The NCAA’s Three-Day Swim Farce Is Over, but the Controversy Is Not By Madeleine Kearns
Atlanta — UPenn swimmer and biological male Lia Thomas finished eighth at the women’s NCAA 100-yard freestyle final tonight, with a time of 48.18 seconds. The winner was UVA’s Gretchen Walsh, at 46.05 seconds. And so concludes the NCAA’s sexist three-day swim farce.
On Thursday, Thomas was awarded the women’s 500-yard freestyle championship. On Friday, Thomas took to the podium again for a joint fifth place in the 200-yard freestyle.
The New York Times and other outlets have framed Thomas’s 500-yard victory as the story of “the first openly transgender woman to win a N.C.A.A. swimming championship.” Really, the story here isn’t about athletes’ identities. The story — or rather, the scandal — is about biological sex.
Nobody objects, for instance, to the participation of Yale swimmer Iszac Henig in the women’s championships. Henig identifies as transgender but – crucially — is biologically female. Henig finished fifth in tonight’s NCAA 100-yard freestyle, with a time of 47.32 seconds.
The same people who would boo Thomas can happily cheer for Henig. How can that be, if their motivation is “transphobia”?
That Henig has been content to swim alongside other biological females also exposes the nonsense argument that it would somehow be a denial of “human rights” to expect Thomas to swim alongside biological males.
If Henig can compete in the women’s championships without any issues, why can’t Thomas swim with the men?
One of the women’s-rights protesters who attended the championships in Atlanta was Linnea Saltz, a former NCAA Division I collegiate track and field athlete.
Saltz told National Review that she had to compete against the first trans-identifying male athlete in the NCAA. She and her teammates felt “intimidated” and “discouraged” before the races even began.
Saltz emphasized an important point:
The situation of sports, whether it be professionally, or collegiately, is not a human right. You don’t get to wake up in the morning, roll out of bed, and decide that you now get to compete as a female athlete in the NCAA. No one’s able to do that. This is a privilege. And we work very, very hard to be chosen in our respective sports to be given this privilege and compete at this level.
Even Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner — who won a gold medal in the decathlon at the 1976 Olympics as a man before undergoing gender transition treatments in 2015 — has said Thomas’s participation is unfair.
Tonight’s swim was the final competition of Thomas’s college career. However, given Thomas’s Olympic ambitions — and given the increasing prevalence of biological males in women’s sports — this controversy will only intensify.
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