There was extraordinary testimony on Thursday at a House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government on “The Dangers and Due Process Violations of ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Children.” One of the witnesses, Paula Scanlan, a former University of Pennsylvania swimmer, testified about her experience as a sexual assault survivor being forced to share a locker room with celebrated transgender male swimmer Lia Thomas.
Scanlan was sexually assaulted at age 16 — a trauma she says is made worse by “many policies pushed today” that “completely ignore my experiences and many women like me.”
“What you do not know is the experience of the women on the University of Pennsylvania swim team,” Scanlan told the judiciary subcommittee during her opening statement.
“My teammates and I were forced to undress in the presence of Lia, a 6-foot-4 tall biological male, fully intact with male genitalia, 18 times per week,” she said. “Some girls opted to change in bathroom stalls, and others used the family bathroom to avoid this.”
“When we tried to voice our concerns to the athletic department, we were told that Lia’s swimming and being in our locker room was a non-negotiable, and we were offered psychological services to attempt to re-educate us to become comfortable with the idea of undressing in front of a male,” she continued.
I have written previously about the gigantic game of “pretend” being played by transgender advocates and those too terrified of the consequences of disagreeing with them to speak up. Paula Scanlan is making points about her experience that the University of Pennsylvania should be forced to answer for by being subpoenaed by Congress and put under oath.
“To sum up the university’s response: We, the women, were the problem, not the victims,” she told the committee. “We were expected to conform, to move over and shut up. Our feelings didn’t matter. The university was gaslighting and fearmongering women to validate the feelings and identity of a male.”
When Lia Thomas joined the team, the University of Pennsylvania offered @PaulaYScanlan and her teammates psychological services to re-educate themselves to become comfortable undressing in front of a man.
Listen to Paula's story 🗣️ pic.twitter.com/C4g4yTeCfU
— House Judiciary GOP 🇺🇸 (@JudiciaryGOP) July 27, 2023
But Scanlan also recognizes the greater issue at stake.
Scanlan said she penned an op-ed to the school’s student newspaper, only to see it retracted just hours after publication. She said she was given no reason why her piece was removed.
“This is representative of a greater issue — the destruction of free speech,” Scanlan said. “Today, any discussion maintaining the sanctity of women’s spaces is labeled transphobic, bigoted and hateful. What’s bigoted and hateful is discrimination against women and the efforts to erase women and our equal opportunities, dignity and safe spaces.”
What happens when females refuse to play the game? What if they refuse to pretend that biological males have no intrinsic advantage over biological females in their sport? What if their modesty makes them uncomfortable about getting naked in front of an unfamiliar man?
They are told to get psychiatric help in order to get used to getting naked in front of a man. Obviously, it’s the biological woman’s fault that she can’t deal with the “new normal.” And in this “new normal,” there will be no more silliness about “feminine modesty.”
This was a favorite tactic in the late Soviet Union — putting dissidents under the care of a psychiatrist because obviously, you had to be crazy not to see the old Soviet Union as paradise on earth.
Paula Scanlan, Riley Gaines, and other courageous women being pressured, threatened, and ostracized for advocating for a point of view that the transnazis disagree with need the full support of Republicans in Congress. It’s time to rip the fig leaf off this game of pretend and expose these charlatans as the anti-democratic extremists they truly are.
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