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
