On June 23, 1972, Congress passed, and Nixon signed the Education Amendments of 1972. Within that law was Title IX which reads: No person in the United States shall, based on sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance. The act was designed as a follow-on and clarification/expansion of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It was not specifically written to apply to women’s high school and college sports, but the failure to equally/proportionally fund women’s teams was challenged under it, and the challengers won.
A friend of mine has a young teenage daughter who is a swimmer. A highly competitive swimmer who is just beginning her swimming career. Yet, if Daughter goes to college on a swimming scholarship, her odds of setting or breaking records in women’s swimming are lowered by the presence of transwomen athletes. Her odds of making an Olympic team and medaling there are greatly lowered with transwomen competing on women’s teams. My friend has been posting quite a bit about this and has highlighted articles by female swimmers who are former Olympians and record holders.
This paragraph from an opinion piece in Swimming World Magazine is telling regarding the standards set (or not) by USA Swimming and the NCAA: “USA Swimming eventually announced the adoption of new guidelines that required transgender women to have a testosterone threshold of 5 nmols/L for 36 consecutive months. The NCAA, in response, indicated it would not follow USA Swimming’s guidelines and stated that it would require athletes to produce a testosterone threshold of 10 nmols/L prior to the NCAA Championships. The average testosterone threshold for a female is .5 to 2.4 nmols/L.”
To clarify: A mole is an amount of a substance that contains a large number (6 followed by 23 zeros) of molecules or atoms. A nanomole is one-billionth of a mole. A litre measures fluid volume. It is a little bigger than a quart (source: www.myhealth.alberta.ca – first place I found a definition). Note the “6 followed by 23 zeros”… USA Swimming is asking for a testosterone threshold of 5 nmols/L; NCAA is using 10 nmols/L. The average female as .5 to 2.4 nmols/L. The average woman has at most half the testosterone that a hormone suppressed transwoman has. At most. The NCAA has set a limit of 10 nmols/L…double what USA Swimming has set and between five and twenty times greater than the average female. Still think the NCAA isn’t a racket?
Do you still think that makes no difference in athletics? Would you call a race between somebody with 5 nmols/L of testosterone (a definite muscle and endurance enhancer) and somebody with 0.5 nmols/L of testosterone fair? If so, why? What about a race between somebody with 10 nmols/L of testosterone and somebody with 0.5? That’s 20 times greater. Is that fair?
In the 1970s and 1980s female athletes (particularly swimmers) from the former East Germany were drugged up to their eyeballs with steroids (including testosterone) in order to make them faster and stronger than other women. They were eventually disqualified for drug use. Transwomen with 5 nmols/L of testosterone in their systems competing against biological women with .5 to 2.5 nmols/L of testosterone are the equivalent of those East German swimmers.
Fair competition assumes that the athletes competing have all had similar training, access in school (via funding – hello Title IX) to similar coaching, equipment, facilities, and are generally in the same physical shape. That’s what women have been fighting for in their sports for over fifty years. Is it fair that biological men, still in possession of, at a minimum, more than double the amount of testosterone and who may be fair-to-middling athletes against other men, allowed to compete against women instead?
Why are women being asked, and even required, to move aside for men… again? Why are women’s teams being required to find a place for mediocre men? Is this equality? Or is this just men pushing out women?
If there are so many transgender athletes, why not form teams of transgender athletes? Why is somebody who’s changed genders not required to make any sacrifices of their former life (Thomas stills gets to swim competitively and now wins… a lot. That’s a win-win for her.) while women who’ve trained for most of their lives are required to give up everything they’ve trained for? Why is Thomas’ ability to compete prioritized over all the other women on the UPenn women’s swim team?
Why are the gains made via Title IX being thrown away?
Why are women being required to give up hard-won gains in equality in the name of political correctness?
Why is the mainstream media not talking about this except to vilify those who object to the inclusion of transwomen on women’s teams?
More importantly – why is it becoming taboo to ask these questions?
Photo by Kampus Production from Pexels
NCAA Never Cared About Anyone
So true.
Transgender women… proving that men are even better at being women than women!
At least one of the psychos literally argued that trans women are more authentically women because they had to fight for it/grow into it/ choose it.
It’s funny how the Progressive stuff always boils down to ugly, usually old, guys telling me what I must do to be an acceptable woman, or they’ll cast me into the briar patch of … um… people who will tell me what I’m allowed to do, think, or feel.
Oh my God! Are you kidding? They had to fight for it and choose it, therefore they are women??? That’s enough internet for today.
Every cell in Thomas’s body has xy chromosomes. He is a man, not a woman, no matter how much testosterone suppression, other chemical treatments, or mutilation he undergoes.
Right down to the bones. When someone comes along in a few centuries and comes across Thomas’ bones, they will determine that those bones belonged to a man.
Got curious, went and looked– their limit is higher than the low end of healthy male levels.
https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2019/04/19/what_is_a_normal_level_of_testosterone_110949.html
Doctors measure testosterone in nanomoles per litre (nmol/l) and the reported “normal” healthy range in males is anywhere from 9.2 to 31.8 nmol/L. It is about ten times lower in females, with “normal” levels considered to be between 0.3 and 2.4 nmol/L.
It’s like they didn’t pay any attention to actual biology! And, as I pointed out elsewhere, if a biological female were to take testosterone to get her up to the level allowed by the NCAA for transwomen, the biological female would be DQ’d and likely permanently banned from competition for drug violations. The NCAA has insured and uneven playing field for biological women.
Perhaps it is time to revive the AIAW, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women.
Eligibility: No Y chromosomes*
*Yes, there is a bizarre genetic event where you have a Y chromosome, but the relevant gene is dysfunctional, so you are still a person of the female persuasion.