UPenn swimmer comes out as trans / switches to women's team after competing on men's team for 3 years and is dominating NCAA

RunRagged wrote:

News update: since this thread began, Lia Thomas has racked up new wins and smashed more records in women's swimming!

On Friday, December 3, Thomas set a new pool, meet and program record in the women's 500 freestyle, and now is the fastest collegiate swimmer in that event in the whole USA!

Lia Thomas, the University of Pennsylvania swimmer who competed as a male for three seasons at the Ivy League school before joining the women’s team this season, set new records Friday night in Akron at the Zippy Invitational.

Thomas, who was a second-team All-Ivy League swimmer as a male, now owns the fastest 500m female freestyle time in the nation after setting an Akron pool record and lowering the Penn women’s all-time record with a time of 4:34:06.

How dominant was Thomas’ performance? The Penn sports information department reports Will/Lia set a pool record and meet record in the prelims and then went more than 12 seconds faster in the finals to beat her teammate Anna Kalandadze who had a time of 4:48.99.

That’s right, Will/Lia won the Zippy Invitational 500 free by 14.39 seconds.

https://www.outkick.com/transgender-penn-swimmer-sets-another-record-has-fastest-female-500m-time-in-the-nation/https://pennathletics.com/news/2021/12/3/womens-swimming-and-diving-womens-swimming-diving-in-second-place-after-day-one-of-zippy-invitational.aspx

The NCAA all-time record in the women's 500 free is 4:24.06, set by Stanford’s Katie Ledecky in 2017. The next four fastest times were set by Leah Smith (4:28.90, 2017), Katie Hoff (4:30.47, 2007), Dagny Knutson (4:31.18, 2009). and Brooke Forde (4:31.34, 2019).

At the 2021 NCAA women’s national championships, Paige Madden of Virgina won gold in the 500 free with a time of 4:33.61.

Armstronglivs wrote:

Lenny Leonard wrote:

Well, for starters, I’d imagine someone like Lia Thomas has “F” on her drivers license. If you asked her if she was a man or a woman, she would say “woman.”

Maybe just ask the person? That’s my definition.

By that token, anybody can be a anything they claim to be - you are a "genius" if you say so, regardless of the evidence against it. I can be an American if I say so - even though I am not a citizen. I could be from Atlantis, if I say so.

When a person says they are a "woman" they are using a term of self-description that has a defined meaning for millions of others. How can they be a woman if they do not share that agreed definition of what it means to be a woman? They have simply appropriated the term and stripped it of its agreed meaning, so that it will mean anything they say it means. That is fine if you only wish to use a word differently from how others use it - but they don't, they wish to be included amongst those for whom the word "woman" means something. And it does not mean a person who is biologically male.

RunRagged wrote:

SDSU Aztec wrote:

The difference between the men's and women's winning 500m times at the last championships was 26 seconds. To date, Thomas has only slowed by 16 seconds, so clearly the hormone treatments are not leveling the playing field.

It's well-established that the hormone treatments that males who identify as women take - which is usually a combination of a testosterone suppressant like Spirolactone and high-dose estrogen, sometimes with progesterone added - do not "level the playing field."

Even when males who "identify as" women have their testicles removed - something very few of them do today, for good reason - they aren't magically transformed into the equivalent of women and they don't lose all the physical advantages they have over females in sports.

Males are hugely advantaged in nearly all sports over females because of a vast number of physical characteristics they acquire during the processes of developing as male in utero, going through the 5-month long "mini puberty of infancy" (when baby boys' T levels are as high as they will be in their teens), and the longer, and more well-known puberty of adolescence that is often erroneously depicted as the sole reason that males outperform females in sports.

With the exception of hemoglobin levels, none of the physical characteristics that males have which give them such a leg up in sports are reversed or even appreciably diminished due to the hormone treatments they take for "gender transition."

The idea that these hormone treatments do level the playing field is wishful thinking that comes from and has been promulgated by trans-identified males, gender ideologues and full-of-themselves people in the fields of "gender medicine" and "gender therapy" who want to give the impression that Big Pharma products (and cosmetic surgeries) can change human beings' sex, or come close to doing so, because the transgender industry is a huge cash cow that's raking in plenty of money by selling pipe dreams to unhappy people looking for a quick fix for their mental health and life problems. Unfortunately, the idea that hormone treatments level the playing field in sports has been taken at face value and spread further by gullible sports authorities, the media and much of the general public.

Also, no one knows what kind of hormone treatments Thomas might be on. The current NCAA rules only say that a male athlete must have completed "one calendar year of testosterone suppression treatment" prior to competing in women's events, but they do not say that testosterone must be reduced to any particular level. Nor do the NCAA rules require that testosterone must be kept at a consistently lowered level throughout the entire calendar year. Also, the NCAA doesn't test these athletes' T levels or require independent testing. A letter from the athlete saying he intends to suppress T or is suppressing it already, and a single doctor's letter saying what meds have been prescribed, and documenting the athlete's T level at the time the letter is written "if relevant," are all that's required.

https://ncaaorg.s3.amazonaws.com/inclusion/lgbtq/INC_TransgenderHandbook.pdf

Armstronglivs wrote:

Lenny Leonard wrote:

Well, for starters, I’d imagine someone like Lia Thomas has “F” on her drivers license. If you asked her if she was a man or a woman, she would say “woman.”

Maybe just ask the person? That’s my definition.

By that token, anybody can be a anything they claim to be - you are a "genius" if you say so, regardless of the evidence against it. I can be an American if I say so - even though I am not a citizen. I could be from Atlantis, if I say so.

When a person says they are a "woman" they are using a term of self-description that has a defined meaning for millions of others. How can they be a woman if they do not share that agreed definition of what it means to be a woman? They have simply appropriated the term and stripped it of its agreed meaning, so that it will mean anything they say it means. That is fine if you only wish to use a word differently from how others use it - but they don't, they wish to be included amongst those for whom the word "woman" means something. And it does not mean a person who is biologically male.