On Lia Thomas and Conservative Priorities

The latest case of a biologically male, transgender woman athelete disrupting a women’s sport has come from the inside of our very own Ivy League. The swimmer at the center of the controversy, Penn senior Lia Thomas, has smashed several records in the pool while igniting a drama that continues to unfold.

The Timeline

In an interview she gave to the SwimSwam podcast, the swimmer claimed to have realized her transsexuality during the summer of 2018. Citing her would-be uncertain future in competitive swimming, Thomas delayed transitioning until 2019. She continued to swim as a man during the 2018-2019 season before coming out to her teammates on the men’s swim team. Thomas continued her hormone therapy when the Ivy League shut down all sports events during the 2019-2020 season due to COVID-19. In the summer of 2020, the NCAA reviewed her submitted medical records and declared her eligible for the Penn women’s swim team.

On December 3-5 of 2021, Thomas swam the fastest time in the nation in the 200-meter and 500-meter free at the Zippy Invitational. While her times were still slower than her lifetime bests (posted before gender reassignment), Thomas swam faster than the winning times at the previous Zippy. She continued her winning streak into the final home meet of the season and broke multiple school records in female swimming.

Later that December, parents of female Penn swimmers wrote letters to the university administration and NCAA protesting Thomas’ participation on the women’s team. The letter expressed their concern that Thomas’ membership set a precedent where female athletes would not receive “a protected and equitable place to compete.” In response, the University of Pennsylvania doubled down, supporting Thomas in the name of “inclusivity.” The school then shared mental health resources with the parents, in order to help them navigate “Lia’s success in the pool this winter.”

On December 17, USA Swimming official Cynthia Millen resigned in response to the NCAA’s decision to allow Thomas to compete as a woman. In her resignation letter, Millen complained that “everything fair about swimming is being destroyed” and that she would “pull the coach aside and say, ‘Lia cannot compete against those women because that’s not fair,’” if she were a referee. 

In late January, the NCAA announced a new policy whereby the collegiate sports organization would defer to each national sports governing body’s policy on transgender atheletes. This meant that Thomas might become ineligible to swim as a woman: USA Swimming has instituted a panel of three experts to determine whether a transgender woman athlete holds “a competitive advantage over the athlete’s cisgender female competitors” due to her physical development during puberty as a biological male and her possibly highly concentrated testosterone levels.

On February 3, sixteen swimmers of Penn’s women’s swimming team anonymously penned a letter addressed to the school and the Ivy League asking that they not pursue legal action challenging this updated NCAA policy. The swimmers stressed that they support Lia Thomas’ decision to transition but question the fairness of her participation. Nancy Hogshead-Maker, a 1984 Olympian swimmer, delivered the letter.

No matter how much hormone therapy Thomas has undergone, her experiencing male puberty before transition, her elevated testosterone, and their impacts on her swimming have become the central issue of this debate.

Media Sensationalism

Of course, regardless of your political stance on transgenderism, one must sympathize with Thomas’ struggle, with the dissonance she must have felt between body and mind. The alienation from their own bodies and entrapment felt by transgender individuals is a valid and authentic sensation. The fact that these individuals feel that gender reassignment surgery or hormone therapy is the only route of escape from their misery is a permanent stain on our society’s moral fabric.

Following her performance at Zippy Invitational, however, Thomas received a flurry of attention from conservative media, mostly in opposition to her participation on the women’s team. From November of 2021 to the publishing of this article, Breitbart News had written 43 articles mentioning the swimmer with Fox News writing 10 and the National Review publishing 23. Compare this to CNN, which wrote only 6 articles tangentially mentioning the Penn senior. 

Conservative media could have used their time and platform to cover the worsening Ukraine crisis, which may alter the course of eastern European history; the detrimental failure of the Biden administration to inspire confidence or trust; our participation in the Beijing Olympics despite China’s unaddressed human rights violations; and, most importantly, Whoopi Goldberg’s fall from heavenly grace. Instead, we got breaking news about a college swim team.

The issue underpinning the Lia Thomas controversy—gender ideology and its impacts on society—is of vital importance to conservatives and every American. However, compared to the events of real value and significance in the last two months, the Thomas saga itself merits a fraction of the coverage it received.

Penn Swimmers Are Not on Our Side

An Ivy League women’s swim team as it navigates the frontier of transgenderism in sport is not a constituency conservatives should expend any effort advocating for. At its core, Penn is an institution of liberal elites, for liberal elites, and administered by liberal elites. 

The median family income of a Penn student is $195,500 (the third highest figure in the Ivy League). 71% of students at the school hail from the top 20 percent, while 19% come from the top 1 percent. The latter number is the fourth highest in the Ivy League. 

According to Niche, 58% of Penn students identify as Democrats, with legions more voting blue in general elections. Hillary Clinton won Philadelphia Ward 27, home of the university, by 83% in 2016. President Biden, who last January signed an executive order requiring federally funded universities to allow transgender female athletes to compete in women’s sports, won by 84%.

It could not be more clear: Penn administrators, faculty, students, and parents overwhelmingly support and believe in the gender ideology that has made Lia Thomas’ series of records possible.

Hence, most members of the University of Pennsylvania women’s swim team are not helpless victims of a liberal establishment but rather victims of their and their parents’ liberal attitudes, brought to a logical conclusion.

They most likely would not have cared about Lia Thomas or the precedent she has set until her success in woman’s swimming affected their own chances to place or compete in the Ivy League Championship. Team members write letters lamenting the “unfair advantage” Thomas holds over female swimmers, but do they do anything to fight other transgenderism-involved violations of women’s rights? For example, the rape of a Loudoun County public schools student in a female restroom by a skirt-wearing male?

Conservatives Need to Get Their Priorities Straight

Conservatives have a self-destructive tendency to defend non-conservatives who face the wrath of the mobs they themselves helped assemble. The examples are plentiful, from the right-wing defense of David Chappelle and his newest Netflix special to outrage over the cancellation of J.K. Rowling (who created an “army of liberals”, according to The New Statesman). 

We further have an unusual knack at stopping the Left from falling into its own traps. Nearly every day, I find conservatives on Twitter lamenting the state of American cities, with their defunded police, bail reform that benefits violent criminals, and sanctuary for illegal immigrants. I see just as many complaining about the degradation of California, which has allowed some adults who have sexual relations with minors to not register as sex offenders and decriminalized the deliberate transmission of HIV.

But such deleterious absurdity is the natural form of Leftist policies. The horrors that now reign in our inner cities and increasingly outside of them are the natural consequences of Leftist thinking. Accordingly, if we hold our beliefs true, then we must be brave enough to let our enemies live with the consequences of theirs.

Let Leftists implement Leftist policy to the extent they want. Let Minneapolis run on “community policing.” Let hardened criminals run free on Fifth Avenue. Let the people of states like California live with the policies they vote for, each time they pull the lever for someone like District Attorney of San Francisco Chesa Boudin or state Senator Scott Wiener.

Instead, let us focus on those voiceless men and women who actually require the resources and advocacy of our nationwide political movement. Men like William Kelly. Women like the mothers who have protested at school-board meetings around the country in the past year. 

And no, these people do not swim for the University of Pennsylvania.