Fomer Kentucky swim star Riley Gaines and tennis legend Martina Navratilova each sounded off Saturday on the College of Pennsylvania’s resolution to appoint trans swimmer Lia Thomas for the “NCAA Girl of the Yr” prize. Opinion’s Becca Decrease introduced you the story of the nomination final Friday. Radio host and Outkick co-founder Clay Travis summed up his ideas in a tweet:
Penn nominated transgender swimmer Lia Thomas as their NCAA lady of the 12 months. Hell of an accomplishment to be lady of the 12 months after solely being a girl for a few years. https://t.co/gW3acTQ1Jl
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) July 15, 2022
Discover another person in that photograph? That’s Riley Gaines, who was additionally nominated for the award by the College of Kentucky, and who received three particular person convention titles within the SEC, broke two SEC data, had 12 All-America awards and graduated with summa cum laude honors — however misplaced to Thomas within the 200-yard freestyle on the NCAA championships earlier this 12 months. As a result of, equity or one thing.
She responded:
Being the actual woman in that photograph and in addition College of Kentucky’s nominee for NCAA WOTY, that is yet one more slap within the face to girls. First a feminine nationwide title and now nominated for the head award in collegiate athletics. The @NCAA has made this award nugatory. https://t.co/MRCieqbltd
— Riley Gaines (@RileyGaines) July 16, 2022
Gaines wrote:
[T]his is yet one more slap within the face to girls. First a feminine nationwide title and now nominated for the head award in collegiate athletics. The NCAA has made this award nugatory.
She didn’t cease there, although, blasting the choice:
This award combines athletic efficiency with lecturers, service, and character. What character has Thomas proven aside from sheer selfishness and entitlement? The disrespect and disrespect for the opposite feminine athletes in Thomas’ interviews is eye opening.
Lia Thomas, in the event you missed it, is transgender, and competed on the UPenn males’s staff for 3 years earlier than present process hormone remedy and switching to the ladies’s staff for a senior 12 months. Not surprisingly, the 6′ 1″ swimmer went on to smash quite a few data and received an NCCA title within the 500-yard freestyle last. Thomas famously claimed on Good Morning America that, “I additionally don’t want anyone’s permission to be myself and do the game I like.”
Everybody else be damned. “Trans girls should not a risk to girls’s sports activities,” she mentioned—a quote displaying seemingly zero consciousness of the results of male physiology on girls’s competitors.
Riley Gaines wasn’t the one individual to be outraged by the nomination, nonetheless. Girls’s tennis legend Martina Navratilova, who has received probably the most main titles in girls’s tennis since 1968, isn’t hiding her emotions:
Not sufficient fabulous organic girls athletes, NCAA?!? What’s unsuitable with you?!!!!!!!? https://t.co/5QAJyt0Qab
— Martina Navratilova (@Martina) July 16, 2022
“Not sufficient fabulous organic girls athletes, NCAA?!? What’s unsuitable with you?!!!!!!!?” she tweeted.
Extra voices chimed in: Former NCAA champion swimmer Marshi Smith wrote: “What number of girls’s awards are we prepared to give up? The Ivy League selecting a male as their nominee is doubling down on their anti-woman marketing campaign.”
I keep in mind 5–6 years in the past discussing present occasions with a liberal relative. “You see the place that is going, don’t you?” I requested him. “Trans males will begin competing in girls’s sports activities, and they’ll dominate.”
“You’re simply being a conservative reactionary,” he responded. “That may by no means occur.”
Properly, it is occurring, and swimming is just one of many sports activities the place we’re seeing the phenomenon. Monitor and area has seen biologically male athletes dominate organic females, with devastating outcomes. We’ve got but to see organic males enter the world of faculty basketball, however once they inevitably do if this development continues, count on them to completely slay the competitors.
I like my spouse, and I like my daughters, and I like seeing them compete in athletics. However they weren’t meant to battle towards males. Bear in mind: the FC Dallas under-15 boys squad simply defeated the U.S. Girls’s Nationwide Workforce in a scrimmage. The U.S. Girls’s Nationwide Workforce. This isn’t anti-women, it’s pro-reality.
This has gone too far. I’m all for folks dwelling as who they’re, and being what they need to be. However males shouldn’t compete towards girls, and Lia Thomas ought to man up, resign this award and let or not it’s given to the achieved biologically feminine athlete who earned it.
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