UPenn swimmer comes out as trans / switches to women's team after competing on men's team for 3 years and is dominating NCAA

SDSU Aztec wrote:

The Narwhal wrote:

https://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/ncaa-transgender-policy-background-resources

Didn't that just confirm the same rules that have been in place since 2010?

This policy is obviously flawed. And we could already tell that when Cece Telfer won the D2 title in 2019. But NCAA did not take it seriously enough, probably because they thought D2 was not a big deal. (Telfer would not have made the final in the D1 championship.)

But if someone who was second team Ivy League (and did not qualify for NCAA for three seasons), suddenly becomes the D1 national champion, that should alarm NCAA. Unfortunately, I don't think they could change the eligibility for this season. And since this is the final season of Lia Thomas' eligibility, she won't be affected by any future change in rules. That does not mean NCAA does not need to change the policy. If they don't, they could have another Lia Thomas down the road, either in swimming or some other sports.

I think it would be best if Thomas continues to swim the rest of regular season, and then withdraws from championships. That way, no one will be denied the title they deserve, but NCAA will have enough data points to justify the future rule changes. Unfortunately, the chances of that happening are probably as big as my chances of beating Galen in the next marathon.

Today everything is about a small group of zealots being allowed to lead corporations around by the nose if it fits the right narrative. According to the zealots Bruce Jenner was a woman when he won the gold medal, and not saying so is bigotry. The crazy years.

My response to Narwhal was that the rules are not new and have been in place for 10 years.

The N.C.A.A. has always taken its transgender rules seriously. Even if they had wished to ban transgender athletes, they would have been advised by their attorneys they would lose in court if challenged. Even with Thomas dominating NCAA women's swimming, they cannot unilaterally ban such athletes. If there will be changes, it will be as a result of court actions and it will take far more that one successful transgender athlete to get it done

Well, I am not so certain about that. There were three relevant athletes in the DSD case with IAAF/WA, but in reality it was only about Semenya. So in that sense, one athlete might have changed the rule.

sayyestonepotism wrote:

Armstronglivs wrote:

Hogwash. From beginning to end.

Nope. There are countless scientific studies about personality differences of sexes. There are in agressiveness agreeabliness and others.

Compassion and competitiveness are human attributes and are found in either gender. How about doping - a feature of ambition - do you think that is only a male problem?

real brain differences wrote:

Only a man would have the audacity and perceived privilege to do what this swimmer is doing. And the women he is doing it to are too meek to be totally honest about how they feel about it.

Only a "man" can do it because trans women are biological males. It's a bit hard for a trans male to dominate men. However, if ambition against sportsmanship is the measure there are and have been plenty of women dopers. Winning any way you can is a human attribute, not simply a male one.

Just Another Hobby Jogger wrote:

SDSU Aztec wrote:

My response to Narwhal was that the rules are not new and have been in place for 10 years.

The N.C.A.A. has always taken its transgender rules seriously. Even if they had wished to ban transgender athletes, they would have been advised by their attorneys they would lose in court if challenged. Even with Thomas dominating NCAA women's swimming, they cannot unilaterally ban such athletes. If there will be changes, it will be as a result of court actions and it will take far more that one successful transgender athlete to get it done

Well, I am not so certain about that. There were three relevant athletes in the DSD case with IAAF/WA, but in reality it was only about Semenya. So in that sense, one athlete might have changed the rule.

Semenya was not a transgender athlete. The IAAF was successful in its argument that she was biologically a male and should be required to have testosterone suppression treatments before being. allowed to compete. Transgender athletes are already required to receive hormone treatments.

The number of individuals doping by gender is far more males than females. Females are more likely to have been forced to dope by males in state-sponsored doping programs. Just like there are millions more males, than females, in prison for acts of aggression. Similarly, every act of war, in the history of humanity ever perpetuated, was 99.9% initiated and fought by males.

I could post 100s of studies with findings showing males are more aggressive, assertive and competitive than females.

Males are different from females. These are biological facts found in every species that reproduces sexually.

Taking a full grown male and lowering his T for a couple of years and saying he’s now equal to a female is like taking a Porsche 911 and filling it with low grade fuel and saying it’s now a Volkswagen Beetle.

There are hundreds of male high school athletes around the world who could smash every women’s track world record with ease every year. In middle distance events, men seem to have an ever greater advantage over women. World class women’s middle distance times are achieved easily by high school boys who barely even train properly.

SDSU Aztec wrote:

Semenya was not a transgender athlete. The IAAF was successful in its argument that she was biologically a male and should be required to have testosterone suppression treatments before being. allowed to compete. Transgender athletes are already required to receive hormone treatments.

IAAF/WA rule is "5nmol/L or below for a minimum of 12 months." NCAA rule is taking medication to lower the T-level for 12 months. There is a big difference between the two. Any "input" based rule is flawed because each person responds to medicine differently.

I don't know what is the current t-level of Lia Thomas, or how long she has sustained that level. The SwimSwam guy never asked that question. Thomas may well be ineligible to compete in the FINA World Championships, and therefore the trial race as well. We will see if she shows up in April.

SDSU Aztec wrote:

My response to Narwhal was that the rules are not new and have been in place for 10 years.

The N.C.A.A. has always taken its transgender rules seriously. Even if they had wished to ban transgender athletes, they would have been advised by their attorneys they would lose in court if challenged. Even with Thomas dominating NCAA women's swimming, they cannot unilaterally ban such athletes. If there will be changes, it will be as a result of court actions and it will take far more that one successful transgender athlete to get it done

But no one is saying Thomas and other male athletes who "identify as" women should be banned from college sports participation and intercollegiate competition. The NCAA rules specifically say that such athletes "may continue to compete on a men's team".

All people like me are saying is that athletes like Thomas should "stay in their lane" as it were and continue to participate and compete with others of their own sex. Because that is what's fair and sporting.

The purpose of women's sports is to give female athletes a chance to participate, compete and excel - not to provide therapy, emotional support, "narcissistic supply," mollycoddling, easy wins, confidence boosts, feelings of being special, self-image "validation" or gender identity "affirmation" to male athletes who for whatever reason claim they don't "identify as" their sex.

Athletes compete with their bodies made of flesh and blood, not with their claimed identities or the fantasies they have about themselves in their heads.

No matter what a person's gender expression or claimed gender identity is, it doesn't change his or her sex.

SDSU Aztec wrote:

My response to Narwhal was that the rules are not new and have been in place for 10 years.

The N.C.A.A. has always taken its transgender rules seriously. Even if they had wished to ban transgender athletes, they would have been advised by their attorneys they would lose in court if challenged. Even with Thomas dominating NCAA women's swimming, they cannot unilaterally ban such athletes. If there will be changes, it will be as a result of court actions and it will take far more that one successful transgender athlete to get it done

As for your statement that the NCAA "cannot unilaterally ban such athletes", I think you're using "unilaterally" to mean something different to what it actually means.

But sure the NCAA can unilaterally ban male athletes like Thomas from competing in women's sports. The NCAA is the sole body that decides the eligibility standards and other rules for nearly half a million college and uni athletes at the more than 1,200 educational institutions and conferences under its purview. Not that women wanted it that way: women formed their own organizations to govern women's and girls sports in the 20th century, and in the 1970s we fought hard not to have women's intercollegiate competitive sports come under the control of the male-led NCAA. But we lost.

Guys like you who constantly tell women like me that it's time for women's sports to be "inclusive" of male athletes with identity issues, and condemn us for not doing as we are told, seem to have no clue about how long women were excluded from sports, and how hard we've had to work to build the sports (and spaces and services) that male interlopers like Thomas, CeCe Telfer and host of others now feel entitled to waltz into and claim as their own. The fact is, women and girls around the world were kept out of sports - and other spheres of life too - for nearly all of history since the dawn of agriculture well into the 20th century solely because of our sex - or, rather, solely because a majority of men believed that our sex made us inferior, not fully human and thus not deserving of the same rights accorded to males.

In the US, the various bodies involved in regulating women's sports and PE in colleges and universities prohibited women from having any intercollegiate competitive sports until 1957, when the powers-that-be said women's intercollegiate sports competition “may” exist. In 1963, the bodies in charge - now organized under the umbrella org called the Division for Girls and Women's Sports - went a step further by formally stating that it was “desirable" for intercollegiate programs for women be permitted to exist.

But in the US, female students at all levels of education, including college and university, only won the legal right to establish and participate in interscholastic competitive sports with the passage of Title IX in 1972.

However, women's scholastic sports didn't suddenly spring up overnight once Title IX was made federal law in 1972. Title IX gave educational institutions until 1978 to implement the law, and it took a lot of time, effort, money and new facilities to get girls' and women's school sports off the ground. Most of the time and effort was put in by women on our own; by and large, men and male-run institutions like Penn and the NCAA did not leap to their feet to lend a hand.

Moreover, when the Title IX implementation period ended in 1978, educational institutions were not penalized if they hadn't fully established interscholastic competitive sports programs for female students on par with programs for males the way the law required. So long as schools were generally moving in the right direction, no matter how slowly, they were considered to be in compliance with Title IX. So practically speaking, it's really only been since circa 1982 that women and girls began to get a chance at fair play and parity in scholastic sports.

Prior to Title IX, the NCAA sought to block women from having interscholastic college and uni competitive sports; and after Title IX was passed, the NCAA tried to undermine the legislation, prevent it from achieving its aims, and stop women from having control over women's intercollegiate sports. Women initially wanted a governing organization entirely separate from the NCAA, to be run by and for women in consultation and partnership with the NCAA but not under NCAA control. Which is why the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) was founded in 1971.

The NCAA, run and almost entirely made up of men at the time, did not take kindly to this, which led to decade-long struggle between the NCAA and AIAW over control of the women's collegiate sports that were then beginning to be established. In case you don't know, the women who wanted women to have a major say in the governance of women's collegiate sports lost.

After the AIAW challenged the hegemony of the NCAA in court on the grounds that the NCAA is an unlawful monopoly in violation of federal anti-trust laws, the court ruled against the AIAW. The NCAA, by now aware that control of women's intercollegiate sports could bring it more revenue and power, then used its vast resources to muscle the AIAW out of the way and put it out of business. Broke and defeated, theAIAW folded in 1982, and the NCAA became the sole official governing body for women's interscholastic college and uni sports in the US.

Now a mere 40 years later, the NCAA, the powers-that-be-at Penn and other schools, the IOC, the ACLU, the Democratic Party, the MSM and virtually all other establishment institutions in the Western world say it's fine for selfish males like Lia Thomas, CeCe Telfer, June Eastwood, Terry Miller, Andraya Yearwood, Laurel Hubbard, Stephanie Barrett, Chelsea Wolfe and many more to use gender identity claims to demand access to girls and women's sports, thereby rolling back and removing the basic rights for the female sex that generations of women fought hard for. You approvingly say that "The N.C.A.A. has always taken its transgender rules seriously." But I see the NCAA's actions as proof that the NCAA has always made its priority favoring males and insuring that male athletes are catered to and get what they want, no matter the damage this does to women and women's sports.

And to justify this male invasion and attempted coup of female sports and female spaces, males are using the very same sexist, regressive sex stereotypes that generations of women fought hard to escape and free both sexes from. Today's male-led gender identity movement wants to force everyone to accept outdated, restrictive and incredibly sexist, superficial and offensive sex stereotypes as a given because those stereotypes are at the heart of the sacred dogma that authoritarian adherents of gender ideology want to make the mandatory state religion. And guys like you are cheering this misogyny on. How very sporting.

quote]real brain differences wrote:

The number of individuals doping by gender is far more males than females.(quote)

Proof?

Are you really that stupid to not figure it out your own.

Steroid use in high school, who do you think is using it more, boys or girls?

Professional sports, where male professional athletes out number female athletes probably 100 to 1. NFL, NBA, Baseball, who is doping more, men or women? College football, college basketball, etc.

Vanity muscles at gyms around the world, who is doping more? Men or women?

That and more. Add it up. What ratio of male to female doping rate is a reasonable hypothesis to you?

astro wrote:

Today everything is about a small group of zealots being allowed to lead corporations around by the nose if it fits the right narrative.

You have the cart and horse mixed up here.

Sorry, but if you have a hang-down , you’re a man or boy

real brain differences wrote:

Are you really that stupid to not figure it out your own.

Steroid use in high school, who do you think is using it more, boys or girls?

Professional sports, where male professional athletes out number female athletes probably 100 to 1. NFL, NBA, Baseball, who is doping more, men or women? College football, college basketball, etc.

Vanity muscles at gyms around the world, who is doping more? Men or women?

That and more. Add it up. What ratio of male to female doping rate is a reasonable hypothesis to you?

Thanks. You have answered my question - you have no proof.

Measured against relative performances gains, there is actually little basis for the argument that women are less likely to use PEDs. Because women have lower baseline levels, they often benefit more from small doses of steroids, which gives them a greater boost in performance. “For females, the effects of anabolic steroids are greater, and the old files of the German Democratic Republic have shown that their official doping plan targeted females, as those effects had more impact than they did on their male counterparts,” says Olivier de Hon, scientific expert at the Anti-Doping Authority of The Netherlands.

“We know that the win-at-all-costs culture exists in all sport, at all levels,” says Annie Skinner, a spokeswoman for the United States Anti-Doping Association. “The temptation to use performance-enhancing drugs to cheat your competitor isn’t limited by gender.”

Of course, news that female athletes are doping isn’t a surprise. Just as the IAAF documents indicate that doping among World Championship and Olympic track and field athletes is far more widespread than previously thought, recent high profile positive tests—including three-time Chicago Marathon champion Liliya Shobukhova and three-time Boston Marathon winner Rita Jeptoo—suggest that female athletes may be doping at similar rates to their male counterparts.

So based on everything I explained to you about males taking performance enhancing drugs from the high school level to the professional level, and you think more females are taking them?

Women barely even have an opportunity to be professional athletes. NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball, professional soccer the world over, hockey, cricket, etc. Men have the opportunity to become rich in these sports and the temptations to dope are very real. There is no female professional equivalent for these professional sports.

Many of these male professional are contact sports, where physical strength is ultra important, raising the rates of doping.

Oh, and here is a study:

https://www.wada-ama.org/sites/default/files/resources/files/weaving_full_report_2008.pdf

If you actually think there are more females doping than men, you really aren’t smart enough to participate in this discussion.

If an athlete (group of athletes) or team wanted to challenge Thomas' participation in, say, the NCAA Championships, what would the best recourse be?

With virtually no legal knowledge about this issue, I'm inclined to posit that a court would not issue an injunction barring Thomas from competing. Several states have attempted to enact laws prohibiting transgender athletes from participating on teams that match their gender identity, but courts seem to be inclined to strike them down. I do not know if the NCAA policy has ever faced a legal challenge.

I suspect the only other viable option would be for athletes to refuse to compete (stage a walkout) in the event(s) that Thomas is swimming, which I suspect is also not a viable option for a host of reasons.

I imagine Thomas and U Penn will have an incredibly successful year. However, this will not be a one-off scenario as more transgender athletes begin competing at very high levels and questions mount as to whether it's ultimately a fair policy to allow trans athletes that have gone through adolescence to compete in events that match their gender identity. The athletes simply can't give up some of the physical traits they've developed prior to transitioning. The disparities will be even more apparent in sports like basketball and volleyball.