But William is so vulnerable
Even the Telegraph reports on this subject using the terms of the cheaters instead of the non-cheater, reality-based ones. It makes their reporting worthless, because it’s not reporting to keep repeating a blatant lie.
Thomas’s triumph in the 500-yard freestyle event in Atlanta, Georgia, almost two years ago made global headlines and sparked a major furore in the United States and beyond over her participation in women’s races.
Her landmark victory came less than three years after she began transitioning – she had previously been ranked just 65th over the same distance in the division’s male category – and led to protests from rival swimmers.
The ugly fallout, which continues to this day, has included accusations Thomas had been allowed to use women’s locker rooms during events, thereby exposing other competitors to her “male genitalia”.
Her her, she she, and then “the ugly fallout” – why ugly? Why are the people who object to the cheating ugly while William Thomas is poor sad fragile she-her?
A growing number of sports governing bodies have been bringing in similar policies amid mounting pressure from athletes, campaigners and politicians to prioritise fairness and safety over inclusion, which a victory for Thomas would leave open to further legal challenges.
That “inclusion” is not really inclusion, because it excludes women from winning for the benefit of men. Women don’t have to be “inclusive” of men in all circumstances; the idea that we do have to is extremely rapey as well as a grotesque injustice. You might as well rule that women have to give birth on live tv with the camera aimed straight between their legs.
Less than a month before World Aquatics introduced its own policy in June of that year, Thomas said in an interview with Good Morning America: “It’s been a goal of mine to swim at Olympic trials for a very long time, and I would love to see that through.”
So what??? Lots of people would love to swim at Olympic trials; that doesn’t make it ok for them to cheat to get there. Spare us prattle of William’s hopes n dreams.
Thomas’s lawyer, Carlos Sayao, himself a former competitive swimmer, branded World Aquatics’ rules a “trans ban”, saying it was “discriminatory” and caused “profound harm to trans women”.
“Trans women are particularly vulnerable in society and they suffer from higher rates of violence, abuse and harassment than cis women,” he added.
William Thomas is not more vulnerable than women, you misogynist pig.
Let’s consider trans-identifying females here and ask if they could compete in women’s swimming events after getting testosterone boosters. Given the current rules, they couldn’t because of what happened when the former East German Olympic team gave testosterone boosters to their female athletes and that was eventually found out and declared to be – wait for it – cheating.
So what about trans-identifying females who declare themselves eligible to compete in men’s athletic events? Could they be allowed to as long as their testosterone levels are the same as their male counterparts? Perhaps, but – the fact is that they’re never going to be competitive with male elite athletes because males do have a general physical advantage over females and that is even more pronounced at elite levels of sport.
So to allow male athletes like Thomas to compete in women’s events is unfair to women as a class and if sports care at all about fairness they must not allow males to compete as if they are women.
J.A., trans identified females can get Therapeutic Use Exceptions for testosterone and compete in men’s events, but not women’s events. The same year Thomas was competing in NCAA women’s events, a trans identifying woman Iszac Henig, was also competing in women’s events. She had a mastectomy but did not take testosterone so she could compete, and win, as a woman. After winning a national title, she started testosterone and switched to the men’s team, where she eventually stopped competing because she was not remotely competitive.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/05/opinion/trans-athlete-swimming.html
There is a new controversy over whether “nonbinary” women who take testosterone can compete in the new nonbinary categories some sports are creating. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/10/06/trans-nonbinary-runner-testosterone-exemption/
Hey Ben: no need for scare quotes around proper names of normal nouns; uninvited undesirable exposure to male genitalia is one of the problems being described here.
Hey Carlos: citation fucking needed. I get that twisting the truth is technically acceptable, but I thought lawyers were professionally obligated to not outright lie.
All that’s quoted above is reprehensible reporting, but this is the bit that really, really, gets my goat:
“The ugly fallout, which continues to this day, has included accusations Thomas had been allowed to use women’s locker rooms during events, thereby exposing other competitors to her “male genitalia”.”
You are a reporter, The Telegraph is a news paper, you report news. There cannot be too much difficulty in finding out whether or not Thomas used the women’s locker rooms. Do your job, find out. Report findings. There are people you can, and honestly should have asked.
I would be interested to know what his time for the 500 yard freestyle was that ranked him 65th as a man, and how it compared to his winning time in the women’s event. I suspect there is very little in it, and I suspect one of the reasons we are not told is that it would make people notice that he hasn’t actually got any better at swimming.
Has the Graph gone “woke?”
“It’s been a goal of mine to swim at Olympic trials for a very long time, and I would love to see that through.”
Sotto voce: “And fuck any woman with the same dream that I happen to bump out of contention.”
Fuck you, Bill.
Cat whisperer, #5.
His 500yd personal best when swimming for the Penn men’s team was 4:18:72. His time for the women’s NCAA race, three years after his PB was 4:33:24, so 14:52 seconds slower*.
What is really telling, though, are the differences between his rankings in the male and female categories across all of the distances he competes in. The following are distance/male ranking/female ranking. Male rankings are from the 2018/2019 season, his last season competing as a male. His female rankings are current.
200yds/554th/5th.
500yds/65th/1st.
1650yds/32nd/8th. His current time for this distance would rank him 89th in the men’s division.
*far be it for me to suggest that he has deliberately slowed down to make the gap less obvious, but 14.5 seconds is a huge drop in pace over that distance.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_Thomas
@AoS, does that mean it’s fair to say that Thomas has, over the recent years of competitive swimming, become simultaneously a worse AND more successful swimmer?
He’s certainly slowed down, but whether he’s also more successful hinges on one question: does cheating one’s way to victory genuinely count as success?
Well, what Thomas has done is in keeping with the current rules. So while you and I (and many, many others) call it cheating, the powers that be governing the sport don’t. To even take back or vacate Thomas’ records and wins so far would require new rules with retrospective effects. So, in terms of what constitutes success in swimming, he apparently is more successful.
If Lia has begun hormone replacement, that would certainly explain at least some of the performance drop.