DeSantis: No Man Is the Best Women’s Swimmer

BUCK: Clay, we’ve been talking a lot about the transgender swimmer issue because a transgender swimmer just won the NCAA 500-meter women’s freestyle championship, and there are some women who are very rightly upset about this because it affected their ability to compete at the NCAA finals at all, which for some women would be a crowning achievement to spending, what, 12, maybe 15 years of their lives in the pool, training, training, trying to get faster.

To be at that level as a swimmer is a remarkable achievement for women, and that was taken from some of them. Well, we do have some in this country in elected office who are willing to say something about this. They are not going to stand silent on it. Here is Ron DeSantis. He put out a statement today. “By allowing men to compete…” Notice he used the term “men.” He doesn’t say “biologically gendered previously described males.”

He says, “By allowing men to compete in women’s sports, the NCAA is destroying opportunities for women, making a mockery of its championships, and perpetuating a fraud. In Florida, we reject these lies and recognize Sarasota’s Emma Weyant as the best women’s in the 500-meter freestyle.” Clay, you’ve said it, I have said it; it’s absolutely true. Emma Weyant is, for all intents and purposes, a gold medal winner, number one for women in the NCAA 500-meter freestyle. And DeSantis even spoke out on this today. Play it.

BUCK: I think he’s totally correct. (chuckles) Totally right.

CLAY: Man. This is an example of how to fight back. I mean, it really is. Now, this is not something that is… Buck, you and I have been fighting on this a lot. OutKick has been aggressively covering this story. In fact, we had an article up over the weekend congratulating Emma Weyant, who I believe is from the University of Virginia swim team and would have been the 500-meter women’s champion, but for the inclusion of a transgender swimmer.

I didn’t know she was from Florida. Credit to Ron DeSantis and his staff because I think that gives a no-brainer effect to the decision they’re making, because it’s a Florida native who was deprived of a 500-meter win. (I think it’s meter. Sometimes I screw that up. But the 500.) She would have won. And by the way, is Twitter going to ban Ron DeSantis for having this opinion?

BUCK: They might. You never know.

CLAY: The way that Twitter is trying to defend this Lia Thomas story, they may well suspend Ron DeSantis’ Twitter account (chuckles) for proclaiming that this other girl would have won — or this girl would have won — the 500 meter. And this is the kind of battle that we’re in right now, where the party ostensibly of “science,” Buck… Let’s emphasize this. The same people who are lecturing all of us through Dr. Fauci:

“You don’t believe in science!” when we say, “Hey, you shouldn’t wear masks or when we point out that many people who are double vaxed and boosted,” i.e., Jen Psaki, who just announced that she tested positive for covid again — many people who are double vaxed and boosted — are still testing positive. “The party of science,” in quotation marks, is refusing to acknowledge biology — and by the way, this swimmer still has male genitalia.

Sorry if there’s kids out there, but walking around in a women’s locker room when you still have…? You’re still biologically male and you’re competing against women… Just think about it, take it outside of transgender issues, Buck. What would happen — I coach little league sports — if I showed up for our 11-year-old baseball team and I had a 16-year-old with me, and I tried to play that 16-year-old in 11-year-old boys’ baseball?

Everyone, every parent at that field would reject what I was trying to do because in athletics we try to have people compete against other people like them. Ages are paramount. High schools, we have different sizes. Boxing, we have different weight classes. All of these things are designed to increase overall competition. Buck, can you imagine if I showed up with a bunch of 16-year-olds? They would kick the crap out of the 11-year-olds because they’re older, bigger, stronger, faster.

BUCK: What happens if the 16-year-old says, “Well, I identify as 11”? Everybody would say, “That’s absolutely absurd.” The absurdity of it, I think, is in many ways is becoming more apparent to people. The arguments in favor of this are rooted in the negation of reality and mob madness such that even some Democrats… Fox, I know, Clay, played this over the weekend a video of three women who are protesting the Lia Thomas swimming, quote, “victory” at the women’s championships.

Here’s what these are women — who claim to be lifelong Democrats — said.

BUCK: Welcome to reality, and welcome to voting for Republicans. It’s just a question of time, because if you insist in living in reality, you’re not going to be able to vote in good conscience for these leftist loons of the Democrat party. Clay, at some level you bring this up with the existence of Lia Thomas’ male genitalia and the changing on a regular basis in front of women. You think about indecent exposure, for example, right?

If you walk up to somebody who does not want to see that part of you, you get arrested for this, right? Because we have some understanding that this is an affront to a person’s dignity to have to see this. Although these days in New York City, I mean, there’s all kinds of stuff going on. It feels like nobody gets arrested for anything here anymore. But in general, you could be arrested for this.

There’s been, I think, all along an exploitation by the left of conservative kindness and courtesy. This is how they’ve gotten even to this point. “Oh, come on. Be nice to everybody. Be inclusive. Just use the preferred pronoun. This is just about being nice to people. Why won’t you be nice to people?” Always in the context of whoever the trans individual is deserves your kindness and sympathy. By the way, all people, including trans people, deserve our kindness, sympathy, and decency.

What they leave out of the conversation is what about the women in the locker room? How is it kind to them? How is it kind and courteous to tell a woman who has been swimming her entire life that she can basically remember, “Sorry, you don’t get to have your peak athletic experience. You don’t get that gold medal that you earned.

“You don’t get to be even in the NCAA finals, which you earned.” That’s discourteous, that’s unkind. But they don’t even talk about it. That’s why women who actually think they’re feminist, they’re realizing, “Hold on a second. The wires are crossed here. There’s something going on.”

CLAY: Well, and this is why also the entire concept of “inclusivity” is, in many ways, a lie, because the very inclusion of Lia Thomas is excluding women from being able to compete at the highest level. So when we talk about inclusion, we’re also talking about exclusion, excluding women who otherwise would be able to perform at the highest level.

I believe this woman swimmer — give her credit — from Virginia Tech, spoke out and said, Lia Thomas, a man swimming against women, cost me the opportunity to compete for a championship. And this Emma Weyant that Ron DeSantis is giving the proclamation for, would otherwise have won. Let me say this, too, Buck: All the women we just played discussing how they feel politically homeless?

There’s a lot of people listening to us right now, I guarantee you, who don’t identify necessarily as conservative, who don’t identify necessarily as Republican. They identify as Team Sanity. They want for America to be sane again. I know Donald Trump ran on Make America Great. I think 2022 and 2024, “Make America Sane Again,” is actually something that appeals to a huge number of otherwise Democratic voters, and suburban women that went against the Republicans in 2020.

And we want you to be listening to us. We are a voice for sanity in an insane world, and I don’t take that lightly, because I know we have an incredible privilege on this show, Buck. You and I get to come on, for better or worse — I know sometimes you don’t always agree with everything we say. But for better or worse, we have the privilege every single day for three hours of saying exactly what we think and fighting back against the voices and rising tide of insanity in this country.

And I know that a huge number of you out there listening to us right now feel voiceless and feel as if you are surrounded by that insanity, and you come to us for three hours every day, and we try to do our best to make sense of the world. And we welcome all of you, regardless of how you may have voted in the past, because I really do think there’s a new lineup that is occurring in American politics, and it’s not necessarily, in my opinion, Democrat versus Republican. It’s sane versus insane. And the Democratic Party is on the side of insanity an awful lot of times.

BUCK: I think the parties kind of align on sane versus insane these days. This is what we’re seeing, and we could go through and do go through, I think, a lot of the ways in which that plays out through policy.