The New Yorker has fallen

Arty Morty on the magazine's disgraceful coverage of Lia Thomas

The New Yorker has finally chimed in on the Lia Thomas debacle, and it’s a disgrace. The cult-like language used throughout is a stain on its reputation. Remember, The New Yorker is renowned for having the most prestigious and respected fact-checking department in the world. Nevertheless, here we are.

Let’s go through the article together, shall we? Let’s imagine that we’re fact-checkers working under Harold Ross, realising with the arrival of this piece we’re not leaving work early for the weekend.

Lia Thomas has been swimming since she was five years old. As a high schooler, she was one of the top swimmers in Texas, an All-American. She followed her older brother onto the men’s team at the University of Pennsylvania, and established herself as a strong competitor in distance races; in her sophomore season, at the Ivy League championships, she finished second in three events. 

He. Since he was five years old. He was a boy named Will, He finished second in three events. It’s a matter of record that he competed in men’s events. Under the name Will.

Out of the pool, though, she was struggling. Her body, with its solid pectorals and compact, muscled hips, characteristic traits of a male athlete

That’s because he IS a male athlete.

didn’t align with her sense of who she was, she later told the podcast SwimSwam, in one of the two interviews she has given this season.

This is a category mistake. One’s “sense” of who they are has no bearing on the material facts of what their body literally is — in this case, an unambiguously male one. It’s fashionable to humour people’s “sense” of who they “feel” they “really” are, but the customs of middle-class social-justice-oriented etiquette do not override the facts of biology. He’s a male.

She read the personal stories of trans women online, and was paired with a trans mentor through a group at Penn. She saw her own feelings reflected in their stories, she recently told Sports Illustrated. In the summer of 2018, after her freshman season, she realized that she was a woman, not a man.

In other words, he got involved with gender identity ideologues who indoctrinated him into their belief system, and convinced him that whatever he was feeling — perhaps gender dysphoria, perhaps autogynephilia, maybe both, but this can’t be fact-checked from simple say-so alone — meant that he’s a female born in a male body.

It took her a while to come out to her teammates and coaches. She didn’t want to jeopardize her swimming career. And she was swimming well: setting personal bests, breaking pool records.

It is not reasonable to go from almost 500th place to first and worry that you are jeopardizing your career. Quite the opposite. This is perhaps the most egregious line in a piece absolutely full of them.

Still, the suffering became too much; knowing that she was a woman and competing as a man “caused me a lot of distress,” she has said. 

He did not “know” that he was a woman, he came to believe so after being indoctrinated into gender identity ideology.

The N.C.A.A. allowed a path for people like her to join the women’s team, but it was not quick or easy. In general, élite male athletes have considerable physical advantages over élite female athletes

Whoops, you’ve just acknowledged that “people like her [sic]” are, in fact, “élite male athletes” who “have considerable physical advantages over élite female athletes.” That should put an end to this article, that fact right there.

People who have gone through testosterone-driven puberty have, on average, more cardiovascular capacity, greater muscle mass, higher tendon mechanical strength, and denser bones. They tend to be stronger and taller, with longer wingspans. In many sports involving timed races, men are roughly ten to twelve per cent faster than women. [...] After consulting with students, medical experts, and people from the L.G.B.T.Q. community, the [NCAA] announced that trans women would be able to compete on collegiate women’s teams after one year of testosterone suppression. Other governing bodies, including the I.O.C., went on to adopt similar rules.

The focus on testosterone seemed, to many, straightforward: on average, men have testosterone levels around fifteen times that of women, and the competitive advantages of taking testosterone—at least exogenous testosterone, a steroid—were well established

The benefits of testosterone are indeed well-established, and it’s well-established that they aren’t the only benefits male bodies have. In fact, you just said that males have more cardiovascular capacity, greater muscle mass, higher tendon mechanical strength, denser bones, and they tend to be stronger and taller, with longer wingspans. A year of injecting estrogen quite obviously does not shrink the length of a man’s arms or the size of his lungs.

There is a gap between the range of testosterone levels in men and the range in women—one researcher described it to me as a “chasm”—but there is enough variability among élite athletes to create some small degree of possible overlap between sexes

A small degree of possible overlap in testosterone levels between the sexes does not suggest that the sexes are possibly equal for the purposes of competitive sports. At all. This is just utterly irrelevant.

At the same time, hormone-replacement therapy may not counteract all the competitive advantages a body might gain during testosterone-driven puberty. It may not fully reduce the difference in lean body mass or in grip strength, for instance, or change the width of a pelvis. 

There’s no maybe about it. If a few months without testosterone literally rearranged a man’s pelvic bones, we’d have heard about it by now. 

As Thomas underwent hormone-replacement therapy, and went through something like female puberty, she noticed some of her muscles softening. Fat was redistributed around her body, and she felt herself losing aerobic capacity. Her times in the pool started rising. She continued to swim with the men’s team, sporadically, wearing a women’s suit. 

Since he was willing to continue to swim on the men’s team even after he declared he had a transgender identity, and his male teammates supported him in doing so, then it’s clear he knows what sex he is, and it’s clear he wasn’t at risk of discrimination on the basis of his gender identity. If he decided to switch to the women’s team only after his competitive times (which were never stellar to begin with) started to slip, then this is evidence of opportunism. Cheating, in other words.

Few people paid attention when, in a meet against Princeton and Cornell, in November, she put up the season’s best times in the two-hundred-yard and five-hundred-yard freestyle races, and set Penn records. But, in early December, at the Zippy Invitational, in Akron, Ohio, Thomas dropped another second off her time in the five-hundred-yard freestyle, and nearly a second and a half off her time in the two-hundred-yard race. She won the sixteen-hundred-and-fifty-yard freestyle by thirty-eight seconds.

Again, this is expected. You’ve already established the multiple ways in which males have athletic advantages over females. It’s not surprising that a mediocre male athlete would break records in the women’s category.

On the same day, a group of parents of Penn swimmers anonymously sent a letter to the N.C.A.A. arguing that Thomas should not be allowed to compete in women’s competitions. “At stake here is the integrity of women’s sports,” the parents’ letter, which was also sent to Penn and the Ivy League, declared. “The precedent being set—one in which women do not have a protected and equitable space to compete—is a direct threat to female athletes in every sport. What are the boundaries?”

The letter was leaked to the Daily Mail, and conservative outlets gleefully reported on rifts between Thomas and her teammates.

Not only conservative outlets, not all “gleefully”, and would you care to venture an explanation why more liberal outlets aren’t reporting on this extremely important story, hmm?

Some published photos of Thomas from before her transition and referred to her using the name she had gone by then.

Will. The name was Will. And there’s nothing illegal or improper in saying his former name or publishing pictures of him from a couple years ago. Again, in fashionable middle-class circles, this may be seen as gauche, but that’s a far cry from journalistically unethical, unless you think journalism is just a chat room for privileged New Yorkers. (Oh wait — you are writing for The New Yorker…)

In fact, Thomas’s top time in the five-hundred-yard freestyle is a full ten seconds slower than [Katie] Ledecky’s, and Franklin’s record is also well ahead of Thomas’s best. It’s possible that Thomas will best them at the N.C.A.A. Championships, which began on Wednesday, but to hear some people, the broken records are a foregone conclusion. 

If you’re debating whether or not just one single male athlete competing in a women’s category is guaranteed to immediately break the all-time records in the sport, and your line of defence is that such a conclusion is certainly “possible” but not yet entirely foregone, then it’s clear there’s a monumental problem here.

After Thomas lost a race to Iszac Henig, a transgender man who has not medically transitioned [i.e., a female who simply “identifies” as a transgender man] and swims for Yale’s women’s team, one of Thomas’s teammates anonymously accused them of colluding on the result. 

Interesting, and not implausible. There’s evidence already, from within your piece, that Thomas is inclined to cheat. Now we have allegations of explicit cheating. Why haven’t you looked into these allegations further? And why do you have nothing to say about a transgender man [a.k.a. a woman] competing with women? If you’re so adamant that one’s self-declared trans status should always override their biological sex, why haven’t you addressed this obvious hypocrisy?

It was impossible to ignore the political context in which all this was happening: hundreds of bills have been introduced to restrict transgender people’s access not only to sports but to health care.

No bills have ever restricted transgender people’s access to sports. In your own piece, you said that Lia Thomas continued to swim on the men’s team after he came out as transgender and even after he began hormone therapy. Thomas chose to switch to the women’s team after the hormones he voluntarily chose to take in order to indulge his gender identity began slowing him down. This is in your piece.

 Is it ethical to require medical interventions of healthy people who wish to compete in women’s sports?

Healthy PEOPLE don’t compete in women’s sports. Healthy WOMEN compete in women’s sports. Unbelievable that you think women’s sports should be available to ALL PEOPLE who want to play in them. Unbelievable that you’re pondering whether it’s “ethical” for women’s sports to be for women — adult human females. Just nuts.

Female athletes have bodies of different sizes, colors, shapes, and sexualities. Those bodies, especially those that differ from a feminine—and, often, white—ideal, have, for a long time, been castigated as too muscular, too masculine, too threatening. 

The NCAA does not disqualify nonwhite females from competing in women’s swimming. Neither does the IOC or any other respectable athletic organization. This is racist. Women’s sport is and has always been for biological females. Questions of gender identity or religious identity or vegetarian identity or astrological identity are irrelevant. African-American Mormon vegan Sagittarian non-binary females are still female and NO ONE is disqualifying them from competing.

Women’s sports have thrived by challenging the limits that circumscribe what women can supposedly do, and who they supposedly are. At the same time, the division of sports into men’s and women’s categories serves a purpose—it allows female athletes to be considered on their own terms

You wonder who women “supposedly are” and five seconds later you concede that women’s sports are for “female athletes to be considered on their own terms”. My brain hurts.

The argument about Lia Thomas, a college student from Texas in her early twenties, is also an argument about whether there are, finally, defining lines, and who gets to set them.

Biological facts get to set them. There. That was easy.

Joanna Harper is a nationally ranked master’s runner. For a long time, she competed alongside men. But, in 2004, she decided to begin hormone-replacement therapy and compete in the category of her gender identity

It would be a lot clearer and more honest if you said that Joanna Harper is a man who decided to compete in the women’s category because of his quasi-religious belief that his personal sense of his “gender identity” overrides the material fact (which even you implicitly concede here) that he is male, and that he believes everyone else is obligated to defer to his personal feelings, facts be damned.

Still, a number of observers remained troubled by the idea of a traditionally white, patriarchal institution defining, and policing, the supposed boundaries of womanhood.

The boundaries of women’s athletic sports are, and have always been, biological sex, no matter whether the person reminding you of this fact is “white” or “patriarchal”. In the case of Lia Thomas, you conceded he is in fact unambiguously male in your very first paragraph. You must be white and patriarchal! Monster.

There should be “no presumption of advantage” from transgender status, the [I.O.C.] framework instructs

But “transgender status” is just a euphemism for “competing in the opposite sex category.” Which, you have already established, confers a serious advantage in just about every elite sport. I dunno, maybe curling and archery are fine, but Lia Thomas is a competitive swimmer.

And some were heartened, too, by the I.O.C.’s decision to emphasize human rights. “Valuing inclusion and non-discrimination, first and foremost—I think that’s really what’s important,” Schuyler Bailar, who became the first openly trans swimmer to compete in N.C.A.A.’s Division 1, told me. “We have so many trans people and intersex people that are just constantly discriminated against.”

“Intersex” or DSD is a biological condition; “transgender” is literally just a statement of feelings, a “sense” (you used that word) of one’s inner “identity” (you also used that word). Do not conflate the two. It’s insulting to people with DSDs.

Here’s where the article turns towards the opposing side’s arguments…

To a lawyer, precedent is everything. “I’m not an expert on the science, but I am an expert in civil-rights law,” [Nancy Hogshead-Makar] said. The law when it comes to sports, she went on, “is we allow sex segregation because of biology. We don’t allow sex segregation for any other reason.” I suggested that the biology of sex differences between athletes was murky, and that the legacy effects of testosterone-driven puberty were not totally established or understood.

The law of gravity is not totally understood either. Physicists are still working out the details. But we know enough to know what will happen if you throw a watermelon off the top of the Chrysler Building. And the biology of sex differences isn’t so murky that we can’t figure out why we have sex-segregated sports in the first place. This reads like an explicit argument for eliminating sex-segregated sport entirely. It’s incredibly disingenuous at best; outright dishonest nonsense is a more honest take.

Hogshead-Makar has argued against laws that would ban transgender kids from all participation in sports, but her other positions, and the ways she talks about them—she insists on referring to “biological” genders, for instance—put her deeply at odds with those in favor of broader trans inclusion. (A state legislative director at the Human Rights Campaign has referred to the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group as a hate group.) 

Those “in favor of broader trans inclusion” are special-interest lobby groups that use loaded and inflammatory language at every turn, as you can see here quite clearly.

She has argued that Thomas, far from being unjustly treated, is being opportunistic in her desire to win. Of course, one could also argue that there is an opportunism involved in seizing on Thomas’s case to advance a broader cause. 

No, there’s no “of course” about that. (Unless you mean so in the sense that “of course one could also argue that the moon is made of cheese”. Of course one could, but it’s stupid and irrelevant.) The integrity of women’s sport depends on biological segregation, and Thomas’s case is a perfectly reasonable example to highlight that.

It does seem clear that the rule is designed to exclude trans people from the podium, if not from the pool.

Lia was doing quite fine (er, quite mediocre at least) competing with fellow men until he decided to take estrogen. The only thing that kept Lia from the podium was Lia.

Laws against the participation of trans women in women’s sports at the collegiate level have already been passed in eleven states, and more are being considered. Some of them ban trans girls from elementary and youth soccer programs.

Nope. Again, it’s a matter of objective fact that they don’t.

Earlier this month, Iowa’s governor signed a law prohibiting trans girls and women from competing according to their gender identity; the law applies from kindergarten through college.

Ah, there it is. You concede that they’re not prohibited from competing. They’re only prohibited from competing according to their gender identity – you know, that quasi-religious self-declared inner sense of self which is a mystical euphemism and an excuse for competing in the opposite sex category. In the land of facts and science (which you would think The New Yorker should be upholding), someone’s inner sense of themself does not override the material fact of their biological sex. 

Reading the arguments made on behalf of such laws, one might get the mistaken impression not only that Republican legislators place a great value on women’s sports but also that trans women are a conquering horde, swarming the leaderboards. In reality, trans women are grossly underrepresented at high levels of all sports, particularly in the winners’ circles. Based on simple demographics, one would expect there to be a few thousand trans athletes in the N.C.A.A. Instead, openly transgender collegiate athletes are disproportionately rare.

This article is almost entirely about just one single transgender athlete venturing into the women’s category, breaking records and upending the sport. You went into detail about the advantages of male bodies over female bodies in sport. Now you’re trying to say that because there aren’t very many elite male athletes identifying as transgender — yet — that this means there’s no problem. This is illogical and contradictory. 

If trans athletes have physical advantages, it appears these have been overwhelmed, so far, by social, legal, financial, and other disadvantages.

So far?! What?! In other words, who cares if men have physical advantages over women because this is somehow counterbalanced (SO FAR) by trans people’s financial or other circumstances? And you claim to be for inclusion? If transwomen suffer from social or financial disadvantages, that should NEVER be used as an excuse to force women to let transwomen compete against them; it should serve as a motive to resolve whatever financial or social disadvantages transwomen have. Otherwise, you’re implying that after we solve transwomen’s social and financial disadvantages, there would no longer be an argument for allowing them to compete in women’s sport. The argument for men in women’s sport must not be based on factors other than biology, or this is the absolute mess you end up with.

Transgender youth are more likely to be homeless and live in poverty. They are more likely to experience violence, bullying, rejection, depression, and suicidal ideation.

So step aside, ladies.

Sports are known to build self-esteem and leadership skills, and can be especially important for trans kids, the very people who are, in many places, being deprived of these opportunities.

Sports are also known to help kids connect with their bodies and reconcile their distress over their self-image. We’ve known for almost a century that these are things that can help kids get over gender dysphoria. But who cares about helping kids get over gender dysphoria when it’s far more fashionable to label those kids as “trans” and take a bunch of selfies with them?

There are élite organizations that are working in a concerted way to be inclusive—even, potentially, at the cost of competitive fairness. 

Ha! That should be the headline for this article.

On the other hand, World Rugby last year formulated a policy explicitly barring trans women from its global competitions, on the grounds that, because trans women are, on average, larger than cisgender women, it would be dangerous for them to participate. 

Just say men and women instead of “trans women” and “cisgender women”. Or, if you must, say males and females. This is all just euphemism to cover the facts. It’s very unbecoming of The New Yorker.

“I believe that treating people with respect and dignity is more important than any trophy or record will ever be,” [Sports Illustrated writer Pat] Forde said, “which is why I will not have a problem racing against Lia at N.C.A.A.s this year.”

Well, in that case, why bother racing at all? It’s not a competition anymore; men’s feelings are more important, evidently.

According to a preprint of a paper the researchers have authored, Thomas’s best times were around five per cent slower than her best times when she competed against men—a much smaller gap than the average difference between men and women.

It’s utterly irrelevant the gap comparison between Lia-today vs. Lia-two-years-ago, and men vs. women. Why is this even in here? It’s like comparing the gap between men and women’s swimming times vs the gap between high and low daily temperature averages in Toledo. It has nothing to do with anything.

It may also be that she is swimming faster relative to her competitors than before in part because she is in a better place now—no longer battling gender dysphoria, able to swim, as she put it, as her authentic self, comfortable pulling on a swimsuit and feeling her body for what it is, slipping through the water.

Women’s competitive swimming, and the women who compete in it, do not exist as psychiatric therapy for men who may or may not have gender dysphoria.

These days, women’s sports… are ascendent: interest is up, and opportunities are increasing. 

And there you have it. It’s a gold rush. No WONDER so many men have suddenly taken such an interest in conquering it.