Former Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines was among more than a dozen college athletes who filed a lawsuit against the NCAA on Thursday, accusing it of violating their Title IX rights by allowing transgender woman Lia Thomas to compete at the national championships in 2022.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Atlanta, details the shock Gaines and other swimmers felt when they learned they would have to share a locker room with Thomas at the championships in Atlanta. It documents a number of races they swam in with Thomas, including the 200-yard final in which Thomas and Gaines tied for fifth but Thomas, not Gaines, was handed the fifth-place trophy.
Thomas swam for Pennsylvania. She competed for the men’s team at Penn before her gender transition.
Thomas was the first openly transgender athlete to win a Division I title in any sport, finishing in front of three Olympic medalists for the championship. By not making the final, the lawsuit mentions that Florida swimmer Tylor Mathieu, who was not a plaintiff, was denied first-team All-American honors in that event.
Other plaintiffs included athletes from volleyball and track.
Correct me, but we are yet to see a trans person winning anything or achieve a significant record anywhere. IIRC hormones do a big effect on anything but bones frame. And we are still talking potentional damage for M2F transitioners only, not F2M athletes or NB athletes.
Honestly, I think the whole perception of international competitive gendered sports like Olympics shall die. Sportsmanship on that level is toxic, many use drugs, costumes and hacks to somehow gain the edge. I see sports as a motivation for regular people to think of their health, not a gambling platform or a thing to boost national pride by injecting ‘winning horses’ with steroids, inhalers, whiskey.
Trans problem in sports is not a problem of trans people who do sports but another reason to redo sports and our perception of them.
The article itself has this to say:
“Thomas was the first openly transgender athlete to win a Division I title in any sport, finishing in front of three Olympic medalists for the championship.”
I’d say that winning a Div1 title ahead of three Olympic Medalist is somewhat significant.
Trans athletes have definitely won some competitions. The news were sometimes difficult to miss.
But that’s really the thing. Sometimes it feels like there’s no problem before a trans athlete wins. Like how many competitions have transgender athletes taken part in throughout modern history? Thousands? And how many have they won? A handful?
I mean, almost nobody talked about this before the inevitable happened: A trans person happened to win a competition and it gained media attention. And when we consider that the Olympics has allowed transgender athletes to compete within their gender since 2003…
Seeing sports as a casual way to get exercise is fine on a personal level if you aren’t an elite athlete, but you can’t force that perspective on millions of people who enjoy competing or watching elite athletes compete. It’s a weird take to want to rewire sports to accommodate a very small minority of people, most of whom wouldn’t even agree with that perspective.
There were abolitions of slavery when most holding voting rights could lose something in the process. Sports are not even close. Reformating them can come hurtless if the focus is pushed somewhere else, like local friendly competitions where there’s no stakes. Americans like their local teams at baseball and football, why it’s impossible to limit them to make regular youth the primal category participating in that, so communities in reverse get more involved, not suoerstars?
Many sports throughout history were only segregated by gender once and because a woman fought to participate and beat the men.
This is all about the bruised egos of bigots. If they’d come 5th against a cis woman they’d be annoyed at themselves and try to do better next time, but coming 5th against a trans woman hurts because they see trans people as inferior (yet also superior, sound familiar? that’s because it’s one of the points from the fascism checklist), so them coming 5th is clearly her fault, and she must be persecuted to give her, and other trans people, the message that they aren’t welcome.
There’s actually already been trans women that were setting new records, far surpassing what was previously set. And because to be trans is too just identify… Well this happened https://nypost.com/2023/03/30/male-powerlifter-enters-womens-event-breaks-record/
NYP is not a very good source. But either way - maybe there should be a term limit for their transition or something? I don’t know. Abandoning sport competitions as they are now altogether seems easier than adjusting the time they eat hormones.
I mean by all means feel free to Google the name and post any link you want. I just grabbed the first thing that popped up.