Former Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines was among more than a dozen college athletes who filed a lawsuit against the NCAA on Thursday, accusing it of violating their Title IX rights by allowing transgender woman Lia Thomas to compete at the national championships in 2022.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Atlanta, details the shock Gaines and other swimmers felt when they learned they would have to share a locker room with Thomas at the championships in Atlanta. It documents a number of races they swam in with Thomas, including the 200-yard final in which Thomas and Gaines tied for fifth but Thomas, not Gaines, was handed the fifth-place trophy.
Thomas swam for Pennsylvania. She competed for the men’s team at Penn before her gender transition.
Thomas was the first openly transgender athlete to win a Division I title in any sport, finishing in front of three Olympic medalists for the championship. By not making the final, the lawsuit mentions that Florida swimmer Tylor Mathieu, who was not a plaintiff, was denied first-team All-American honors in that event.
Other plaintiffs included athletes from volleyball and track.
It’s very easy to resolve, most kids that participate in sports are themselves (shockingly) also kids and will not have gained any advantage if allowed to transition early enough. Even a year or two of puberty is going to shed away very quickly.
(And leave us older trans people who are no longer teenagers who might have gone through a full puberty to have that advantage not participate in sports, and leave kids alone to transition and participate in their chosen gender.)
Either way this is a problem that resolves itself if trans people are allowed to accept and be themselves when they figure it out, which would be a lot more possible if people actually took the time to understand us.
Also genetic advantages like Micheal Phelp’s lungs and body have always been a part of sports. So if we happen to want to play sports we’re still women playing sports with a genetic disadvantage in every way that matters to us like having babies. (sports are the last thing on most of our minds)
Either way stop making trans people the center of your political battles. We just want to live without you fucking up our lives. We aren’t anything that matters to the vast majority of instances. We are the rare exception. Go figure out that they’d rather you argue about us than about the actual issues like health care, abortion, union rights, civil rights, etc.
Letting kids transition before they even reach puberty is a great way to potentially ruin their lives forever. Kids are so impressionable and change faster than the wind. They instantly succumb to peer pressure and 99% of the cases have no clue what they want because they are kids. They don’t have a lot of life experience.
I know only one case where I knew that transition would have been normal at any age for him. When we were kids it would have been 100% impossible. Now we are older farts and he still didn’t transition, he doesn’t want and would have regretted the decision if he would have had the possibility to do it as a kid.
Transition as a kid should be nearly impossible and you should be put through an infinite amount of tests and visits to the doctor. Reach an age where you can be considered an adult, go ahead and schedule an appointment and transition away. Do as you please.