The Latest Twists in the Penn Trans Swimmer Story

CLAY: Buck, a big debate of late has been this University Pennsylvania swimmer that has for three years swam as a man, and then decided to become a women’s swimmer, and has been dominating. What’s interesting is the NCAA, which is the body that oversees college athletics, has effectively acknowledged that their existing policies don’t make sense.

In particular, they said basically if you stop your testosterone for 12 months… This is what’s going on. So for people out there who have not paid attention to this story, we’ve got biological men that are deciding to identify as women and then are crushing women’s athletes. This swimmer who swam for three years as a man at the University of Pennsylvania is now swimming as a woman, and may set an all-time record!

That is, that has never existed before in women’s college swimming, and there’s an interesting quote here that one of my writers, Joe Kinsey, has been doing a great job covering at OutKick, if you’re at all intrigued by this story, and it says, “For trans women who have successfully suppressed testosterone for 12 months, the extent of muscle strength loss is only about 5% after 12 months,” and this expert says, “Testosterone suppression does not remove the athletic advantage acquired under high testosterone conditions at puberty while the male musculoskeletal advantage is retained.”

That sounds a little bit complicated, but basically what it means, Buck, is, men are bigger, stronger, and faster than women — and if you suddenly stop testosterone for a year, they’re still able to produce 95% of the overall athletic dominance that they would have otherwise done, which means that a man is going to be better if he becomes a woman and decides to change his gender than a biological woman. It’s crazy that we even have to have these conversations, but this is where we are.

BUCK: I talked about this story that your OutKick writer did yesterday, Clay, and it was one of those “A-ha!” moments, because we were supposed to believe in this case, right, that the… Just so I’m clear, is it a biological female who is competing against male…? What was the actual transition status? It’s tough to even keep up. So Lia Thomas is a biological male — also known as a male — who is competing against women.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: So Lia Thomas lost to another biological male who…? Wait. No, no. It was a biological female who competes —

CLAY: This is how confusing it’s getting. Yes.

BUCK: — against women, or…? Yes.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Against women. So she…? So the biological female who is now claiming to be a male still swims against women. This is the part of this that… So why doesn’t the biological female who can compete and beat Lia Thomas and we know there’s collusion — why isn’t that individual swimming against men?

CLAY: It’s a great question. And, by the way, it gets complicated, and “It gets complicated” is probably going to become the subtext of all women’s athletics going forward as this occurred because this is not a big issue, to your point. If a biological woman decides that she wants to become a man, she has no chance of competing with male athletics, right?

There’s no way that that person would ever make a team, most of the time, and certainly would never compete in the context of winning actual swim meets. And so, the transgender activists like to say, “Well, this is not really a big deal. It cancels itself out.” No, it doesn’t, because biological men who decide to become women are the ones that are taking over women’s athletics.

And the scary part about this, Buck, is the number of actual female athletes that are willing to speak out against this is almost zero because these college athlete women want you to go to grad school, they want to get jobs, and they don’t want their number one Google result to be questioning whether transgender athletes should be competing against them.

BUCK: You swim in the Ivy League, for example, not because it’s gonna make you a millionaire, because it’s not. You swim in the Ivy League so you can get a job working in Google communications or something making 200 grand a year in your twenties, your late twenties, whatever. That’s why they do it. So, they don’t want to give that up, obviously. They’re all terrified.

CLAY: Yes. And, by the way, there’s arguments here — and this will be fascinating — that this may eventually end up at the Supreme Court because as women more and more are losing to biological men, there’s gonna be a question about how this is implicating Title IX, which requires even equality of scholarship. And if you’ve got a lot of biological men who are taking away — in theory — scholarships that would otherwise go to women, this is gonna turn into a monster issue going forward.