From Sports Illustrated:
Lia Thomas was the dominant force in women’s college swimming this season. The records she set may be broken one day, but her poise in the face of a debate over transgender athletes was a lasting statement for equality
… The shy senior economics major from Austin became one of the most dominant college athletes in the country and, as a result, the center of a national debate—a living, breathing, real-time Rorschach test for how society views those who challenge conventions.
… In her first year swimming for the Penn women’s team after three seasons competing against men, Thomas throttled her competition. She set pool, school and Ivy League records en route to becoming the nation’s most powerful female collegiate swimmer. Photos of Thomas resting at a pool wall and waiting for the rest of the field to finish have become a popular visual shorthand of her dominance.
… Thomas says she has ambitions to compete beyond college, which could set her on a course to be Ledecky’s teammate at the 2024 Games in Paris—and perhaps challenge Ledecky’s Olympic records.
… Thomas’s story has also become a right-wing obsession, a regular topic of discussion on Fox News. Conservative opinion sites have called her a man and deadnamed her, purposely using the name she went by before transitioning.
Probably to a lot of progressives, Thomas is like Putin is to some American conservatives: My enemies’ enemy has to be a good person, right?
Her moves have been minutely tracked by the U.K.’s Daily Mail, including once with cruel detail about her habits in the women’s locker room provided by an anonymous teammate.
… She won’t criticize teammates she knows are rooting against her. “I don’t look into the negativity and the hate,” she says.
It appears as if the young women who are being forced to share a locker room with this man hate him.
“I am here to swim.”
These sound like the swimmer’s version of the ballplayer cliches that Kevin Costner teaches Tim Robbins to use with sportswriters in Bull Durham.
Every day this season felt like a challenge to her humanity. Part of her wanted people to know her journey to this moment, to know what it felt like to be in a body but not be of that body. She wanted people to know what it was like to finally live an authentic life and what it meant for her to finish a race, to look up at a timing board and see the name LIA THOMAS next to the names of other women.
On top of the names.
What it meant to her to stand on a podium with other women and be counted as an equal.
To stand on the top step supreme over the inferiors.
She finds it hard to explain the feelings creeping into her mind at that time, only that she began to have concerns about how she viewed herself—feelings that would emerge more and more often as she competed in her first college season.
It’s not that hard to explain the autogynephilia fetish, it’s just creepy, hilarious, and embarrassing. So nobody in the MSM ever talks about it. The New York Times has used “autogynephila” or “autogynephilic” three times in its history and the Washington Post once.
… She was paired with a trans mentor through a group on Penn’s campus.
Mentor = recruiter.
… The Quakers’ women’s roster has 37 swimmers. Those close to the team estimate that Thomas has six to eight adamant supporters, maybe half the team opposes her competing against other women and the rest have steered clear of the debate. An unsigned letter, which the university said represented “several” Penn swimmers and was released through the school in early February, said Thomas was “value[d] as a person, teammate and friend” and took aim at the stories circulating about her. “The sentiments put forward by an anonymous member of our team are not representative of the feelings, values and opinions of the entire Penn team.”
Two days later, 16 Penn teammates sent an unsigned letter to Ivy League officials, requesting that Thomas be held out of the conference championship meet.
In other words, women swimmers hate him, but are afraid of being cancelled. But the bureaucrats at Penn and the Ivy League are all for him.
… BEING TRANS, THOMAS says, is “an amazing and beautiful experience. . . . I’ve been reinvigorated. I’ve been swimming for 17 years, but for [only] a short part of that time have I felt fully engaged.”
“I, Lia Thomas, didn’t feel fully engaged in men’s swimming because I kept getting my ass kicked by faster guys.
“But now that I compete against girls, it’s awesome because, finally, I am The Man.”
This guy has the need-to-dominate of a Michael Jordan, but not the talent. The Farrelly Brothers produced a movie about a similar competitor:
[Comment at Unz.com]
