When discussing transgender athletes in sports, Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps issued a commonsense response.
CNN asked the swimming star about Lia Thomas, a male swimmer who is transgender and is performing well on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swim team. Phelps offered compassion for people suffering from gender dysphoria but acknowledged the biological reality: Men and women are different.
“I believe that we all should feel comfortable with who we are in our own skin, but I think sports should all be played on an even playing field,” Phelps told the station. “I don’t know what it looks like in the future. It’s hard. It’s very complicated, and this is my sport, this has been my sport my whole entire career. And honestly, the one thing I would love is everybody being able to compete on an even playing field.”
While it’s less common than you’d think to see transgender girls participate in girls sports, it does happen, even though it shouldn’t. Having men swim against men and women swim against women is the way to have an even playing field.
When people point out this reality, however, they’re subjected to attacks from the media.
Media outlets have criticized podcaster and UFC color commentator Joe Rogan as transphobic. His so-called transphobic offense? Rogan didn’t like seeing Fallon Fox, a man who identifies as a woman, beat up actual women in professional mixed martial arts fights. In 2013, Rogan said, in part, “You can’t fight women. That’s f***ing crazy. I don’t know why she thinks that she’s going to be able to do that.”
In a news piece, CNN said that Rogan had “a history of making racist, homophobic and transphobic comments.” The article also said that the language Rogan used about Fox was “offensive.” This was CNN’s idea of objective news.
And when former star tennis player Martina Navratilova had the nerve to call male athletes playing women’s sports “insane and cheating,” she faced media attacks as well. Outlets such as ESPN and Sports Illustrated wrote about her supposedly “transphobic” remark.
There is nothing wrong with wanting boys to compete against boys and girls to compete against girls in athletics when each sex has the chance to compete on a team of people of their own sex. People have a right to hold that opinion, and they’re not hateful bigots for saying what they believe.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts. He is also a freelance writer who has been published in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other outlets.
