felix?

 

Those who are celebrating Lia Thomas as a woman are attempting to throw a veil over the purpose of competitive sports and biology. They understand that the advancement of the transgender movement means displacing the rights and protections of women and hinges on the debate about whether it is fair for Lia Thomas to compete against women.

 

Until the NCAA and USA Swimming, along with every other governing body in sports, take a stand in defense of the sanctity of competition, women’s rights are in jeopardy. A threat in one arena is a threat to women in every arena. No amount of “becomingness” changes that.