Debunking Lia Thomas
Female sports do not exist to serve as group therapy for miserable males.
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Yesterday Good Morning America released a new video about Lia Thomas, the male athlete who recently became the NCAA Division I Women’s Swimming champion for the 400-yard freestyle. The video contains a new interview with Thomas about transitioning, competing in the women’s category, and the resulting controversy.
The program begins by referring to Thomas several times as “the first known/openly transgender athlete to win a Division I national title.” Right away this misleadingly centers the whole discussion and surrounding controversy as having to do with Thomas being transgender instead of Thomas being biologically male.
This might seem like a distinction without much of a difference, but it is rhetorically very important. This is because if the outrage were about Thomas being transgender per se, then there should be similar controversy and outrage surrounding Isaac Henig, a male-identifying female swimmer at Yale (i.e. transgender man) who continues to swim as a female. But since Henig is swimming in the appropriate sex category, and is not taking exogenous testosterone, there is simply no issue. By emphasizing the fact that Thomas is transgender instead of being biologically male, it incorrectly portrays those who oppose Thomas’ inclusion in female sports as being “anti-trans” instead of “anti-males in female sports.”
Below are the questions Thomas was asked, Thomas’ answers, and my own rebuttals.
THOMAS: I knew there would be scrutiny against me if I competed as a woman, and I was prepared for that. But I also don’t need anybody’s permission to be myself and to do the sport that I love.
ME: Nobody is preventing Lia Thomas from being transgender, but being a female is a matter of biology and “permission” doesn’t even enter into the picture. Being male or female is not a choice. And nobody wants to prevent Thomas from swimming altogether; Thomas is simply being asked to compete in the proper—male—sex category.
INTERVIEWER: There are some who look at the data and suggest that you’re enjoying a competitive advantage. What do you say to that?
THOMAS: There’s a lot of factors that go into a race and how well you do, and the biggest change for me is that I’m happy, and sophomore year, where I had my best times competing with the men, I was miserable. And so having that be lifted is incredibly relieving and allows me to put my all into training, into racing. Trans people don’t transition for athletics. We transition to be happy and authentic and our true selves. Transitioning to get an advantage is not something that ever factors into our decisions.
INTERVIEWER: You didn’t transition to win more medals?
THOMAS: No.
This is a revealing answer. Firstly, Thomas brings up the “many factors” argument, which claims that success in athletics can’t be boiled down to a single factor. This is a true statement, but highly misleading. While success in sports can’t be reduced to a single factor such as height, weight, strength, arm length, etc., there is one irreversible process that influences all of these factors—going through male puberty. And when we discuss fairness in sports generally, the question isn’t whether some athlete is better than the others, it’s whether they are better than others because of some additional factor not available to all other athletes.
This is why performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) like steroids are prohibited in sports—it gives individual athletes an unfair advantage over other athletes who are not taking PEDs. Female sports is its own separate category specifically to control for the additional and irreversible advantages bestowed to males by going through male puberty. Lia Thomas cannot undo what male puberty has done, and what changes do occur by suppressing testosterone levels for years does very little to close the large performance gap between male and female athletes.
Thomas then suggests they should be allowed to compete in the female category because it makes them “happy,” and they were “miserable” competing with the men. But female sports do not exist to serve as group therapy for miserable males. This also completely disregards the happiness of every female athlete forced to compete against Thomas, such as Thomas’ 16 teammates who wrote letters about Thomas being a threat to women’s sports. Do their feelings not matter? It’s hard to avoid the sexism implied here—that the happiness of one male should be prioritized over the happiness of many females.
Lastly, Thomas says that gaining an advantage in sports was not a factor in their decision to transition. But that’s completely irrelevant to whether or not the unfair advantage exists and should prevent Thomas from competing in the women’s category.
INTERVIEWER: The women who signed the letter anonymously said that they absolutely supported your right to transition, but they simply think it’s unfair for you to compete against cisgender women.
THOMAS: You can’t go halfway and be like “I support trans women and trans people, but only to a certain point.” Where if you support trans women as women, and they’ve met all the NCAA requirements, then I don’t know if you can really say something like that. Trans women are not a threat to women’s sports.
There are two things here worth mentioning. First, Thomas is of the belief that “women’s sports” refers to people who identify as women and not adult human females. Thomas is free to believe that, but then the question becomes why are sports segregated into men’s and women’s events in the first place?
There is simply no coherent reason why sports should be segregated by gender identity any more than they should be segregated by political or religious identities. The subjective brain states of “identifying as a woman” and “identifying as a man” have no causal relationship with athletic performance, and so cannot serve as a justification for separate sporting leagues and events. But biological sex has a very large causal relationship with athletic performance, and it is therefore obvious that “women’s” sports exists to ensure a protected category for adult human females to compete fairly with other adult human females.
The second thing worth mentioning is that Thomas actually brings up a pertinent point about having met “all the NCAA requirements” to compete in the women’s category. I maintain that we should not be directing our outrage at Lia Thomas for competing in the female category, but rather at the sporting organizations that have created loopholes for some males to unfairly compete against females.
INTERVIEWER: There is this concept of the legacy effects of testosterone, and that that can’t ever be zero. Should that eliminate or disqualify transgender women?
THOMAS: I’m not a medical expert, but there is a lot of variation among cis female athletes. There are cis women who are very tall and very muscular, and have more testosterone than another cis woman, and should that then also disqualify them?
This is another common argument, that since there is a lot of variation in traits among “cis” female athletes that is allowed and considered fair, that means trans women have no unique or categorical advantage. While it is true that there is substantial trait variation among female athletes that influence performance, the point of sports isn’t to control for every source of variation within a category. In a real sense the point of sports is to highlight exceptional individuals with exceptional traits. While sports like boxing has weight categories to control for one major source of advantage, boxers within weight classes still differ in other relevant traits such as strength, speed, and wingspan. Certain amounts of individual variation within categories is deemed acceptable, and even celebrated, in sports. But just as it would be absurd to allow a 250 lb boxer to simply “identify” their way into the featherweight class, it is equally absurd to allow a male to identify into the female class.
There is no rule in the universe saying that males and females must compete in separate leagues and events. But if we value females having the ability to compete fairly with other females, which controls for the full-body advantages males have as a result of male puberty, then we should exclude males from female sports. If women having the ability to compete fairly is of no value to you, that’s a belief you can certainly hold. It’s not one that I share, but you’re entitled to it.
But if that’s your position then own it, and stop pretending to care about female sports while your every action is aimed at abolishing it.
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A sports fact that I recently learned and find striking is that the women's record for a one-mile run is 4:12 (4 minutes, 12 seconds). On the men's side, Roger Bannister famously ran the first sub-4-minute-mile in 1954! Today the men's record is 3:43.
These numbers are easy to understand, and show the truly huge difference in performance between men and women.
As a follow up to asking if Lia Thomas transitioned to win more medals, I wish the interviewer had asked about Lia Thomas taking five years to graduate and transitioning in the covid year to swim as a woman. Lia Thomas did not wait to live her best life, but did to graduate.