A quiet senior
That night, the atmosphere in the arena was charged with a tension distinct from the usual intensity of athletic competition. “I’ve never felt a crowd root against anybody before,” said Dan D’Addona, who covered the meet for Swimming World Magazine.
The target was Lia Thomas, a quiet senior from the University of Pennsylvania. Ms. Thomas swam competitively for years as a member of the men’s team, before beginning estrogen treatment to transition in 2019, and later switching to racing with the women. Over the course of the 2021-22 season, she became national news, an avatar for churning unease about gender, power, safety, sports, politics, feminism and biology.
First of all, what is a “quiet senior”? What is a noisy senior? How would the reporter know either way? What’s her point?
Her point, of course, is to stack the deck without being too blatant about it. Aw, poor guy, he’s just quiet, he’s not kicking up a fuss like those blahblahblah women.
At any rate, there is nothing “quiet” about pretending to be a woman and stealing women’s athletic prizes. Lots of women consider it quite noisy.
Farther down the page the reporter drops the subtlety.
Ms. Gaines’s approach to activism involves a weaponization of names, pronouns, physical descriptions and other language to undermine the legitimacy of transgender people’s mere existence in the world.
In 2022, she used female pronouns for Ms. Thomas and emphasized that she affirmed her gender identity. “I am in full support of her and full support of her transition and her swimming career and everything like that,” she told The Daily Wire days after the race.
Now, offensiveness is a part of her brand.
It’s not “weaponization” of anything to call a man “he” or to point out that men are stronger than women. It’s the other way around. It’s a slow-motion attack on women to pretend that the physical disparities between women and men don’t matter when it comes to sports. It’s not automatically “offensive” to say that.
In other words, she often seems to go out of her way to provoke those who are not already fully on board with her mission. But if Ms. Gaines’s rhetoric is alienating, her specific position on transgender women and sports has increasingly widespread support.
In California, where Mr. Trump received less than 40 percent of the vote last year, 71 percent of public school parents say they support his executive order on transgender athletes, according to a statewide survey this spring.
Brilliant! That is excellent news.
Uh huh. Totally not phobia indoctrination. Totally not stochastic terrorism. Totally not at all related to recent heinous atrocities committed by self-identified trans or non-binary people.
Totally not bullshit.
Totally.
I think there is a dropped word here. Shouldn’t it be “pretending not to be a man”?
In 2021-2022 the entire swim team was being bullied by the university and coaches to ‘affirm’ him, and banned from talking individually to outsiders, under threat of dismissal. Of course she spoke the prescribed words.
Why doesn’t the writer care about a whole group of young women who were forced to strip off in front of a huge young man? How has she been persuaded that the dented ego of a male cheat is a bigger human rights issue than the safety, dignity, and fairness of all the women against whom he cheated?
Oops! Thank you Bruce – it was meant to be “pretending to be a woman”. Fixed now.
tigger – and how has anyone? I will never ever understand it.
JFC. It was Thomas who was weaponizing all of that in order to undermine women and rob them of their safety, dignity, and awards.
JFC. Anyone mentioning reality provokes these people. Gaines is not any different in this regard. Thomas is male; always has been, always will be. Maybe Gaines was just tired of living with and having to regurgitate the lie that he was not.
As if Thomas’s delusional, perverted, fetish-fueled intrusion into the women’s swim team was not “alienating.” And why shouldn’t reality have “widespread support”? (Way to normalize abnormal, and, despite claims of being a “woman” criminal behaviour. Without the protection of his bullshit “gender identity” he would have been arrested, just like any other male who did what he did. His cheating (which is bad enough) is the least of it. His presence in the women’s changing rooms was a sex crime. Thomas is not a hero. Thomas is a sex criminal. Having voltuntarilly outed himself as a proud, unrepentant sex offender, Thomas should be on watch lists and under restraining orders for the rest of his life. Who the fuck in their right mind wouldn’t have rooted against him?
How , I wonder, do the editors of the NYT allow this sort of hit-piece?
“Ms. Gaines’s approach to activism involves a weaponization of names, pronouns, physical descriptions and other language to undermine the legitimacy of transgender people’s mere existence in the world.”
“Ms Gaines” is in no way undermining “the legitimacy of transgender people’s mere existence”, what she is addressing is the disgraceful way that certain trans-people (all male) invade or seek to invade women’s sports, as well as other institutions and spaces for women, on the pretext that they are now wholly female. It undoubtedly is not because 71 percent of parents with children at public schools have been listening to Gaines that they disapprove of men in women’s sports, but because, like most people, they think the idea of men in women’s sports is both abusively unfair as well as dangerous.
[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on A quiet […]
Facts are powerful weapons. They don’t need to be weaponised.
“The truth is like a lion. You do not need to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.” -Saint Augustine.
I was prompted to look that up by Francis’s comment.
Or used to be, back in the pre-post-truth era…