At the end of The Incredibles, Dash — a superhero kid with superhuman speed — partakes in his middle-school track race. “Make it close!” his dad, a plainclothes Mr. Incredible, yells as Dash shoots past his non-super peers. “Go for second!” adds Mrs. Incredible. While the other competitors catch their breath after crossing the finish line, Dash, who has barely broken a sweat, gives his parents a thumbs-up. If only the University of Pennsylvania swimming coach had deployed the same strategy when allowing a transgender-identifying male athlete to dominate the women’s team.
Between 2016 and 2019, Will Thomas was an average swimmer for the men’s swimming division. But after adopting a female name (Lia) and identity, Thomas has been smashing records at every turn. Now, Thomas is supposedly the No. 1 female swimmer in the nation, with the fastest 500-yard female freestyle in the country and the all-time record for the Penn women’s team. In a sport that is known for slim margins, Thomas has been crushing the competition. At the Zippy Invitational at the University of Akron, Thomas’s time in the 200-yard race was better than last year’s gold-medal time in the NCAA finals, while notching a 4:34:06 in the 500 freestyle — a margin of victory of more than 14 seconds. And in the 1650 freestyle, Thomas beat the second-place woman by more than 38 seconds.
The explanation for such staggering victories is neither talent nor superpowers — merely biology. Since Thomas is biologically male, and since Thomas underwent male puberty with all the androgenizing benefits that this conferred, he is larger, faster, and stronger than most female athletes.
Just ask Thomas’s female teammates. Despite being “strongly advised” to stay silent, two teammates have anonymously spoken out to the sports website OutKick. “Pretty much everyone individually has spoken to our coaches about not liking this. Our coach [Mike Schnur] just really likes winning. He’s like most coaches. I think secretly everyone just knows it’s the wrong thing to do,” said one.
She observed that Thomas’s best swimming times as a woman are not far off college records set by then-future Olympic gold medalists Missy Franklin and Katie Ledecky. (The editor of Swimming World has written that the records of both should now be considered in jeopardy.)
Another teammate spoke of how soul-crushing it is for the other competitors who know they don’t stand a chance of winning.
“Usually everyone claps, everyone is yelling and cheering when someone wins a race,” she said. “Lia touched the wall, and it was just silent in there. When fellow Penn swimmer Anna Kalandadze finished second, the crowd erupted in applause.”
But Thomas, like UPenn, claims not to see any problem, saying that “everybody is able to compete in the category they’re most comfortable with unless there’s a proven unfair advantage that they have.”
Even if Thomas is in compliance with the NCAA rules that require testosterone-suppression treatment for one year for male-to-female athletes, this is still risibly insufficient at mitigating sex-based advantages that are years in the making and do not simply disappear with chemical or surgical interventions. Such policies fail on principle, in any case. As politically incorrect as it is to point out, there is no material difference between a man and a trans woman. This is not difficult. The athletes in women’s sports should be women only.