Female Athletes Sue NCAA Over Transgender Competitors in Sports

What are you talking about?

Dumb as it gets.

So you disapprove of Riley Gaines' decision not to use female pronouns for Lia Thomas, calling it "petty" and claiming "there's no reason to do that." But at the same time, you obviously have no problem spelling Thomas' chosen first name wrong five different times in a single post. Talk about double standards!

Misrepresenting Thomas' new and world-famous chosen "lady name" as Leah rather than Lia once or twice can be written off as probably the result of unintentional carelessness or being in a rush. But doing it again and again seems deliberate.

Why is it okay for you to show (what many wound consider) insufficient respect for Thomas' claimed gender identity by getting his new "lady name" wrong repeatedly, but it's "petty" - meaning small-minded and spiteful - for women like Riley Gaines and me to use sex-based pronouns for Thomas the way we do for everyone else?

Since I don't know Riley Gaines, I have no idea why she has decided to stick with sex-based pronouns for Lia Thomas. But I disagree with you that there's "no reason" for anyone not to use the pronouns she/her/hers in reference to blokes like Thomas.

You might not agree with the reasons many people - women especially - have decided to keep using sex-based pronouns - even for men and boys who want others to call them she/her. But you're mistaken in asserting that we don't have any reasons at all.

fairplayforwomen.com

Pronouns are Rohypnol • Fair Play For Women

@fairplaywomen

There’s a lot of chat around about pronouns right now. Specifically, ‘preferred’ pronouns. By which is usually meant, the pronouns a person would prefer.

Link:fairplayforwomen.com/pronouns/

In 100+ years of running there has never ever been an elite women who was transgender, it's physically impossible.

Any woman who has even gotten close as semi-elite was simply because they were not completely transitioned and not only should not have been allowed to compete but they should have known better to race against peers so soon.

If you followup years later on anyone who has gotten even remotely close, ie. the XC athlete and the woman who made the Olympic Marathon Trials, their performance goes off a cliff much later.

Before 2016 the Olympic rule was not only FOUR years after transition but also critically post-op.

That was fine, that was sanity, that was fair to all.

But now everyone seems to pretend just two years on just hormones and non-op is somehow completely transitioned. That is ridiculous and everyone should know better, the rule makers and the competitors.

Athletes in other sports like Lia Thomas negate their body weight with the water so they get the full benefit of watts per kg without the extra kg.

But also more critically, Lia Thomas WAS NOT FULLY TRANSITIONED.

People should have absolutely no problem with women who are fully transitioned.

If one was standing next to you in a locker room you would never know.

The difference between two years and four years is like night and day.

Unfortunately bigots won't listen to that logic, they just need to bully someone, anyone, everyone.

Make a friend who is transgender and learn they are nothing to fear or hate.

This reminds me of all the republicans who were violently anti-gay for decades through Reagan, etc. and then finally made some friends who were gay and suddenly realized their prejudice was very wrong and then went to the supreme court to make marriage equality legal.

So I challenge the bro-Jos to make at least one running friend who is transgender in 2024.

Good for them! I hope that they are successful in their lawsuit.

This is very telling as you have not grasped enough about reality to know that people have delusions on every conceivable subject and a scientific method is how we definitively distinguish fantasy from reality.

I do appreciate that you are acknowledging there is unfairness and an advantage, some people do not even voice that concern on the far left. However the evidence you're providing for 4 years, rather than just 1 or 2, is anecdotal at best. Take the trans canadian powerlifter, she states she has been transitioned for 20 years...however she came from relative obscurity to breaking national records. The problem is, yes there is unfairness, and we do not know how to correct it (or even if it is correctable). It drives me nuts because there are other medications other than Testosterone suppressants that lower athletic ability (like some heart medications, or meds for depression), but we are not making "other categories" for people who have to take those meds, they just have to live with lower athletic ability or decide not to take the meds...makes sense to me. The simple answer is to make the category of Female defined as XX only, and the other category as "open to all". Heck, I don't even care if they change the name to "XX" category to make people feel better. Open to all includes people who might have to take meds that lower their innate athletic ability (like hormones etc for trans people). Done, argument settled.

Of course famous figures who've built their entire brand on publicly speaking out against the GOP, and slagging off and making fun of individual Republican politicans - especially all the ones who richly deserve mockery - get constant emails from the GOP. Especially the ones who are famous because they're on TV all the time like MSNBC talking heads Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnel.

Since everyone knows where Maddow and O'Donnell work, finding email addresses for them isn't hard. Any kid working as an intern for the GOP, GOP orgs or GOP candidates could do it.

Also, since Maddow and O'Donnell make their living as political pundits and purported journalists whose entire brand image is based on them being both "on the left" and "in the know," I am sure their staffs have signed them up to get emails not only from the GOP, but from every major and upcoming Republican politician at the statewide and national level - and from every loony rightwing group in the USA with a mailing list.

But back to you and all the emails from GOP candidates you say you constantly get featuring photographs of Lia Thomas: maybe the explanation is the other social media you use outside of LRC - if, that is, you use any. My understanding is that on platforms that monitor and sell users' data, the AI determines people's leanings and interests from the material they post, share, link to and like.

As to why the GOP is sending you a constant stream of emails showing photographs of Lia Thomas specifically - and particularly of Lia Thomas wearing women's swim suits - maybe that's due to other mailing lists you're on. Or due to your internet browsing and viewing history.

BTW, I got another email from Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna just now, LOL.

According to NCAA, there have been 34 trans athletes who have competed in women's division this academic year. Only three of them are known to public. One D3 sprinter, one D3 swimmer and one D2 tennis player. So who are the other 31 and why don't we know anything about them?

For one thing, they probably never competed as male either at college or even high school. So they are harder to be identified. But I don't think that's the whole story. Reduxx has outed multiple trans athletes in high school who have never competed as male. So why haven't they doxed any of the remaining NCAA athletes?

My suspicion is that those 31 people are unremarkable as athletes. They are good enough to made the squad (probably mostly at D2 and D3 level), but they don't stand out and they haven't won anything important. So they don't fit the narrative Reduxx (and activists like Gaines) wants to promote.

BTW, here is an interesting trivia. Did you know Terry Miller had a high school teammate who was also trans? Why did we hear nothing about this person? Well, she ran 14.xx 100m. That's why.

What do you think is the difference (in terms of athletic performance*) between people born with CAIS and trans people who started transitioning before puberty? Why do you think World Athletics treats the two groups of people essentially the same?

(* Obviously, there are differences in other area. But let's limit the discussion to sports here.)

Sorry for mistakenly thinking you're in California.

I realize now that I probably mixed you up with the LRC poster "Wise Old Man," as he's another poster who appears to be a full-grown adult male who is intelligent like you but who's also made many, many posts over the years saying it's unjust, immoral, and unfair for males to be excluded from female sports the way you have.

I confuse you and Wise Old Man because his posts have made it clear he's a "liberal"and supporter of the Democratic Party who's just as angry, distressed and outraged over the idea of no males in female sports as you are.

Like you, Wise Old Man claims to be a "progressive" who supports women's rights and hews to the set of positions that "all good people" who consider themselves "forward thinking" today supposedly agree are correct, virtuous and just. Yet, like you, he claims that it's hateful, bigoted, transphobic, cruel, ignorant and just plain wrong for anyone - especially anyone female - to say and believe that female people have a right to fairness and safety in sports just as male people do, and that female students attending schools in the USA specifically should have just as much of a chance to participate, qualify, place, win, set records and generally shine in our own school sports category as males have always gotten in their school sports category.

Coming to this late, so in case no one else has linked to the complaint, below.

Also, the complaint was plainly written for newsworthy soundbites and public consumption; I don't know a single reasonable judge who would care about language like this: "During the same fifteen-year-period, the NCAA has simultaneously imposed a radical anti-woman agenda on college sports..."

That's for news articles, which will eat it up.

That said, and not having read the complaint all the way through, this ought to be interesting.

Quote the opposite. When a woman opposes trans inclusion, I can at least understand where they come from. This is especially the case if she has either been an athlete or has a daughter who has been an athlete.

What I cannot stand is the objection from MEN, especially those who show absolutely no interest in women's sports in every imaginable way.

Female students attending US schools still have so many obstacles to equal opportunity in sports, and 99% of them have nothing to do with a handful of trans athletes. Yet many people on this board (and other places on the net) claim to be champions of women's sports because they care about the 1% of the problem and willfully ignore the other 99%.

NERunner's responses show the role of excessive female compassion in the trans debate. Claims of victimhood, for her and many such women, supercede the desire of many girls and women to have fair competition or change clothes and toilet in spaces free from males. She somehow cannot see how evacuating the category "female" of all meaning will have negative knockoff effects for all females down the road. This is the kind of compassion that truly bad people are adept at exploiting.

There are relatively few psychopaths and bad faith actors in the world, but we create social systems that are difficult to game because a single one of these people can and will do great damage when insulated from accountability. Redefine some men as women, and suddenly a behavior that qualifies as exhibitionism and vouyerism in other circumstances becomes his "right to exist," and "if your eight-year-old daughter is disturbed by seeing a penis, you need to educate her to stop being a pervert who stares at people."

There's also an irony here because the women speaking openly about the injustice of males in women's sports are actively being gender non-conforming, while those condemning them view themselves as champions of gender nonconformity.

This is where you're wrong. Plenty of men do care about girls and women's sports; some even make a lot of sacrifices so that girls and women they value an exceed at the highest levels. In addition to the many women that coach women and girls, boyfriends and husbands pace workouts and races. I've watched Jason Simpson pacing Jenny on the track in Boulder, seen videos of Molly Huddle doing mile repeats with Kurt; we know that Steve Magness did a lot of marathon training with Kara Goucher when she was with the Oregon Project. Marathons that attract Amercian women chasing the OTQ frequently have pacers, and most of the time, it's somebody's boyfriend or husband. Some of these guys run the entire 26.2 with a group of amateur women.

These are men that actually do value women's sports. They understand that competitive women have a different ceiling than competitive men, and they don't look down on the women because of it. It's the people who can't look at this difference and still see the greatness of competitive and elite women driving a lot of this nonsense. They're burying their sexism in a fog of faux social justice talk.

There are sexist men in the world, but don't go attacking the many men who actively contribute to girls and women's sports.

No, the IOC rules in place from 2003 to 2015 were not "fair to all." Those rules created a special entitlement to a small group of males at the expense of female athletes. The rules were patently unfair to female athletes, the group of people that women's sports and women's Olympic events were created for.

As for your contention that the critical element making it unfair for Lia Thomas to compete in the women's category is that" Lia Thomas WAS NOT FULLY TRANSITIONED" - that's hooey.

No human being has ever "fully transitioned" to the opposite sex. It can't be done. Putting FULLY TRANSITIONED in all caps doesn't change that fact.

The operations that some surgery-mad men in medicine came up with and have performed on the genitals of others over the past 70 or so years that have been falsely billed as "sex change surgery" have never actually turned any of the patients who've gotten these surgeries into the opposite sex.

As for your claim that the difference between an adult male who's been on testosterone suppression and Big Pharma estrogen for two years and an adult male who's been on these drugs for four years "is night and day" - that's your view. It's not a view that many of us believe is supported by facts.

For the purpose of sports categorization and competition, it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference how long an adolescent or adult male has been on testosterone suppressant drugs, Big Pharma estrogen, or whether he's had genital surgery removing his balls, flaying his penis and reconfiguring the tissue that remains. Males don't belong in female sports no matter what medical treatments they've undergone.

By your reasoning, since Lance Armstrong has only one testicle, he should be considered "half transitioned" or at least "partially transtioned." And the progatonist of Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" was a "partly transitioned" man too.

The only group of males for whom there's some reasonable basis to argue that an exception should be made to include them in the female category on humanitarian grounds are those with the rare disorder of male sex development known as CAIS (complete androgen insensivity syndrome - a DSD that only occurs in males).

Though persons with CAIS do seem to have an unfair advantage over females in sport, most women and girls have long been willing for CAIS males to be included in female sports - and spaces - because persons with CAIS do not have a massively unfair advantage; they've not benefitted the way other males have from the male levels of testesterone their testes have produced in utero, male puberty of infancy, male puberty of adolescence and/or adulthood; and many persons with CAIS really did grow up thinking they were girls at least until they reached their teens. What's more, in many cases, parents of children with CAIS were also unaware of their children's CAIS until the affected kids were in their teens - and so many persons with CAIS genuinely spent their formative years being raised and socialized "as girls."

You seem to have a serious problem with reading comprehension. I didn't write men did not care about girls' and women's sports. I write I have problems with men who don't care about girls' and women's sports, and yet complain about trans athletes.

It might well be true that no judge would care about - or take seriously - the snippet of language you cite.

Lawsuits about contentious social and political issues and "culture war topics" have always been written with the understanding that they'll be read by the press and public. Providing quoteable snippets and soundbites has been "a thing" for a very long time.

One of the most famous trials about a "culture war" issue in US history - the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 - was put on as an intentional publicity stunt. The Scopes trial, which was argued by two American attorneys who were already major celebrities when the trial began, created a media circus and garnered public attention on the scale of the Watergate hearings in the 1970s, the OJ Simpson double murder trial in the 1990s, and the more recent coutroom drama in which Johnny Depp and Amber Heard went head to head over which one of them was more abusive during their romance and marriage.

Also, other lawsuits, legal briefs and official complaints related to "gender identity" that have been lodged in courts and other kinds of judicial bodies in the the USA and other countries have contained lots of language meant to get press notice, generate publicity and drum up attention and sympathy from the general public for the plaintiffs .

Many of the decisions and dissenting opinions written by jurists in these cases have also contained passages and claims that others in the legal profession and the general public might look askance at and not take seriously. Or which might even prompt a lot of people to roll their eyes.

For example, these passages from the decision of the NY State judge who ruled on the Renee Richards in 1977:

When an individual such as plaintiff, a successful physician, a husband and father, finds it necessary for his own mental sanity to undergo a sex reassignment, the unfounded fears and misconceptions of defendants must give way to the overwhelming medical evidence that this person is now female.

Citing testimony given by John Money - the now-notorious psychologist at Johns Hopkins who along with California sexologist Robert Stoller came up with and popularized the term and concept of "gender identity" in the 1960s and 1970s - the judge said,

Dr. Richards is a female, i.e., external genital appearance is that of a female; her internal sex is that of a female who has been hysterectomized and ovariectomized; Dr. Richards is psychologically a woman; endocrinologically female; somatically (muscular tone, height, weight, breasts, physique) Dr. Richards is female and her muscular and fat composition has been transformed to that of a female; socially Dr. Richards is female; Dr. Richards' gonadal status is that of an ovariectomized female.

Dr. Money's professional conclusion... is that a person such as Dr. Renee Richards should be classified as female and for anyone in the medical or legal field to find otherwise is completely unjustified. Dr. Money also believes that Dr. Richards will have no unfair advantage when competing against other women.