Trans-gender women set to set collegiate records in multiple swimming events

[grumbler]

I've always thought it interesting that Renée Richards, who successfully fought to play professional women's tennis, does not believe that trans women should (or even can) compete with cis women.

Despite all this, Richards has expressed ambivalence about her legacy. She continues to take pride in being "the first one who stood up for the rights of transsexuals." But she also mused, "Maybe in the last analysis, maybe not even I should have been allowed to play on the women's tour. Maybe I should have knuckled under and said, 'That's one thing I can't have as my newfound right in being a woman.' I think transsexuals have every right to play, but maybe not at the professional level, because it's not a level playing field." She opposes the International Olympic Committee's ruling in 2004 that transgender people can compete after they've had surgery and two years of hormonal therapy.

The science of distinguishing men from women in sports remains unsettled. And Richards has come to believe that her past as a man did provide her advantages over competitors. "Having lived for the past 30 years, I know if I'd had surgery at the age of 22, and then at 24 went on the tour, no genetic woman in the world would have been able to come close to me. And so I've reconsidered my opinion." She adds, "There is one thing that a transsexual woman unfortunately cannot expect to be allowed to do, and that is to play professional sports in her chosen field. She can get married, live as woman, do all of those other things, and no one should ever be allowed to take them away from her. But this limitation—that's just life. I know because I lived it.

https://slate.com/culture/2012/10/jewish-jocks-and-renee-richards-the-life-of-the-transsexual-tennis-legend.html

[Valmy]

Binary? Women's sports is, as the name implies, for women (whatever exactly that means, but it certainly doesn't include non-women). Non-women may come in all kinds of sexes, it doesn't affect women's sports.

Ok but why does women's sports exist? Because people of different genders shouldn't compete against each other? Well why not? Why should gender determine who you can and not compete against. It doesn't make any sense, your performance at sports has nothing to do with your gender at all.

We separated the sexes in sports because of biology not because people who present as different genders shouldn't be competing against each other.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I look at this from a few conflicting angles.

First is the culture war angle. The simple reality is websites like Daily Mail, OutKick etc are far right troll farms that exist to upset conservative people. Part of me doesn't really want to spend much mental energy on addressing anything they bring up, because nothing they bring up comes from a place of honest concern, they are provocateurs who simply want to hurt society to make money. These are bad people doing bad things. That being said it is obviously a lot easier said than done to just ignore these people.

The second angle to me is the idea of competing with someone who has genetic gifts that you can never match. Well, let's be quite honest--that happens in all sport, whether a trans person is there or not. Starting at age 8 I could have dedicated my life to the sport of basketball. I could have lived, breathed, and thought of nothing else, practiced endlessly. But no matter how hard I tried, no matter what, I was never going to be anything but a 5'10" slow white guy, and I would never be able to compete with say, Michael Jordan. Let's be honest--I don't have to go as far as Michael Jordan, I could say any basketball player on a Division I basketball team is just bringing genetic gifts to the table that I don't have, and no amount of hard work or practice can overcome that difference.

I suspect a lot of people who played against Michael Jordan in High School and College "felt bad" that they were facing someone who could do effortlessly things they had to work very hard their entire lives to do only adequately. Competitive sports are not about equality, and never have been. We are not created equal, some people are faster, stronger, more coordinated, have faster reflexes, have better proprioception, better vision, better hearing etc.

Every single one of these UPenn swimmers, none of whom is considered particularly good in terms of rankings in their sport, is experiencing something here they would not have experienced had Lia never gone out to play for the women's team--the specter of competing against someone better than them, that no amount of effort could ever overcome.

The third angle is--okay all that being said, is this a man playing a woman's sport and if so how do we address it? There isn't an easy answer there right. What Brain said earlier has some merit--if we consider this person a full woman, then saying "except in sport" pays proof to the lie, and that we don't consider them actual women. If we don't consider them a complete woman, is that okay? Some would say absolutely not. On trans issues I generally think people should be free to do what they want in life as long as they aren't hurting anyone, and many trans people suffer psychological issues of depression and dysphoria that are relieved by transitioning, and it has been indicated by many that transitioning heads off what might have been a life doomed to end in suicide otherwise. The issue gets really complicated and I won't pretend to know the real science on it, and to be frank and non-PC, I'm not sure we have a great certainty on the science anyway.

The argument that we need to step in and treat Lia differently is saying we consider her a "special class" of woman that needs differential treatment. I am not saying that isn't the right answer, but I think people need to recognize that is what they are advocating and understand the full consequences of it.

Now I'm not an expert on the trans stuff but I do consider myself an expert on weight lifting, muscle building and frankly, steroid use. From years in the bodybuilding and powerlifting game going back to my 20s I had more friends than I can count do the full gamut of different steroid routines. I can tell you that muscle mass built with the help of anabolics does not disappear in perfect lock step with the hormone levels of the lifter returning to normal reference frame. That's basic, undisputed fact. I would thus be quite surprised if in 12 months of treatment that brings a biological male's testosterone levels down to biological female reference frame, and estrogen levels up to appropriate range, that they would lose all the excess muscle mass they developed due to higher testosterone levels. It doesn't work that way in men who take anabolic steroids and I'm highly skeptical it happens in the case of transitioning.

You certainly lose some muscle mass in coming down from a steroid cycle, and it becomes harder to maintain and your recovery goes to shit. But not only is it well known that you maintain a lot of the gains of the steroids even after ceasing them this is in fact how many athletes not just in the "strength sports" but in football and etc historically bypassed testing regimes (it's also why serious testing regimes test randomly throughout the off season in modern times.)

In the powerlifting world they maintain a list of "Lifetime Drug Free" records because it is understood it is very hard to equalize the results of any period of serious steroid usage even years prior. Now, with the passage of time things certainly equalize "better and better", but in my experience a year off steroids you're nowhere close, in terms of muscle mass, to what someone would be who was lifetime natural, you're going to enjoy those excess benefits for years, especially if you follow a workout program that helps maintain.

So my take on it all? At the pre-college level I think the women need to just deal with it, because it's such a rare occurrence, and disparities in talent are already so great at the High School level that "having to face off against someone better than me" isn't really cause for great concern. At the collegiate and higher level I think the one year window needs to be bigger. I might even go as far as to say in college, if you've ever competed in a men's sport you are locked into that sport for your four years of eligibility, if you transition during your collegiate career you would need to remain in the men's league. Now post-college in things like the Olympics or whatever, some sort of multi-year window would be appropriate.

[OttoVonBismarck]

The individual this thread was about ended up losing at Regionals to another transgender swimmer (although this was a FTM transgender swimmer who says they have not begun hormone treatment, so competitively was considered a woman while identifying as a man.)

The Washington Post has a big article about this situation up now:

A transgender college swimmer is shattering records, sparking a debate over fairness

By Rick Maese
January 10, 2022 at 9:00 a.m. EST

PHILADELPHIA — Wearing a blue swim cap, Lia Thomas dived into the pool and sprinted ahead to the first turn. The University of Pennsylvania swimmer had already pushed through weeks of attention, online criticism and scientific debate, so nothing was slowing her down Saturday at Sheerr Pool in the final home meet of a collegiate career that had been completely unremarkable until exploding into the latest flash point in an ongoing culture war.

The 22-year-old zipped past her competitors from Yale and Dartmouth and was again first to the wall. It looked effortless, providing more proof that she's among the best female college swimmers in the country — and more evidence that her detractors will use to say she doesn't belong in the pool.

For three years, Thomas had competed for the men's swimming team at Penn. After undergoing more than two years of hormone replacement therapy, the transgender woman now competes for the school's women's team, and her fast times have sparked a debate from the starting blocks to online message boards to cable news networks.

Thomas has shattered school records and has posted the fastest times of any female college swimmer in two events this season. She'll probably be a favorite at the NCAA championships in March, even as people inside and outside the sport debate her place on the pool deck.

Her success has sent waves of controversy across the swimming world, too. Parents of other Penn swimmers sent a letter to the NCAA and the school last month expressing concern about the rules that allow Thomas to compete against women and the precedent she is setting, which the parents called a "direct threat to female athletes in every sport."

"All you expect is a fair chance," one parent said in a recent interview, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect her daughter's privacy. (Her daughter and other Penn swimmers, including Thomas, were not made available for interviews.) "There is no chance this year. They train hard but know that they cannot beat Lia."

Classifying transgender athletes has amounted to a delicate balancing act for officials in several sports, a tug-of-war of sorts between inclusivity and fairness. The NCAA's transgender athlete policy allows transgender women to compete in women's events after completing a full year of testosterone suppression treatment. Thomas has been undergoing treatment for the past 2½ years and says it has depleted her of the strength and speed she had when competing for the men's team.

But some researchers say Thomas's times show one year of treatment isn't necessarily enough to level the playing field, and detractors say her continued participation is unfair to the other swimmers.

Since she obliterated two school records and posted nation-leading times at a meet last month, Thomas has garnered attention from across the swimming community and right-wing media. Credentialed media at Saturday's meet included Fox News, Newsweek, the Daily Mail and ESPN. Tennis icons Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert have publicly said Thomas has no business competing in women's swimming, as has Olympian Erika Brown, who said last month it's "time to start standing up for women's sports."

"A few years of testosterone blockers and estrogen doesn't change the fact that she will have more powerful muscles, a larger heart and greater lung capacity [than] a biological woman," Brown, who won two relay medals at the Tokyo Games last summer, wrote in an Instagram story post.

Last week, both Penn and the Ivy League issued statements supporting Thomas. The school said it is "committed to being a welcoming and inclusive environment for all our student-athletes, coaches and staff," while the conference expressed an "unwavering commitment to providing an inclusive environment for all student-athletes while condemning transphobia and discrimination in any form."

Nancy Hogshead-Makar, chief executive of Champion Women, a women's sports advocacy organization, said concerns around Thomas's spot on the women's team aren't rooted in transphobia or discrimination. Hogshead-Makar's issues are with the rule book that allows Thomas to compete in women's sports and with sports officials whom the advocate argues are putting Thomas's competitors at a disadvantage.

"This topic is very uncomfortable for people. They don't understand it, and so they took the lazy way out," said Hogshead-Makar, who won four swimming medals at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. "The lazy way out is saying, 'Put them in the women's category.'

"To blow up the women's category is just not the answer. This makes the women's category meaningless."

'Nowhere close'
Thomas began swimming at 5 and eventually spent three years competing for the men's team at Penn. She realized in the summer of 2018 that she was transgender, she has said, which cast uncertainty on her swimming career. Thomas continued competing on the men's team even after beginning hormone replacement therapy in May 2019.

That fall, she came out to her teammates but remained on the men's team as she transitioned, she said during an appearance on a SwimSwam podcast last month.

"It was a very awkward experience of basically being a woman competing in a men's meet," she said.

In summer 2020, Thomas began submitting medical paperwork and doctors' notes to the NCAA, which cleared her to compete as a woman. After the coronavirus pandemic wiped out the 2020-21 swim season, Thomas returned to Penn last fall as a member of the women's team.

She said the spironolactone treatment resulted in muscle loss and she has been unable to replicate her previous training and race times.

"I have to readjust my goals and what I think of as a good time or a good pace to hold in practice," she said on the podcast. "Times and paces I held in meets before, I'm often nowhere close to now."

While her times haven't matched what she posted as a member of the men's team, they've been significantly better than what most female swimmers manage.

Her fastest 200-yard freestyle time before this year was 1 minute 39.31 seconds. This season, she posted a 1:41.93, a 2.6 percent drop. That's the fastest time by any female college swimmer this year, 0.64 seconds faster than Olympian Torri Huske. Thomas also has posted the nation's best 500-yard freestyle time this season at 4:34.06, nearly three seconds faster than Olympian Brooke Forde.

Researchers from the Mayo Clinic, Duke University and Marquette University recently studied Thomas's times from before and after she transitioned. They found her recent times were about 5 percent slower across all distances, according to an article they published. The gender gap between elite college and international swimmers is 10 to 15 percent for shorter distances and 7 to 10 percent for longer ones, they wrote.

"Everybody wants to maximize each individual's opportunity to participate and be as inclusive as possible," one of the researchers, Michael Joyner, a physiologist at the Mayo Clinic, said in an interview. "But how do you balance that inclusion at the individual level with the fairness to the entire field? That's really the split-the-baby question."

Joyner, who has spent his career studying human performance, notes that elite male and female swimmers start to diverge around ages 11 and 12 as boys hit puberty and testosterone levels begin to spike. He said Thomas's times might be illustrating that taking suppressants doesn't negate the hormonal impact of puberty.

"The thing you have to ask yourself is, 'To what extent are there potential legacy effects of testosterone?' " he said.

A decade-old policy
The NCAA issued a 38-page handbook in 2011 to outline its stance on transgender athletes, saying that "any strength and endurance advantages a transgender woman arguably may have as a result of her prior testosterone levels dissipate after about one year of estrogen or testosterone-suppression therapy."

The NCAA did not respond to a request for comment last week, but in a video posted in April, LaGwyn Durden, the organization's director of sports medicine, said this is a complex issue and noted the science is far from definitive.

"The science/medical community really hasn't reached a consensus on testosterone threshold," she said. "We don't have a definitive answer about that. If there is a threshold, what should that threshold be? That's one piece that really makes this problematic when we're trying to make policy."

Others dismiss the idea that Thomas unfairly benefits from biological advantages. Before transitioning, she consulted with Schuyler Bailar, a former Harvard athlete and the first openly trans swimmer to compete in Division I. Bailar says biodiversity is an innate part of sports and many great athletes benefit from certain biological or genetic gifts.

"Lia is a great athlete because she is a great athlete and has worked hard for 17 years to be great at something she loves," Bailar recently posted on social media. "The belief that all [people assigned male at birth] are better at sports is rooted in the sexist belief that boys are, by default, better at sports than girls, which is false."

There have been a handful of transgender college athletes before Thomas, and many made headlines simply by transitioning and continuing to compete. Sports, for many, are core to their identity — both before and after transitioning. As Thomas said on the podcast, she's able to "continue to do the sport I love as my authentic self."

"That experience in swimming," she said, "and being in a swimsuit 20 hours a week has helped me accept my body as it is and being proud and comfortable in my body and who I am."

The transgender college athletes who came before Thomas haven't challenged records or put themselves in position to hoist championship trophies. While her recent success quickly exploded into a cultural debate for some, many in the swim world are focused on the competitors chasing her to the final wall.

"For me, fairness is the most important thing. I think the NCAA policy issued in 2011 was not really based much on scientific knowledge," said the parent. "So this is all about the rules. It's not really about Lia. She followed the rules."

Parents say several Penn swimmers have shared their concerns with the coaches but the school has continuously voiced its support for Thomas.

No coaches or swimmers were made available to reporters at Saturday's meet. Thomas said on the podcast last month that her team has been nothing but supportive this season and she tries to avoid any chatter from outside the Penn program.

"I don't engage with it," she said. "It's not healthy for me to read it or engage with it at all."

A cold reception
Despite freezing temperatures, two women shouted into bullhorns and waved signs near the entrance to Sheerr Pool on Saturday afternoon. "Stand up 4 women," one sign read.

"Come on, Penn, we know you're cheating," one of the protesters shouted. "This is not fair; this is not sport. It is that simple. Males and females are different."

Inside the building, the bleachers were only half-full as coronavirus restrictions closed the meet to all but select family members and supporters. The swimmers themselves provided the energy, circling the pool and cheering on teammates.

By now, Thomas has grown accustomed to finishing first, and Saturday's meet was no different. In the 200 free she posted a winning time of 1:48.73, nearly two seconds ahead of the next-fastest swimmer. Later, in the 500, she finished in 4:57.20, nearly 1½ seconds ahead of the field but more than 23 seconds off her season-best time from last month.

Thomas also lost a pair of races: the 100 free and the 4x100 freestyle relay. She finished sixth in the short sprint, nearly three seconds behind Yale's Izzi Henig, and then found herself struggling to chase down Henig's Bulldogs in the anchor leg of the relay.

Henig is a transgender male on the Yale squad but has put off hormone therapy for now and continues to compete on the school's women's team.

Though Thomas's times Saturday were well off her season-best marks, they probably won't quiet any dissent.

Along with Navratilova, Hogshead-Makar is part of the Women's Sports Policy Working Group, an advocacy organization that says it's trying to affirm girls' and women's sports "while including transgender athletes."

While she says transgender women who've never experienced male puberty should be permitted to compete against women, Hogshead-Maker says it's possible there are enough transgender athletes in some sports to merit a wholly new competitive category.

Roger Pielke Jr., director of the Sports Governance Center at the University of Colorado, noted that sports organizations have always grappled with complicated classifications, from disabled athletes to competitors switching nationalities. He noted that international soccer players are "cap-tied" and at the elite level cannot compete for one country and then change nationalities and compete for another.

"This would make sense for gender as well," he said. "If an athlete competes in men/women categories, [he or she] would no longer be eligible to change categories.

"Just like in Paralympic classification, science does not make these decisions for us, but science can certainly help to inform our decisions," Pielke added. "Ultimately, classification decisions reflect our values, who we are and what we want sport and the society of which it is a part to be."

I do see two comments in this article that express arguments I find disingenuous. One is the one from the parents of the female swimmers at Penn:

"All you expect is a fair chance," one parent said in a recent interview, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect her daughter's privacy. (Her daughter and other Penn swimmers, including Thomas, were not made available for interviews.) "There is no chance this year. They train hard but know that they cannot beat Lia."

My issue with this argument is sport does not guarantee a fair chance, the gender division of sport does not guarantee a fair chance because physical attributes within the genders are not fair between all members of each gender. I go back to the example of your kid plays basketball and is really good, and goes to a D1 school, and has to play against that generation's Michael Jordan for a starting position. It is the case that "unfairly", Michael Jordan is going to be the starter and your kid isn't. Nothing they do is ever going to change that, because he was born with better genetics than your kid was. That is an intrinsic reality of sport.

The other thing argument I disagree with:

Others dismiss the idea that Thomas unfairly benefits from biological advantages. Before transitioning, she consulted with Schuyler Bailar, a former Harvard athlete and the first openly trans swimmer to compete in Division I. Bailar says biodiversity is an innate part of sports and many great athletes benefit from certain biological or genetic gifts.

"Lia is a great athlete because she is a great athlete and has worked hard for 17 years to be great at something she loves," Bailar recently posted on social media. "The belief that all [people assigned male at birth] are better at sports is rooted in the sexist belief that boys are, by default, better at sports than girls, which is false."

So this person is making the argument that boys are not intrinsically better at sports than girls--if this is the case, what is the reason an athlete like Lia Thomas, who prior to transitioning competed on the men's team, switched to the women's team? If there is no intrinsic advantage to being a boy, why not just stay in the division they were already in?

[Berkut]

I think the argument of the parents of the female swimmers is a shorthand for the actual argument, which is more along the lines of "All we expect is a fair chance to compete against other female athletes who share a common biological gender basis for athletic competitiveness". This seems obvious to me, since they cannot possibly mean otherwise, for the reasons you state (there is clearly nothing "fair" about the non-gender, genetic dispersion of athletic ability within genders).

To me, this is like saying it would not be fair to have to compete against someone who had a propeller installed in their ass that shoots them through the water at 30 knots. Sure, that might be interesting. Heck, maybe they had some related medical issue that needed propeller intervention to fix. But it is clearly not a level playing field within the definitional constraints of the field itself anymore.

The belief that boys are, by default, better then girls at sports is simply true. It is not sexist, it is just reality. Assuming, of course, we define "sports" in this context as being a stand in for general athletic ability around most (but not all) measures that drive athletic performance.