A transgender swimmer who competed as a man until November of 2019 recently smashed several women’s swimming records at an Akron, Ohio, meet, winning the 1,650-yard race by 38 seconds over the closest competitor.
Lia Thomas was able to qualify for next year’s NCAA women’s championship with record-smashing times at the Zippy Invitational meet. Thomas would be the first transgender athlete to qualify for a national title in swimming.
Thomas has met all the requirements the NCAA has set for men to compete as women. But the astonishing way Thomas dominated the competition should raise warning flags about the prospect of Thomas competing in the nationals.
On Friday night, Thomas managed to win the 500-yard freestyle in 4:34.06. The result set a new record, Akron pool record, Penn school record and the Ivy League record.
On Saturday she won the 200 free with a pool, meet and program record time of 1:41.93, some 7 seconds clear of second place.
Then, on Sunday, Thomas won the 1,650 freestyle in a record time of 15:59.71. She stormed home to win the race by 38 seconds with Kalandadze paddling her way to the finish with a time of 16:37.44.
The 200 is a sprint. To win the event by seven seconds is incredible. Anyone who knows anything about swimming knows that something is terribly, terribly wrong with that result.
Thomas’s times would be good — if he was competing as a man. But they wouldn’t win many races at the level of competition he was competing in. But competing as a woman, he absolutely blows the competition away.
It’s interesting because brute strength is not a major requirement to excel as a competitive swimmer (although it doesn’t hurt). In Thomas’s case, it would appear the body type plays a large role in Thomas’s success. Thomas is long and lean with superior muscle mass that allows him to sit high up in the water and surf through the wake, expending less energy than someone with a smaller, more compact body type.
Thomas has given several interviews since the transition and demonstrated a total lack of awareness that competing as a female is anything but completely normal.
‘I’ve been a swimmer since I was five years old. The process of coming out as being trans and continuing to swim was a lot of uncertainty and unknown around an area that’s usually really solid. Realizing I was trans threw that into question. Was I going to keep swimming? What did that look like?’
She also said: ‘One of my big concerns for trans people is feeling alone. Even if you don’t pay attention to the news … [about] states proposing and passing vicious anti-trans legislation, it can feel very lonely and overwhelming.
If you accept this as the new normal are you ready to tell every girl in your family to forget competing in sports?https://t.co/4dylIdfxwv
— Lars Larson (@LarsLarsonShow) December 7, 2021
It’s hard to say what could reverse this gender craziness. Thomas will be congratulated by males and females for the “accomplishment.” But how many of those offering praise and congratulations are actually terrified of the consequences of going against the tide of pro-trans hysteria?
Wishing we were someone else is part of being human. We’ve all dallied in that kind of fantasy. But eventually, only those who are severely disturbed try to maintain the fiction that they are someone else permanently.
And enabling this madness is hurting others — a fact that gets lost in the rush to “accept” trans people for who they think they are.
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