Lia Thomas did it, so why can’t Iszac Henig? Lia is the University of Pennsylvania swimmer who performed indifferently on the men’s team and then proclaimed that he was a woman. Competing on the women’s team, lo and behold, suddenly he became a championship swimmer, breaking records left and right and winning an NCAA swimming championship. It was the strength he got from being transgender and enduring bigotry and hate, right? So we should expect that Iszac Henig, who used to be a female swimmer and now says she is a male, would perform at the same stellar level, right? Well, it didn’t quite turn out that way. It turns out that in the cases of both Thomas and Henig, biological reality can’t simply be wished away.
Henig, according to OutKick, “finished the 2021-22 NCAA season as a women’s all-American while transitioning from female to male.” However, she “is now swimming on the guy’s team and is struggling mightily to not finish in last place at meets.” Why, this is dumbfounding! What could possibly account for Henig’s precipitous decline from the top of the ranks of female swimmers to a mediocre (at best) allegedly male swimmer? It must be deeply ingrained “transphobia” among the judges at swim meets, right?
Of course, it isn’t anything of the kind. The simple and obvious reason why Thomas did better competing against women and Henig did worse competing against men is that males naturally have greater upper body strength and can thus generally swim faster and farther than their female counterparts. Those who are enraged by this should take it up with God; there isn’t an authority on earth, much less a surgeon, who can redress this inequity. Thomas became a champion because he is a man competing with women. Henig became a poor swimmer because she is a woman competing against men.
It is absurd that anyone would refuse to acknowledge these realities, and just as absurd that in our ridiculous age, they have to be restated and restated again. But Henig was given lavish space in the New York Times Thursday to make her case in an article entitled “I Chose to Compete as My True, Trans Self. I Win Less, but I Live More.” The article is nearly two thousand words of the current delusions and self-deceptions, as is evident from the title itself. If Henig were competing as her true self, she would have remained on the women’s team. She wins less because of the inescapable physical realities, that is, her true self, which she is determinedly ignoring.
In her Times article, Henig recounts: “I placed fourth in the 50 free at the Ivy League Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships my first season, and I was the highest point scorer on the women’s team in my sophomore year.” And “I ended up having the best swim season of my life that year on the women’s team and went mostly undefeated. I won my first individual Ivy League title in the 50 free and, at my first N.C.A.A. championship meet, placed fifth in the 100 free, earning All-America honors.”
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Now she is performing at about the same level, but with vastly different results: “Now I’m a senior, swimming with the men. I’ve been taking hormones for almost eight months; my times are about the same as they were at the end of last season. Right before Thanksgiving we finished a meet against Ohio State, Notre Dame, Virginia Tech and others. I wasn’t the slowest guy in any of my events, but I’m not as successful in the sport as I was on the women’s team.” Not quite: OutKick notes that she finished “79th out of 83 swimmers.” And why? Because Iszac Henig is a woman. No matter how many hormones she takes or ghastly surgeries she undergoes, she will always be a woman. And even if technology one day advances to the point where someone like her can be given male upper body strength, people like her will still always be women.
The transgender madness, like so much of the Left’s program, is a war against reality. No one is doing Lia Thomas or Iszac Henig any favors by playing along with their delusions. Neither are heroes; Thomas is disadvantaging genuine female swimmers, and Henig is disadvantaging herself. Henig may prefer to be a third-rate male swimmer instead of a top-flight female one, but she is doing genuine males a disservice no less unmistakably than Thomas is doing genuine females a disservice. Gender identity is not really as changeable as a suit of clothes. At a certain point, people will look back upon all this madness with the horror we reserve for the likes of the Salem Witch Trials. But we aren’t there yet. Not even close.
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