Former USC Female Swimmer on Wannabe Woman Will Thomas

CLAY: Seth Dillon, who runs the Babylon Bee — which is a great, funny satire site — they’ve been locked, their Twitter account has, over the fact that they criticized Penn’s transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, Will Thomas, as a male swimmer switches to Lia and becomes a female. I don’t even know at this point, Buck, the career of this swimmer is over.

But the report was that there was going to be an attempt to make the U.S. Women’s Olympic Team. So you finally had some athletes start to speak out against this. And we’ll see where that heads. But I’m curious what is going on with Seth Dillon and how long… What happens is if you put up a tweet that Twitter doesn’t like, that violates their rules, they demand that you delete it.

BUCK: What you just said, by the way, could get you banned from Twitter, you know that?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Just saying “Will Thomas.”

CLAY: That’s a ban?

BUCK: They call this “dead naming” on the left, which is where you’re using a transperson’s former name from their previous gender, and that under Twitter terms of service, that alone… Even with Caitlyn Jenner. By the way, you can change your name, I’m fine with that, of course, but even noting someone’s previous name is called “dead naming.” You’re not allowed to do it.

CLAY: So saying Will Thomas was a swimmer, which is an accurate fact at the University of Pennsylvania, and was on the Penn men’s swimming team, and then made the decision to change his name to Lia Thomas and become a woman, that would get you banned from Twitter?

BUCK: You dead named, and I’m so angry I’m literally shaking right now.

CLAY: The dead naming concept is so ridiculous. But what is wild about this, Buck, in general is that you can’t tell the story of why this is a big deal without telling the story of Will Thomas being a male swimmer first. Because if Will Thomas had just been a regular dude at UPenn and decided to become a woman, he would never have been able to compete at a high level in women’s swimming, right? Probably.

BUCK: Yeah. The women swimmers at these schools would swim faster than you and me, for example, by a lot. (laughing) A lot.

CLAY: I’m an awful swimmer. I would lose by, like, minutes. So the idea that you can’t say the name “Will Thomas” makes telling the story of Lia Thomas and why it’s significant in the world of sports impossible.

BUCK: But isn’t that the point?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: You can’t tell the story the way you would tell it based on fact, Clay. You have to tell it in the way they insist you tell the story.

CLAY: It’s such a ridiculous policy to put in place, particularly in the world of athletics, where a man becoming a woman’s athlete is, frankly, the antithesis of all competition in general. I think we have a call that wants to weigh in on this.

BUCK: We have a D1 swimmer, an actual female D-I swimmer. Cindy in AZ — Arizona, also known as — thanks for calling in.

CALLER: Thanks for having me, guys. It’s wonderful to talk to you, and I’m so glad you’re speaking about this because not enough people are. I’m telling you. (chuckles) So I swam competitively through high school and college. And there was no way we could compete against the men’s team. We trained with them, but there’s no way we could be better than them. Just because of biology.

CLAY: Where did you swim, Cindy?

CALLER: I swam at USC, University of Southern California, a long time ago.

CLAY: But what would you think, if you were…? I know you’re taking yourself back in time. If when you were swimming suddenly a member of the USC men’s team had decided to become a women’s swimmer and had started, mediately became the best women’s swimmer on your team, how do you think the girls would react back then? And what do you think many of the girls are thinking now?

CALLER: We would have had none of it, none of it. We would have all stood up and fought for our rights as females — biological females, not wanna-be females. What people don’t know about swimming, in general, when you’re 10 and under, six, seven, eight, nine years old, the girls’ times to make state meets and what have you are faster, harder to make than the boys’ times.

But when we hit puberty, the rules change. Everything changes because those boys take on testosterone. They take on muscle bulk, way bigger and faster than the girls, and their times then start to get faster than the girls’ times. So it’s harder to make these meets. But when my daughter was swimming and she made state at nine years old.

And the little boy, his parents I sat next to, said, “Well, Eli just made it, too,” and I’m like, “What? He swam a second slower than my daughter did, their qualifying times.” I didn’t pay attention to boys’ qualifying times because I didn’t have a boy swimming. They were way easier back then. But once they hit puberty, all bets are off and everything changes.

CLAY: Lia Thomas, as she now calls herself, is 6’4″. How much difference would there be — leave aside the biology — just being that much bigger as a swimmer, longer arms, longer legs? That has a tremendous competitive advantage standing alone, even taking away the testosterone, right, which is partly becoming a reality because of biology?

CALLER: Right. Right! (laughing) Yeah, I’m six foot tall, and many of the female swimmers were also tall. But not 6’4″. I never swam with a woman that was 6’4″. I’m just so upset. And after the win in that 500 free, and nobody cheered for him. And they went all crazy for the second-place female, which is rightly so.

CLAY: Yes.

CALLER: But I’m just mind-boggled by the NCAA and them getting this so wrong. This call was so wrong. For us girls and females across the board, not just in swimming, but every sport. This is going to happen across the board, and something’s got to change. One year, three years of testosterone suppression does nothing.

BUCK: It doesn’t change. We know. Cindy, thank you so much for sharing your perspective. Appreciate you listening and calling in.