"But it was also the result of careful planning by national conservative organizations to harness the emotion around gender politics. With gender norms shifting and a sharp rise in the number of young people identifying as transgender, conservative groups spotted an opening in a debate that was gaining attention."
--The New York Times
The story of the University of Pennsylvania swimmer, Lia Thomas, matters because the way her story has been used for political purposes. It is both important and instructive.
Of course, all ethical analysis should begin with the establishment of fact, and legal analysis typically begins this way, but political analysis does not care about fact, only perception of fact.
The swimmer known as Lia Thomas began her collegiate swimming career swimming on the Penn men's team, but then underwent some sort of gender transition therapy and began competing as a woman, where she was among the top women swimmers.
I've spent about as much time as I have patience for googling around the internet, trying to tease out some critical facts, unsuccessfully:
#1/ What, exactly, did Lia Thomas have done to herself?
I said, "some sort of transformation" because the details of what was done are nowhere I can find.
From photos of her in her tank suit, it appears she has no testicles or penis, so I'm tentatively concluding she had an orchiectomy (removal of her testes) and resection of her penis. She also likely received estrogen and possibly other hormones to reduce her testosterone levels, likely cyproterone (which blocks testosterone binding to androgen receptors on cells), spironolactone (which also blocks androgen binding to cells and which has a slightly estrogen like structure) and estradiol patches to "feminize" cells.
All men produce hormones which have a feminizing effect (e.g. stimulating breast cells), e.g. estrogen, and all men also produce male hormones, which reduce feminizing effects and cause "androgenization" meaning male effects, like beard growth and muscle growth and increased muscle strength.
All women do this as well. The make both sets of hormones, androgens (male) and estrogens (female). The difference between most men and women is men tend to produce a lot more male hormone (e.g. testosterone) than female hormone (e.g. estradiol) and women do just the opposite.
Give a normal man a lot more estrogen and he'll tend to grow breasts. Give a normal woman a lot more androgen and she'll tend to grow a moustache and beard.
From her photographs, it looks like Lia Thomas no longer has male external genitalia. From NCAA rules, it seems likely she has taken enough estrogen and/or cyproterone and/or spironolactone to reduce her testosterone levels to some level enough to satisfy NCAA rules to allow her to compete as a female.
But much of this is inference. Just you try finding the details online.
I suppose this is all confidential medical information, but when you assert your rights to swim as woman, one might argue you have to provide enough information to justify your new identity.
#2/ What happened to Lia Thomas when she entered the swimming pool as a newly minted woman?
That is, what happened to her success rates as a woman, as opposed to her success as a man?
The short answer is that although she was marginally slower in the water, she was, compared to women, now at the top of the heap.
Before her transition, she was only modestly successful male swimmer ranking 554th in the 200 meter freestyle, 65th in the 500 event, but as a woman she was 5th in the 200 event, and 1st in the 500 meter.
Her times for those events worsened slightly after her transition, presumably owing to the effects of lowering her testosterone levels, but small differences in times in elite competition work out to large differences in rankings.
In sports like track and swimming, we have objective, numeric measures of performance, so we can look at the winning times--the world records for women, and compare them to those of men. Undeniably, men swim and run faster at the elite levels. An elite woman may beat a less than elite male, but an elite male beats most elite women.
There are a thousand male runners who run faster than the women's world record holder in virtually any track event.
This is true, of course in other sports: Chris Everett was asked in a TV interview about what would happen if she played Roger Federer in a championship match, and she laughed, "I wouldn't last too long!" she said. The power and velocity of his serve alone would be annihilating, she said, not to mention his ground strokes and quickness.
Girls do reasonably well in wrestling, until the boys hit puberty.
There is little doubt there are hormonally (testosterone) driven differences in performance between males and female athletes, which, I presume is one reason we separate male from female competitors.
This is the same reason we have weight classes in wrestling and age group swimming and boxing is divided into weight classes. What would be the fun of watching a heavy weight boxer against a welter weight? We want to see like vs. like; we want a competitive match. How much fun would it be to watch LeBron James play in a high school basketball game?
Lia Thomas went through puberty as a male, did not do the transition until age 18 or 19, and has the bone structure, heart size, muscle bulk of a fully developed male as a result. While she may have lost some muscle bulk and strength, she had that formative experience of forming a body under the influence of male hormone levels and only some of this is reversible. Hand and foot size, tracheal depth, brow ridges, carrying angles, all sorts of musculoskeletal effects of male hormones persist, although they may be somewhat ameliorated by hormone therapy. This has always vexed transgender clinics: while you can feminize former men, you cannot undo the changes wrought by male puberty entirely, so shoulders, hands, feet, face, voice all shaped, built by testosterone remain stubbornly intact.
Should female athletes face defeat by Lia Thomas now?
Show most people photos of Lia Thomas and the answer becomes not simply intellectual, based on numbers, but there is a gut check answer.
This athlete may consider herself a woman. The NCAA may define her as a woman, but the average citizen cannot buy this person as a woman who should be competing with women who went through female puberty.
This is what makes so effective the taunt: "What is a woman? Republicans know the answer. Democrats do not!"
Where does this leave Democrats who defend Lia Thomas and others like her participating as a woman?
The simple answer is they look "woke," which is to say, unreasonable, trapped in a device of their own creation, to be consistent they have to say, "Yes, she is a woman and should compete as a woman," but what anyone with "common sense" would say, is, "Well, she may be a woman now, but she hasn't always been and she was a man long enough to exclude her from competing as a woman."
Consider this brain exercise for a moment, suppose there were a thriving women's wrestling program. Would a trans woman (formerly a man) be allowed to participate? What harm could she wreak on her opponents? There is women's lacrosse and even rugby: what would happen if you had former men competing in these contact sports?
The fact is, liberals try to be consistent even at the extremes of cases and extreme cases, famously, make bad law.
An abortion at 11 weeks is still an abortion, but an "abortion" at 36 weeks looks a lot like infanticide to a lot of citizens, and Democrats should realize this and stop trying to be consistent and start saying, "Well, it's complicated." This is what happens at the extremes. When you take the extreme example of a baby headed down the birth canal and you say, "Is it okay to meet that head with a scalpel?" the pro abortion person has to say "yes" to be consistent, if all that matters is the mother's choice, or "women's health." But thirty seconds away, is a baby most people would accept as a fully formed human being, and that baby has rights. So it's not "just about women's health."
We are talking about an estimated 1.3 million people in this country who identify at any given time as transgender--the number is undoubtedly fluid and likely inaccurate, but it's the current New York Times estimate, and that comes out to roughly 0.4% of the population of a country with 330 million.
Nobody, all Democrats ought to agree, should be harassed, demeaned, shamed or otherwise abused because of their sexuality, their sexual preferences or their own identification as to gender. But that doesn't mean we would allow a transgender to rob a grocery store. That doesn't mean we exempt transgender folks from all rules.
At some point, Democrats can be all for protecting the rights of transgenders without allowing for extreme behavior which strikes a reasonably well informed citizen as unreasonable.
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| Gadansk, Poland |
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