As PJ Media’s Rick Moran reported earlier, the University of Pennsylvania’s “Lia” Thomas took the NCAA Women’s 500 Freestyle at the National Championships. Here is what that looked like:
Champagne podium meme but they actually deserve the champagne. Congrats, Emma and Erica. pic.twitter.com/zHRlhrynPo
— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) March 18, 2022
If the Sesame Street song, “One of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn’t belong,” is running through your head, you are not alone. Unless you live under a rock, you know “Lia” is a man who competed on UPenn’s men’s swimming team before deciding to grow out his hair and suppress his testosterone levels. As is evident from the above photo, the testosterone that flooded his body in his teen years clearly had the natural, lasting effect.
The real woman to his right is 20-year-old Emma Weyant. Weyant is a three-time national champion swimmer who won a silver medal in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics swimming the 400 Individual Medley. For the uninitiated, in 2020, Weyant swam 100 meters of all four competitive strokes faster than all but one other woman in the world. She has also been named a Scholastic All-American and hopes to go to law school. Top swimmers do not routinely make a fortune even following an Olympic performance, though they often leave their undergrad free from debt related to tuition.
By contrast, Thomas would not have even qualified for the NCAA finals as a man. His overall ranking as a male swimmer was 462 in the nation after swimming on the men’s team at the University of Pennsylvania for three years. He was never going to make an Olympic team. Now, who knows? “Laurel” Hubbard, a middle-aged transgender weightlifter, broke that barrier in the Beijing Games. Once again, the only transition Hubbard made was growing out his hair around his receding hairline.
Competing against women, Thomas ranks number one in the U.S. and has repeatedly smashed elite female swimmers’ records. In response to the uproar and controversy, the body that governs amateur competition, USA Swimming, now requires competitors who are transitioning to demonstrate low testosterone levels for 36 months. That would not have changed Thomas’s obvious advantages of height and muscle mass, to say nothing of his metabolic advantages.
Any rational person looks at the picture above and knows awarding Thomas first place in the race is wrong. As a competitive swimmer, Thomas knows it too.
I competed continuously for over a decade and was on track to earn a scholarship until I fell ill in my sophomore year of high school. My first USSA team was the Green Dolphins in Rochester, N.Y. On my first night, my mom thought I would be playing games in the water with a neighbor. Over several years, we both learned:
- Swimmers workout nearly 365 days a year, often twice a day
- If you are competitive, it is a commitment for your entire family. There are lots of lost weekends spent in bleachers at humid indoor pools while the family’s swimmer competes.
- No one expects the chance for a million-dollar contract. Michael Phelps is a rare phenomenon in the sport.
- Swimmers compete because they love the sport, the community of fellow athletes, and winning. It is an individual sport, first and foremost.
I can’t imagine the amount of restraint it must take for Weyant not to rail publicly about having a man steal her win. Because even if Thomas had not grown out his hair and jumped in the girl’s race, 99.9% of Americans would not know Weyant’s name after she won the 500 Freestyle. She won an Olympic medal, and no one had heard of her. Weyant swims to win, not for fame. Yet now many know the name of the man that took a win away because he is an anomaly.
In the NCAA finals, Weyant got the third-fastest time in University of Virginia history and was less than five seconds off the women’s NCAA record. By comparison, Thomas’s time was more than 25 seconds off the men’s NCAA record for the same distance and more than 15 seconds off the Men’s record at the University of Pennsylvania. Some might say those statistics prove that his performance sufficiently declined after depressing his testosterone, and now competing with women is fair.
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It is just as easy to say he’s throwing it. With an approximate five-inch height difference, he should not be eking out a win in a 500-meter race by more than one second. Teammates already accused him of deliberate underperformance to prove a point in January. His record-smashing performances earned him criticism. Maybe that encouraged Thomas to make it close but still win. It may have been what he was trying to do that time he lost.
The person formerly known as Will Thomas is a man. The time has passed for qualifying anything by putting “biological” in front of the word. Thomas is a man down to the cellular level, just as Weyant is a woman. Thomas is not brave. He’s a jerk. Thomas is taking successes away from women because he can in this, his last competitive year. It looks rather petty, knowing where Thomas would have landed in the annals of the sport if he had continued to compete as a man. No one is obligated to reinforce his delusion that he won fair and square or worked hard to do it. In America, you do not even have to concede Thomas won the women’s event, no matter what Twitter and Facebook say.
Fewer women athletes will receive scholarships for collegiate sports as this trend continues to evolve. Most likely, women will also lose academic scholarships if men who put on a skirt are allowed to apply. A woman was already boxed out of the title “Woman of the Year” at USA Today; the person formerly known as Richard Levine won as a national honoree and for the District of Columbia. This follows the person formerly known as Craig Telfer winning the women’s 400-meter hurdles at the NCAA Division II Track and Field Championships in 2019. Take Title IX and light it on fire.
Several commentators have wondered if there would be more backlash if women lost out on executive positions and other professional opportunities. Once sports competition, one of the few remaining meritocracies, is conquered, why wouldn’t this trend seep into the workplace? Levine has already been credited with becoming the first female four-star admiral in the Public Health Service. Until more Americans stand up and point out this obvious reality, the media, universities, corporations, and sports associations will continue to lie and say men competing with women is the fair and equitable thing to do. Call them on it now, before your daughter is robbed like Emma Weyant was.
