I do not know how many websites have, and publish, their own “stylebook,” but at The First Street Journal, I do. From that Stylebook:
Those who claim to be transgender will be referred to with the honorific and pronouns appropriate to the sex of their birth; the site owner does not agree with the cockamamie notion that anyone can simply ‘identify’ with a sex which is not his own, nor that any medical ‘treatment’ or surgery can change a person’s natural sex; all that it can do is physically mutilate a person.
That is, of course, wholly at odds with the Associated Press Stylebook, which is used by many, though certainly not all, credentialed media sources, which specifies language which reinforces the notion that a person can define his ‘gender’ as something different from his biological sex, and that such choices can, should, and must be accepted by society as real.
And so we come to NBC News:
Lia Thomas, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, has become the most recent target in the heated debate about trans women athletes.
By Jo Yurcaba | Thursday, December 16, 2021 | 5:23 PM EST
A swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania is the latest target in the culture-war debate over whether transgender girls and women should be allowed to participate on female sports teams.
Lia Thomas, who came out as trans in 2019, set three school records and two national records at a meet this month.
Since then, Thomas has faced criticism and verbal attacks from anti-trans groups, conservative media and, reportedly, even two teammates.
Some of the headlines about Thomas’ wins said she “smashed” the records and continued her “dominant” season alongside pre-transition photos of her and using her previous name and male pronouns — practices known as deadnaming and misgendering.
As we have previously noted, Twitter bans “deadnaming” and “misgendering”, not allowing any discussion of whether the ‘transgendered’ really are the sex they claim to be rather than their biological sex — something The New York Times gave Chad Malloy space to claim actually promotes freedom of speech. I will confess to having difficulty with the notion that restricting speech somehow promotes freedom of speech. Were I to submit this article for publication to the Times — something of which I have no intention of doing — I would have to change all references to those deemed acceptable by their stylebook, and, in doing so, concede the argument that sex can be changed!
Transgender advocates have condemned that coverage and some of the conversation about Thomas as transphobic. They said it mischaracterizes her victories to make it appear that transgender women are cheating just by being trans and implies that one trans woman winning means trans women generally are dominating women’s sports. They note that Thomas is competing within guidance issued by the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
What I have pointed out is that Will Thomas and his swimming records, competing against biological women, prove that “trans women” are very different from real women. On Sunday, December 5th, Mr Thomas, won the 1,650 yard freestyle with a time of 15:59:71; the second-place finisher was his teammate Anna Sofia Kalandaze, who touched at 16:37:44 in the Zippy Invitational Event in Akron, Ohio. The difference between Mr Thomas’ and Miss Kalandaze’s times is 37.73 seconds.
Competitive swimming at the collegiate level involves races which are often won by fractions of a second. A victory of 37.73 seconds is extraordinary.
In the 500-yard freestyle final, Mr Thomas again defeated his teammate, Miss Kalandaze, who finished second, 4:34.06 to 4:48.99, a 14.93 second margin; Miss Kalandaze defeated the seventh-place finisher by 7.42 seconds, just half of the time she was behind Mr Thomas.
Mr Thomas time would have finished 15th in the men’s final, ahead of ten other male swimmers. The last place male swimmer in the 500 yard freestyle, Luke Scoboria of Bloomsburg University, finished at 4:42.78, 7.21 seconds ahead of Miss Kalandaze’s second-place time. His year of taking testosterone suppressants — whether he has undergone ‘sexual reassignment surgery’ is not something I have found in the published record — have obviously not done what the NCAA believe it would.
Thomas’ critics have varying views. Some have used explicitly anti-transgender language and argue that trans women should be completely banned from women’s sports, while others argue that the NCAA’s policy regarding trans athletes’ participation isn’t strict enough.
Thomas declined an interview with NBC News and has done only one recent interview, with the podcast SwimSwam. In that interview, she said she and her coaches expected that there would be “some measure of pushback” in response to her competing, but not “quite to the extent that it has blown up.”
“I just don’t engage with it,” she said, regarding the criticism. “It’s not healthy for me to read it and engage with it at all, and so I don’t, and that’s all I’ll say on that.”
Of course Mr Thomas does not wish to engage with it, because, regardless of how he feels about things, his swimming records point out the differences, shout out the differences, between males and females. I get it: he really wants to feel like a woman, but he just isn’t one. Even he has to wonder about all of this, because with every meet he swims, every record he breaks, he is demonstrating the differences between himself as a ‘trans woman,’ and real women.
The Daily Mail reported:
‘Usually everyone claps, everyone is yelling and cheering when someone wins a race. Lia touched the wall and it was just silent in there. When fellow Penn swimmer Anna Kalandadze finished second, the crowd erupted in applause.’
Simply put, regardless of what Jo Yurcaba says, regardless of what Bruce Jenner or Bradley Manning or Will Thomas believe, the crowd of ordinary people knew what had happened, knew what was going on, and knew that the winner was not a real female swimmer.
This is the part I simply do not understand: if Mr Thomas believes that he really is a woman, why is he doing things which make the differences between him and real women so apparent?
It is wholly politically incorrect to say that men and women are different, but I’m not exactly politically correct; men and women are different, and somehow, some way, every human society about which we have any knowledge knew about and understood those difference. Every bird, every reptile, and every mammal, can tell the difference between males and females of their own species; it’s necessary for survival. Some mammals, cats and dogs for instance, appear to be able to distinguish between human males and females. It is only now, among our 21st century liberals that that innate ability has been educated right out of them.
