In a conversation about Thomas, one person said to me--it's just sport, and sport is corrupt anyway. I am not someone who is into sports generally myself. But this issue hits me hard. I was a competitive swimmer when I was in high school. A B grade swimmer, never someone who would make a college team. But somewhere in my basement I still have the one blue ribbon that I earned for the 50 yard backstroke. Why do I remember? Why does it matter? I knew I wasn't ever going to be a serious swimmer or an elite athlete. But it felt good to train, try my best, stretch the limits of my own body and yes, to try to win. I wouldn't have even stayed on the team if boys had been allowed to swim with us. So this is not just about the elite, it is about all girls and the joy in the movement of our bodies.
And of course, the issue is not really "women's sports." This is just one horrific lens. It's the overall degradation of women, the silencing of women, the gaslighting of women, the violation of women's boundaries. As she says:
"I still can't believe I had to tell my adult-age daughter. “You always have a choice about whether you undress in front of a man.” What messages that these girls have been receiving this year. How many of the other girls were feeling this? My heart was ripped apart. Damage far greater than the sports arena was now apparent to me."
This facet of the whole thing really bothers me too. I was a mediocre athlete in high school, and I never would’ve had a chance to do anything if I had to play with boys. This whole thing is humiliating to women, designed to make us say over and over again that were not as good as the men.
And women sports are not corrupt, unless were talking about certain countries dumping their athletes for the Olympics.
I wasn't much into sports at school: excelled at gymnastics & loved swimming but not much interested in competitive stuff.
But all this stuff about Lia Thomas makes me boil with anger: at the injustice, the hypocrisy, the callousness, the sheer bloody male entitlement and contempt for women that regards women's abilities, achievements and feelings as worthless.
My god what a heartrending story - I cannot understand why there are no protests outside the swim meet? is it 'cos the US is so absolutely captured? we would be doing it here wouldnt we?
It's revolting isn't it. Thank you for hosting this here Graham. The TRA brigade have been very patient, incredibly well-coordinated and funded to capture the law and all possible avenues for dissent were pre-emptively cut. These girls and their parents were snookered years before this man went out to greet his fawning audience at poolside. It must have been years in the planning and he greedily hopped on that movement. He will be known for the rest of his career and likely life for destroying women's rights and women's competitive swimming. I will never forgive him, Penn or the wider Ivy League.
By the time most of the rest of 'us' have woken up it's always apparently too late. We women are just seen as nagging and whining by too many. Reading the detail on how they reminded everyone at every point during swim meets that any opposition will be clamped down on as hate and transphobia show just how few rights those girls have. Yeah, yeah we get it already. Are they going to instruct the girls to not hold hands now? They're controlling every single other aspect of their behaviour. Holding hands is hardly a hate crime but I bet they spin it as exactly that. This is all patently coercive and abusive.
I think they have a good case to apply to study in other countries in an attempt to compete fairly and have a decent shot at success. Every US sportsman and woman needs to let the US know exactly what they think of this. Every voter and every citizen. Vote with their feet and their dollars as that's the only language they seem to hear.
I really am unsure why the UK has so far escaped the madder aspects of this. In Sharron Davies we trust!
It is and it's autocratic nonsense others are forced to live under. I knew a Chinese sports journalist who could turn the air blue with her views on how pathetic and likely to fall over with the lightest zephyr her UK sports studies students could be. I would be fascinated to hear her thoughts on this. She had very strict rules on who was accorded respect and why.
We accord respect to those that work hard, show commitment and dedicate themselves to any profession or skill and we do so all over the world in all cultures. We dislike cheats and liars. The Ivy League and a handful of people have blown that common and shared belief out of the water.
I think it's worth pointing out more often that the blatant cheating of men like Lia Thomas is hindering public acceptance of trans people generally. His bad example is counterproductive.
Absolutely. And increasing levels of homophobia too. Triple whammy for everyone else. How can anyone be forced to accept a heterosexual man claiming he's a lesbian? It's removing trust and understanding between people. They have bit by bit unpicked gains in actual, genuine human rights progression. None of what they do is 'progressive'. It's recidivist and smashing our rights which is the definition of regressive.
“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
It is very painful to hear even when we know what is going on. How women have been and are being betrayed. I wish the very worst to the architects of this humiliation.
Thank you for sharing this with your subscribers. As many people as possible should hear this account. As a signatory of the declaration on women's sex-based rights, I get an invite to their webinar events and I am glad I heard this mother's story live. I am just so angry that the girl's voices are being silenced and the mother has to stay anonymous. I hope that sense prevails soon, that policies are reversed and Lia's results are expunged from the records. Then we can all learn who this brave mother is and thank her.
The most disgusting part of this for me - and there are many to choose from - is that it had clearly been getting planned for months if not years and there was absolutely no attempt to consult, prepare, or take the girls feelings into account.
They didn't even have the decency to pretend to consult.
The whole thing was done in an aggressive, bullying, abusive manner when it didn't need to be.
They were smart enough to avoid consulting as that avoided anyone knowing what was happening, so no-one could protest until it was too late.
This reflects the recommended tactics for trans activists at every level: including direct approaches to governments of 46 countries, with readymade proposals to change the law, language, education and sport -- and to keep the media out of it, so that the public wouldn't know what was happening & so could not protest. Until it was too late.
Read an article by James Kirkup "The remarkable tactics of trans lobbyists" (spectator.co.uk, December 2019). The strategy was prepared by an international law firm called Dentons, funded by Thomson-Reuters (one of the largest charitable foundations in the world).
For me, the worst of it - and that's pretty damning considering it's all so hideously damning - is the mother coming up against the cold-eyed dogma of the lawyer, a woman lawyer at that (as in the old-fashioned, boring female kind), at the ACLU. I don't know if the ACLU "has lost its way" is remotely an adequate description to what is going on here, since rather they seem to be actively set upon destroying the rights of women and girls.
As a subscriber to the NYTimes (still just about hanging in there despite their recent pitiful ad campaign which saw fit to throw JK Rowling under the bus), I recently saw an ad by the ACLU in the online paper which ran with three projects they were behind: Protecting voting rights, protecting abortion rights, then, muscling in on those two goals which many ordinary people would back, there was the wooly but reasonable-sounding "trans people's rights to live freely".
Yet this is what the ACLU means by that vague statement: Trans rights are a male swimmer trashing the years of training and sacrifice of girls and their supportive families, who went to the pool every morning early before school. Trans rights are the rights of a male sex offender who only five minutes ago cottoned on that he could identify his way out of a male prison. Trans rights are a group of women minding their own business in a female locker room in the WiSpa Los Angeles and enduring a serial sexual offender getting his kicks out of exposing himself beside them, and those women being denounced then as bigots for objecting.
I think a way forward might be to make some of the ACLU's donors aware of this tape and the ACLU's position on this. There will be many reasonable but unaware donors. The ACLU seems to be faced with competing aims right now. In the past, for example, it has defended the KKK, in the name of free speech so it has always made decisions which people will feel uncomfortable with but which some would argue are part of a society where free speech is sacrosanct and a cornerstone of democracy. But there are other voices in the ACLU now who see themselves more as "progressive" activist types who would argue that the mother in the tape is using hate speech. However, even if she is (obviously, she is not), the ACLU would previously, I believe, have supported her right and that of the swim team to voice their objections and possibly to take action against their college. Like many institutions, there's probably an internal battle about this kind of stuff going on in the ACLU.
I would never contribute to them financially, not now, no matter what other important work they are doing. When it's at the expense of women and girls yet again being told to sit down, shut up and be kind, that's my line in the sand.
The ACLU has been god-awful for a while now; the organization was taken down systematically from above and within. No longer has any principles, except assisting trans-identifiers in gutting other people's rights. ACLU represented the boys who stole high school girl track trophies in Connecticut; filed suit against a woman in my state who filed a freedom of information act request to find out numbers of men in women's prisons. They represent male convicts, getting them into women's prisons. ACLU has been destroyed. Same thing has happened with Planned Parenthood and other groups. (I'm watching environmental groups, and others be destroyed by this stuff.) This issue is WAY bigger than the sum of its horrific pieces. There is a wholesale destruction underway of civil rights, social justice organizations, freedom of speech, etc.
Jennifer Bilek of the11thHourBlog.com ("Technology-Transgender-Capitalism") was deplatformed as an environmental activist in 2014, by TRAs.
This is what prompted her suspicion that there might be big money behind what posed as a "civil rights" movement, & started her looking into the financial aspects of the $multibillion transgender industry, funded by super-rich white men.
One of the parts of this interview that stood out for me was this:
"The one race in the meet where the girls all knew beforehand who was competing and had a chance to talk to each other across multiple teams. They all marched out holding hands from the ready room, around the pool all the way behind the blocks."
That's it, that's the limit of the action those girls could take without all being thrown out of the meet: holding hands without him.
I hope they're still allowed to go out next market day.
Thank you Graham. So many seeing this from the substack, will finally have access to these chilling words, from this mother. It’s actually gut wrenching to realise this is being perpetuated, the involvement of so many offices, to keep this looking calm and acceptable is ridiculous.
Such a shame that this huge shouldered man, can’t be hidden nicely away, like a 5’6” male could be, whereas 6’4”? and built like a wardrobe really peaked so many, didn’t it ?
As Martina Navratilova has tweeted - this is a joke.
I'd go further, it's a sick, sick misogynistic joke. I don't care what his motivations are, Thomas is a cheat, and is being enabled in his cheating. Cheats don't get the privilege of women using wrong-sex pronouns to refer to them - they have shown the women they've stomped on no such respect. I think the only thing that will change the situation is for a mass protest by his team-mates and competitors. It should never have to come to this - because it's a joke.
Can people please share this with people like Stella Creasy and ask them why they support this?
In a conversation about Thomas, one person said to me--it's just sport, and sport is corrupt anyway. I am not someone who is into sports generally myself. But this issue hits me hard. I was a competitive swimmer when I was in high school. A B grade swimmer, never someone who would make a college team. But somewhere in my basement I still have the one blue ribbon that I earned for the 50 yard backstroke. Why do I remember? Why does it matter? I knew I wasn't ever going to be a serious swimmer or an elite athlete. But it felt good to train, try my best, stretch the limits of my own body and yes, to try to win. I wouldn't have even stayed on the team if boys had been allowed to swim with us. So this is not just about the elite, it is about all girls and the joy in the movement of our bodies.
And of course, the issue is not really "women's sports." This is just one horrific lens. It's the overall degradation of women, the silencing of women, the gaslighting of women, the violation of women's boundaries. As she says:
"I still can't believe I had to tell my adult-age daughter. “You always have a choice about whether you undress in front of a man.” What messages that these girls have been receiving this year. How many of the other girls were feeling this? My heart was ripped apart. Damage far greater than the sports arena was now apparent to me."
This facet of the whole thing really bothers me too. I was a mediocre athlete in high school, and I never would’ve had a chance to do anything if I had to play with boys. This whole thing is humiliating to women, designed to make us say over and over again that were not as good as the men.
And women sports are not corrupt, unless were talking about certain countries dumping their athletes for the Olympics.
I wasn't much into sports at school: excelled at gymnastics & loved swimming but not much interested in competitive stuff.
But all this stuff about Lia Thomas makes me boil with anger: at the injustice, the hypocrisy, the callousness, the sheer bloody male entitlement and contempt for women that regards women's abilities, achievements and feelings as worthless.
Thank you SO much for preserving this and transcribing it! This needs to be shared widely, but our tech overlords want it squashed!
It was a message. It was silent but it was a message. “We support each other”
My god what a heartrending story - I cannot understand why there are no protests outside the swim meet? is it 'cos the US is so absolutely captured? we would be doing it here wouldnt we?
It's revolting isn't it. Thank you for hosting this here Graham. The TRA brigade have been very patient, incredibly well-coordinated and funded to capture the law and all possible avenues for dissent were pre-emptively cut. These girls and their parents were snookered years before this man went out to greet his fawning audience at poolside. It must have been years in the planning and he greedily hopped on that movement. He will be known for the rest of his career and likely life for destroying women's rights and women's competitive swimming. I will never forgive him, Penn or the wider Ivy League.
By the time most of the rest of 'us' have woken up it's always apparently too late. We women are just seen as nagging and whining by too many. Reading the detail on how they reminded everyone at every point during swim meets that any opposition will be clamped down on as hate and transphobia show just how few rights those girls have. Yeah, yeah we get it already. Are they going to instruct the girls to not hold hands now? They're controlling every single other aspect of their behaviour. Holding hands is hardly a hate crime but I bet they spin it as exactly that. This is all patently coercive and abusive.
I think they have a good case to apply to study in other countries in an attempt to compete fairly and have a decent shot at success. Every US sportsman and woman needs to let the US know exactly what they think of this. Every voter and every citizen. Vote with their feet and their dollars as that's the only language they seem to hear.
I really am unsure why the UK has so far escaped the madder aspects of this. In Sharron Davies we trust!
It is like China
It is and it's autocratic nonsense others are forced to live under. I knew a Chinese sports journalist who could turn the air blue with her views on how pathetic and likely to fall over with the lightest zephyr her UK sports studies students could be. I would be fascinated to hear her thoughts on this. She had very strict rules on who was accorded respect and why.
We accord respect to those that work hard, show commitment and dedicate themselves to any profession or skill and we do so all over the world in all cultures. We dislike cheats and liars. The Ivy League and a handful of people have blown that common and shared belief out of the water.
They are regarded as cheats. I read the comments - more and more of them
I think it's worth pointing out more often that the blatant cheating of men like Lia Thomas is hindering public acceptance of trans people generally. His bad example is counterproductive.
Absolutely. And increasing levels of homophobia too. Triple whammy for everyone else. How can anyone be forced to accept a heterosexual man claiming he's a lesbian? It's removing trust and understanding between people. They have bit by bit unpicked gains in actual, genuine human rights progression. None of what they do is 'progressive'. It's recidivist and smashing our rights which is the definition of regressive.
“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
― Theodore Dalrymple
"War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength"
...
"Transwomen Are Women"
Gaslighting in aid of coercive control: the modus operandi of gender ideology.
Which is why mature women who have experienced emotional abuse see this for what it is. And young naive women, the footsoldiers, cannot.
Yes: it's a case study in coercive control. Aided by gaslighting.
It is very painful to hear even when we know what is going on. How women have been and are being betrayed. I wish the very worst to the architects of this humiliation.
Is it just me - isn’t this utterly utterly evil?
yes it is. It's pure evil
It's evil and vile - women as things
Thank you for sharing this with your subscribers. As many people as possible should hear this account. As a signatory of the declaration on women's sex-based rights, I get an invite to their webinar events and I am glad I heard this mother's story live. I am just so angry that the girl's voices are being silenced and the mother has to stay anonymous. I hope that sense prevails soon, that policies are reversed and Lia's results are expunged from the records. Then we can all learn who this brave mother is and thank her.
The most disgusting part of this for me - and there are many to choose from - is that it had clearly been getting planned for months if not years and there was absolutely no attempt to consult, prepare, or take the girls feelings into account.
They didn't even have the decency to pretend to consult.
The whole thing was done in an aggressive, bullying, abusive manner when it didn't need to be.
They were smart enough to avoid consulting as that avoided anyone knowing what was happening, so no-one could protest until it was too late.
This reflects the recommended tactics for trans activists at every level: including direct approaches to governments of 46 countries, with readymade proposals to change the law, language, education and sport -- and to keep the media out of it, so that the public wouldn't know what was happening & so could not protest. Until it was too late.
Read an article by James Kirkup "The remarkable tactics of trans lobbyists" (spectator.co.uk, December 2019). The strategy was prepared by an international law firm called Dentons, funded by Thomson-Reuters (one of the largest charitable foundations in the world).
For me, the worst of it - and that's pretty damning considering it's all so hideously damning - is the mother coming up against the cold-eyed dogma of the lawyer, a woman lawyer at that (as in the old-fashioned, boring female kind), at the ACLU. I don't know if the ACLU "has lost its way" is remotely an adequate description to what is going on here, since rather they seem to be actively set upon destroying the rights of women and girls.
As a subscriber to the NYTimes (still just about hanging in there despite their recent pitiful ad campaign which saw fit to throw JK Rowling under the bus), I recently saw an ad by the ACLU in the online paper which ran with three projects they were behind: Protecting voting rights, protecting abortion rights, then, muscling in on those two goals which many ordinary people would back, there was the wooly but reasonable-sounding "trans people's rights to live freely".
Yet this is what the ACLU means by that vague statement: Trans rights are a male swimmer trashing the years of training and sacrifice of girls and their supportive families, who went to the pool every morning early before school. Trans rights are the rights of a male sex offender who only five minutes ago cottoned on that he could identify his way out of a male prison. Trans rights are a group of women minding their own business in a female locker room in the WiSpa Los Angeles and enduring a serial sexual offender getting his kicks out of exposing himself beside them, and those women being denounced then as bigots for objecting.
I think a way forward might be to make some of the ACLU's donors aware of this tape and the ACLU's position on this. There will be many reasonable but unaware donors. The ACLU seems to be faced with competing aims right now. In the past, for example, it has defended the KKK, in the name of free speech so it has always made decisions which people will feel uncomfortable with but which some would argue are part of a society where free speech is sacrosanct and a cornerstone of democracy. But there are other voices in the ACLU now who see themselves more as "progressive" activist types who would argue that the mother in the tape is using hate speech. However, even if she is (obviously, she is not), the ACLU would previously, I believe, have supported her right and that of the swim team to voice their objections and possibly to take action against their college. Like many institutions, there's probably an internal battle about this kind of stuff going on in the ACLU.
I would never contribute to them financially, not now, no matter what other important work they are doing. When it's at the expense of women and girls yet again being told to sit down, shut up and be kind, that's my line in the sand.
A very similar thing has happened with Amnesty
The ACLU has been god-awful for a while now; the organization was taken down systematically from above and within. No longer has any principles, except assisting trans-identifiers in gutting other people's rights. ACLU represented the boys who stole high school girl track trophies in Connecticut; filed suit against a woman in my state who filed a freedom of information act request to find out numbers of men in women's prisons. They represent male convicts, getting them into women's prisons. ACLU has been destroyed. Same thing has happened with Planned Parenthood and other groups. (I'm watching environmental groups, and others be destroyed by this stuff.) This issue is WAY bigger than the sum of its horrific pieces. There is a wholesale destruction underway of civil rights, social justice organizations, freedom of speech, etc.
Jennifer Bilek of the11thHourBlog.com ("Technology-Transgender-Capitalism") was deplatformed as an environmental activist in 2014, by TRAs.
This is what prompted her suspicion that there might be big money behind what posed as a "civil rights" movement, & started her looking into the financial aspects of the $multibillion transgender industry, funded by super-rich white men.
Yes, I think you are right.
One of the parts of this interview that stood out for me was this:
"The one race in the meet where the girls all knew beforehand who was competing and had a chance to talk to each other across multiple teams. They all marched out holding hands from the ready room, around the pool all the way behind the blocks."
That's it, that's the limit of the action those girls could take without all being thrown out of the meet: holding hands without him.
I hope they're still allowed to go out next market day.
Thank you Graham. So many seeing this from the substack, will finally have access to these chilling words, from this mother. It’s actually gut wrenching to realise this is being perpetuated, the involvement of so many offices, to keep this looking calm and acceptable is ridiculous.
Such a shame that this huge shouldered man, can’t be hidden nicely away, like a 5’6” male could be, whereas 6’4”? and built like a wardrobe really peaked so many, didn’t it ?
He's a handsome fellow.
I hope he never gets laid again in his life.
Thank you for this. I’ve not been able to watch it because always marked ‘private’. The silencing tactics are horrendous.
As Martina Navratilova has tweeted - this is a joke.
I'd go further, it's a sick, sick misogynistic joke. I don't care what his motivations are, Thomas is a cheat, and is being enabled in his cheating. Cheats don't get the privilege of women using wrong-sex pronouns to refer to them - they have shown the women they've stomped on no such respect. I think the only thing that will change the situation is for a mass protest by his team-mates and competitors. It should never have to come to this - because it's a joke.
Protest in everything in public life that is doing this. Men enabling this do not deserve the company of women.
It's a joke For Men Only. No-one else is laughing.
It is a joke for men with fetishes. A lot of other men don't even know that the joke exists.
That's a good point - one I want mainstream asap
This is so desperately sad. I feel for those girls. They want so badly to silence us it seems to be at any cost
It's now available again on Youtube. Nearly 8.30 am West Coast USA, 11.30 am East Coast, 4.30 pm UK time.