A man won an NCAA Division 1 national championship in women’s swimming last week.
Penn swimmer Lia Thomas, a male who identifies as a woman, won the 500-yard freestyle event. That makes Thomas the first transgender athlete to win that title.
But Thomas’s success has sparked controversy. Some people think it’s absurd that a man can compete against women and that this never should have happened. Others think it’s OK for a man to identify as a woman and that society should accommodate it.
While some sports bodies have tried to come up with a compromise on the transgender athlete matter, only allowing these athletes to compete if they lower their testosterone levels so they’re more in line with a woman’s testosterone levels, this shouldn’t really be a complicated debate.
If there is a team for both sexes in a sport, then men should compete against men and women should compete against women. This has been the case for a long time. There is a reason why high schools and colleges have teams for males and teams for females. The level of competition is a major reason for it. The purpose is to give girls a chance to get to play, be competitive, and have a chance at winning. As someone who covers high school sports, I can attest that if a great boys’ basketball team played against a great girls’ basketball team, it would be an embarrassing blowout.
Thomas is a man. Thomas competed under the name Will Thomas for the men’s swimming team at UPenn as a freshman and sophomore. So, why should a man like Thomas be any different than the other male swimmers at the college?
Penn has a swimming team for men. Thomas was good enough to compete on the men’s team. Just because Thomas identifies as something else, the NCAA shouldn’t change the rules to accommodate one person’s claims at the expense of female athletes.
Hopefully, Thomas’s victory raises public awareness on this matter. If one looks at the photos of Thomas on the podium as the winner of the 500-yard freestyle race, one will see a man standing near two actual women. It’s a powerful visual that illustrates the biological differences between a male competitor and a female competitor.
The NCAA allowed this to happen. Instead of acknowledging that Thomas is not a woman and telling the swimmer to compete against men or not compete at all, the league decided to be woke. In doing so, it cost a woman a national championship.
Tom Joyce ( @TomJoyceSports ) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts.
