Lia Thomas: National Champion

As always, the truth comes out that the people opposed to transathletes competing in their gender simply don't accept transgenderism as even being possible.

So many arguments from conservatives start out with "A person can live their life any way they want, BUT"

If you can't even acknowledge a socially and scientifically accepted reality that transgenderism exists, then I don't think you should be allowed to weigh in on the sporting debate. It's very much akin to thinking certain people are inferior to others based on their skin color and denying them the right to vote or learn alongside other races.

Just give it up. These efforts to twist reality into a pretzel to pretend that a biological male does not have a massive and unfair advantage over a biological female in sports are pitiful, as is your knight's errand. Sorry but this was not some great civil rights victory, just a guy bullying women.

this horse has been beaten dead

There it is. If you don't believe what I believe, then you shouldn't be allowed to express your opinion. No debate allowed. To hell with free speech.

To equate transgenderism with skin color is about as unscientific as it gets. The fact is: if Lia Thomas stops taking her medication or hormone therapy, she will revert back to male levels of testosterone. "She" does not have reproductive capacity so her body fat will never be as high as biological females. "Her" skeletal structure is different at birth than a biological female.

In the "a picture is worth a thousand words" department, the female swimmers who placed 2nd and 3rd after Thomas made a point of posing on the podium with the one who came in 4th - as far away from Thomas as they could get:

Open image

You’ve likely written more than a thousand words on this subject.

Someone on this board set it best a few years ago when the whole trans runners in Connecticut was a big thing...

All the other athletes in the event should just stand there in protest when the gun goes off. Don't start running, swimming, etc. Just stand there.

It's not a level playing field, anyone who denies this is a moron.

Oh, I'm pro free speech. You're allowed to speak whatever ridiculous, unscientific, bigoted thing you want. I, in turn, have the free speech to call you out on it. Conservatives seem to think "free speech" means "no one is allowed to tell me I'm wrong." But then again, they're pretty dumb.

I don't care about her hormone levels. She's a woman. You even refer to her using female pronouns (even though you sometimes put quotation marks around them. Is there a reason for this?). So we seem to agree that she is a woman.

The male chauvinists who opposed the movement toward gender equality in the 1970s would be shocked at how modern-day progressives enthusiastically root for their (the chauvinists') basic principles under certain circumstances, specifically the ones at play here. Instead of simply asserting that women didn't deserve equal opportunities, the chauvinists should have used a different strategy: concede that opportunities can be observed for women in theory, but insist that men have a right to enter the competitions for those opportunities on an "equal" basis in fact. Apparently, progressives would have cheered them on as they struck blow after blow against women's equality of opportunity.

*He
He can cross dress all he wants, but anyone with a Y chromosome is a dude. Science says so.

reserved for women in theory*

Not a woman. Thomas has a Y chromosome.

Just for arguments sake, Thomas isn't even a transwoman. He still has penis, so he's a cross dresser competing against women.

Your instincts are good. This is much bigger than sports.

It means that if they can force society to accept something that is obviously untrue, if they can force us to say this dude is a “she”, if they can force us to say we see four fingers while they hold up three (in Orwell’s 1984), then they own our minds … and then they can do anything without fearing the consequences of their Utopian policies which never work in the real world. Reality is their true enemy. Full Orwellian fascism is the end game.

This is the hill to die on.

It is legal for a person to transgender but not a 50+ year old to attend middle school. If you just gotta finally win a race, you should buy a forged DL and compete in the 70-year old division. If your motivation is to hang out with children and you aren’t already in the sex offender database, maybe you could become a LL coach.

Gender and sex are separate concepts.

Let's have sports be separated on the basis of whichever one you can't change.

I agree with that.

No. Thomas is biologically male who identifies as a woman based on body dysphoria. Biologically and physiologically Thomas is male, and that reality cannot be politely brushed aside when we are talking about athletics. While society will respect that self-identification, this type of mindless absolutism where no compromise or distinctions are permitted and where no other considerations can be weighed is just stupid. Here Thomas's right to have her gender identity respected directly encroached on the right of female athletes to have their own sports based on the simple and indisputable fact that female athletes cannot compete with male athletes on anything close to a level playing field. Here Thomas acted like a bully and a selfish jerk.