When Lia Thomas graduated from college and left the NCAA swimming field, I foolishly hoped that the entire transgender sports debate would begin to die down and women’s sports could return to being sports for women. Clearly, I was mistaken. There are still people beating that drum and complaining about the “treatment” that Thomas received in the media. There is a hilarious article in The Nation this week using Thomas as some sort of flag bearer to proclaim the entire sport of collegiate swimming as a hotbed of transphobia and hate. I wouldn’t have even known about the article if Matt Yglesias hadn’t panned it in a humorous fashion.

This whole article is like progressive madlibs that doesn’t even make a token effort at being persuasive https://t.co/dp3ct1RXa0

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) May 13, 2023

The author of the article is someone named Frankie De La Cretaz, a trans activist whose writing reportedly “sits at the intersection of sports, gender, culture, and queerness.” He, er… she, um… they (?who the hell even knows at this point?) breaks down the amount of time various outlets spent covering Lia Thomas over the winter of 2021 to 2022, though all of the coverage was supposedly classified as “criticizing,” even on CNN.

From December 7, 2021, to February 22, 2022, CNN spent nearly 15 minutes criticizing Thomas’s participation in the women’s division but less than two minutes discussing the dozens of anti-trans sports bills being introduced across the country. Meanwhile, from December 3, 2021, through January 12, 2022, Fox News aired 32 segments that attacked Thomas, according to Media Matters for America. That pace didn’t slow down for months…

The article then goes on to claim that “transphobia” is rampant in college swimming because… care to take a guess? If you said “white supremacy,” give yourself a cookie.

The World Aquatics policy was the culmination of a long-simmering anti-trans sentiment in the sport of women’s swimming, particularly in Western countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. While most sporting bodies have taken a hard turn to the right in recent years when it comes to allowing transgender athletes—and transgender women, in particular—to compete, women’s swimming is, in some ways, uniquely anti-trans. It’s a sport whose culture created the perfect conditions for trans-exclusionary beliefs to take over, through a combination of its overwhelming whiteness, history of rampant sexual abuse, and a 40-year-old doping scandal that still haunts the sport.

De La Cretaz includes a reference to previous articles where they supposedly “proved” that “there is no real evidence that trans athletes have an inherent advantage.” Of course, we already know that is a flatly false statement. We could go back through the archives and point to all of the studies that demonstrate the advantages men have over women in competitive sports, but I’m just not going to bother.

Lia Thomas is all of the proof you need. A mediocre (at best) male swimmer took some women’s hormone pills, jumped into the pool, and began blowing the actual women out of the water, both literally and figuratively. We’ve seen it happen and documented it here in other competitive sports ranging from cycling to weightlifting.

And isn’t it odd how we almost only ever hear about men “transitioning” to compete in women’s sports? If there really were no difference, shouldn’t there be a bunch of former women dominating the men’s sporting events? Funny how that works out. In any event, if you want a good laugh or perhaps yet another reason to be infuriated, pop over to The Nation and read the entire article. As Yglesias said, the author is simply preaching from this month’s version of the trans hymnal and doesn’t even make a token effort to be persuasive. And if you’re considering debating De La Cretaz about actual science or issues of fairness, don’t bother. The author is “done” talking about it.

The longer I write about trans inclusion in sports, the less willing I am to debate the science or ideas of advantage or fairness. They’re all straw man arguments. At the end of the day what we are actually talking about are human rights, & those should outweigh everything else.

— Frankie de la Cretaz (@thefrankiedlc) May 13, 2023