I know. Lame.
Anyway, a couple of links today.
First, Lia Thomas competed in the Ivy League championships this past weekend. Next up NCAA!
University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas is a three-time Ivy League champion.
A 22-year-old trans woman, Thomas came in first in the 200-yard, 500-yard, and 100-yard freestyle events at this week’s Ivy League Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships at Harvard University’s Blodgett Pool.
Her showing cements her position as a top competitor at the NCAA swimming championships in Atlanta next month.
On Bari Weiss’s Substack, Common Sense, a report from the meet:
But the Penn couple thinks that Thomas’s comfort has come at the expense of their own daughters’ who they say have received “veiled threats” from the university when it comes to speaking out. At the meet, the announcer opens with a warning against “racist, homophobic, or transphobic discrimination.”
So it is no surprise that not one of the swimmers would speak to me; nor have they spoken on the record to any other reporter. It’s not that they haven’t considered it. “One of the swimmers on their team called my daughter and asked if they were to put out a statement, if the Harvard swimmers would too,” a Harvard dad told me on Friday night.
The unfortunate aspect to the otherwise excellent piece is that the author uses the female pronoun to refer to Thomas – something many commenters on the piece mention as well. Routine, boring reminder why I (and others) don’t use “preferred pronouns.” In short: it’s buying into the lie that a man can become a woman (or vice versa).
Why the interest with one athlete one Ivy League team? Because the situation has implications. If Lia Thomas, who was born male, who has taken some testosterone suppressors for a year or two, and by all accounts still has male genitalia – if he can be called and categorized as a woman – then there is no meaning to that word left, at all.
And you, as a woman, or you, as a person who is a caretaker of female children, have no right to question the intrusion of males-who-call-themselves-females – into any space where females would normally expect privacy from males.
Of course, also worth commenting on is the cooperation and use of this situation. As Weiss and many others have pointed out, there is considerable gaslighting going on, and speaking up will clearly get you punished.
And then you have the handmaidens, who sport their own trans-flag masks and cheer right on. Always.
One other point – it seems a good moment to mention the limitations and ambiguities of sport, an activity we like to celebrate as bringing out the best in us, bringing us together, helping instill all kinds of good qualities in participants.
All true.
But this is one more reminder that the drive to win and dominate is an integral aspect of sport and of all the negative consequences of that: from objectifying human beings, to physical exploitation and destruction of bodies, to obsession and narrowness of vision, to misplaced priorities, and worst of all, to abuse – as we have seen in recent years, particularly in sports centered on young women, like gymnastics and, of course figure skating.
Sport can bring out the best in us, but there’s always that worst-of-us lurking, too.
Secondly – this is long and sad but important.
It’s an essay from a detransitioner – a young woman who started thinking of herself as a “trans guy” around the age of 15, did go on Planned Parenthood-prescribed testosterone for a few years, but is now disavowing that and rejecting the trans identity.
As I said, it’s long, but it’s important for a number of reasons.
What I want to point out, in particular, is how Helena’s essay makes clear that it makes as much sense to delineate “trans” as an identity and a category as it does to do so with, say “depressed” or “anxious.” There are countless reasons and issues, ranging from the physical to the emotional (not unrelated of course), there are social and family contexts, pressures and dynamics, weaving together in a person’s life in deeply complicated ways that lead to a person experiencing depression and anxiety. It’s the same with the “trans” experience. It may be presented as a simple equation: I feel like I’m the opposite sex, so I am – but of course it’s not.
And you might find it interesting because when I’ve written about this in the past, especially among young women and girls, I’ve focused on the “not like other girls” feeling and the rejection of 21st century images of womanhood. Helena’s experience doesn’t reflect that in a simple way – she goes very deep and explores what her attraction to seeing herself as a guy and presenting as one was all about, and it’s interesting and sobering.
And as I have said to you before, the even more unpleasant truth is that the “trans” identity in the present moment includes not only these young women suffering so much – almost unbelievable levels of suffering, depression and anxiety – but also freakish men who frankly are sexually aroused by themselves as women.
There is no singular “identity” to be found, categorized and least of all, legally protected in this loose collection of emotionally wrecked girls and fetishistic males.
Trans identity took me far away from this into blaming and punishing my body for the emotions I was feeling. It resulted in an even wider disconnect from understanding the conditions that led me to feel such sadness, fear, and grief. Transitioning made my mental health much, much worse. Not better. It was a “fuck you” to the hurting child inside of me. It was telling her that she didn’t matter. It was telling her that I hated her and wanted to annihilate her. It was an act of war against myself.