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

RossiCheated wrote:

I think that equally telling is why they are speaking anonymously.

"While University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, who spent three years at the Ivy League school swimming as a male, has been busy smashing female pool records, friction has been building within the team, according to a Penn female swimmer who said she feared for her ability to find employment after graduating from college for sharing her honest opinion about a transgender teammate. For that reason, OutKick is granting her anonymity to speak out."

For all the people saying that this is for the athletes to deal with, and the athletes should boycott if they care or raise their voices, consider what is being said here. They are afraid that if they speak up, in the current climate, that they will sacrifice their chances of getting a job after college.

This isn't a mess for the athletes to clean up. It is a mess for the adults who already have jobs as sport administrators to clean up.

I was also shocked by how little she has dropped off in some of her best times (2oo meters, 1:39.3 before, 1:41.9 now, and within seconds of Missy Franklin's NCAA record). I fear that she will win the NCAA events but do so by narrow margins to lower the level of scrutiny.

RunRagged wrote:

dhe8282uehdh wrote:

If the biological women being directly hurt by this are too chicken$h!+ to take a stand then they deserve this. Kids their age were off fighting freaking Nazis facing actual death but they worry about their job prospects?

This is actually making me like this trans swimmer better

I don't think this comparison is the winning argument you think it is. A far more analogous situation to what these women fear, with very good reason, is what happened to many people in the US during the McCarthy era.

Certainly compared to the horrors of Stalin's Russia, McCarthyism was not a drastic form of political repression. But it was an effective one.

The punishments were primarily economic. People lost their jobs. The official manifestations of McCarthyism--the public hearings, FBI investigations, and criminal prosecutions--would not have been as effective had they not been reinforced by the private sector. The political purges were a two-stage process that relied on the imposition of economic sanctions to bolster the political messages conveyed by public officials. The collaboration of private employers with HUAC and the rest of the anti-Communist network was necessary both to legitimate the network's activities and to punish the men and women identified as politically undesirable. Without the participation of the private sector, McCarthyism would not have affected the rank-and-file members of the Communist movement or so effectively stifled political dissent.

It is important to realize that the dismissals were usually in response to outside pressures. Most of the firings of the McCarthy era occurred after someone had refused to cooperate with an investigating committee or was denied a security clearance. Major corporations like General Electric and U.S. Steel announced that they would discharge any worker who took the Fifth Amendment, and other employers made it equally clear that they would do the same. Some of these employers may well have welcomed and even actually arranged for a HUAC hearing, especially when it enabled them to fire left-wing union leaders. Left to their own devices, however, most of the other employers would not have initiated political dismissals, though they were usually willing to acquiesce in them once they were apprised of the identities of their allegedly subversive employees.

Self-defense was the primary motivation. Even when not threatened with direct reprisals, the leaders of the nation's major corporations, universities, and other private institutions seem to have decided that good public relations demanded the dismissal of someone openly identified as a Communist or even, in many cases, of people who were merely controversial...

Ideology shored up the dismissals. The cautious college presidents and studio heads who fired or refused to hire political undesirables shared the anti-Communist consensus. They were patriotic citizens who, however squeamish they may have been about the methods of McCarthy and the other investigators, agreed that communism threatened the United States and that the crisis engendered by the cold war necessitated measures that might violate the rights of individuals. By invoking the icon of national security, they were able to give their otherwise embarrassing actions a patina of patriotism.

Equally pervasive was the belief that Communists deserved to be fired. Because of their alleged duplicity, dogmatism, and disloyalty to their nation and employers, Communists (and the definition was to be stretched to include ex-Communists, Fifth Amendment Communists, and anybody who associated with Communists) were seen as no longer qualified for their jobs. Since these disqualifications usually appeared only after the until-then qualified individuals were identified by part of the anti-Communist network, these rationalizations obviously involved considerable deception and self-deception.

https://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/schrecker-blacklist.html

What happened in the US in the 1950s to people accused of wrong think is very much like what is happening today to those who publicly question or disagree with any aspect of gender identity ideology. If you openly say that Lia Thomas is not a woman, and that men can't become women, you'll be smeared as a transphobe and evil bigot, and you'll be set upon by mobs of vicious keyboard warriors determined to trash your reputation, make you a social pariah, get you fired and make sure no one will hire you or offer you any kind of paid work ever again. They'll even make it impossible for you to sell crafts on Etsy, Redbubble or through Facebook. Look how they've gone after Dave Chapelle.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/08/27/sasha-white-and-the-woke-war-on-feminists/

In the past couple of years, there have been numerous well-known cases of people in the UK, Canada and the USA who have lost jobs, speaking gigs, publishing contracts, art exhibitions, commissions, positions in entertainment and media, and put under review by professional governing bodies because of relentless campaigns mounted against them by trans activists determined to destroy the lives and livelihoods of anyone who dares believe that men can't become women. Just today there's lead story in The Times (of London) about a choreographer in the UK who has been forced out of the dance company she founded and which bears her name because she's been accused of "transphobia"

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/3935bc4a-5858-11ec-a3f7-65d2d47c7fea?shareToken=d4efe0ddb11ede84d52835a0a02d70e3

Maybe you're independently wealthy because you've got a trust fund, or you're financially secure or set for life because you're self-employed, you have tenure or you've invested really well, so it's easy for you to sneer that the young women afraid to speak up about Lia Thomas "are too chicken$h!+ to take a stand." But most people aren't in a position where they can afford to be made unemployable. In today's era of gender identity tyranny and nouveau McCarthyism, most young people just staring out in life, often with hefty college loans to pay back, have every reason to worry about their job prospects.

RunRagged wrote:

What happened in the US in the 1950s to people accused of wrong think is very much like what is happening today to those who publicly question or disagree with any aspect of gender identity ideology. If you openly say that Lia Thomas is not a woman, and that men can't become women, you'll be smeared as a transphobe and evil bigot, and you'll be set upon by mobs of vicious keyboard warriors determined to trash your reputation, make you a social pariah, get you fired and make sure no one will hire you or offer you any kind of paid work ever again. They'll even make it impossible for you to sell crafts on Etsy, Redbubble or through Facebook. Look how they've gone after Dave Chapelle.

In the past couple of years, there have been numerous well-known cases of people in the UK, Canada and the USA who have lost jobs, speaking gigs, publishing contracts, art exhibitions, commissions, positions in entertainment and media, and put under review by professional governing bodies because of relentless campaigns mounted against them by trans activists determined to destroy the lives and livelihoods of anyone who dares believe that men can't become women. Just today there's lead story in The Times (of London) about a choreographer in the UK who has been forced out of the dance company she founded and which bears her name because she's been accused of "transphobia"

Maybe you're independently wealthy because you've got a trust fund, or you're financially secure or set for life because you're self-employed, you have tenure or you've invested really well, so it's easy for you to sneer that the young women afraid to speak up about Lia Thomas "are too chicken$h!+ to take a stand." But most people aren't in a position where they can afford to be made unemployable. In today's era of gender identity tyranny and nouveau McCarthyism, most young people just staring out in life, often with hefty college loans to pay back, have every reason to worry about their job prospects.