«Consider me a girl»: the IOC gave women's sports to the amusement of transgender people

МОСКВА, 25 декабря 2021, Институт РУССТРАТ.

American transgender swimmer Lia Thomas from the University of Pennsylvania came first in three women’s heats at the December Zippy Invitational 2021 in Ohio. These victories gave her a ticket to the US Student Swimming Championships in Georgia, which will be held in March.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) found no violations in Thomas’ participation in the starts, since she underwent mandatory annual testosterone suppression therapy. According to the current standards of the sports authorities, such a hormonal course of treatment is considered sufficient for a newly-born woman to compete honestly with other female athletes.

This incident should be considered only as another manifestation of the «new normality» in the West, if not for two circumstances. First: 22-year-old Lia has a good chance to break US national records in several distances and make her way to the Olympic team. And second: according to the new IOC guidelines, which will be introduced immediately after the Winter Games in Beijing, transgender women are no longer required to lower their testosterone levels to participate in competitions, including the Olympics.

Everything suggests that the world women’s sport is on the verge of a revolution, as a result of which the «gold» in a number of disciplines will go almost exclusively to «transformed» men — simply because of their bodily advantages: from height to the size of the heart, lungs and muscles.

A second before the record

Until November 2019, Lia’s name was Will. Under this name, Thomas has repeatedly defended the colours of his university in swimming pools, demonstrating very mediocre results. But a couple of years ago, he changed his gender, spent the whole of 2020 at home because of a coronavirus lockdown, and now he has made a splash. More precisely, she has already made it as Lia.

Thomas’s three short course victories in Ohio are really noteworthy. On December 3, she covered the distance of 500 yards in 4:34.06, breaking away from the nearest competitor by 15 seconds. The next day, at 200 yards, she showed 1:41.93, beating second place by 7 seconds. And on December 5, having swum 1,650 yards in 15:59.71, she completely overtook everyone by at least a lap.

It was Lia’s 200-yard swim that made many of her competitors tense up. The fact is that she was just a little bit over a second of the 2015 US national record (1:39.10). That record, by the way, was also set by a student — and at the same time a five-time Olympic champion Missy Franklin. At the same time, no one has beaten Thomas at this distance in the United States this year, only one swimmer at 500 yards, and four ones at 1,650 yards.

This gives Lia an excellent chance to prove herself at the March starts in Atlanta and compete for a place in the national team. Unless, of course, she gets mixed up in the scandal that broke out following the performances in Ohio.

It began, of course, with the indignation of the losing girls, then spread to social networks and very quickly reaching the political top. As recently as December 14, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, a Republican, announced a bill banning transgender participation in women’s sports in the state. The basis for establishing the gender of an athlete is a birth certificate issued immediately after their birth, the draft bill says. Similar laws have already been passed in Alabama, Arkansas, West Virginia, Mississippi, Montana, Tennessee and Texas. The same norm, to Lia’s horror, may appear in Pennsylvania, which she represents.

Here push came to shove: the transgender agenda has stumbled upon the feminist agenda. In the understanding of Noam and a number of critics, Lia Thomas and other trannies, as the last louts, encroach on the equal rights and opportunities of women, regained by them, including for the sake of sporting success. And it is not a fact that the American LGBT community will prevail in this dispute. After all, judging by the May poll according to the Gallup Institute, 62% of American adults support the position of Kristi Noem.

However, the International Olympic Committee, whose latest initiative is shocking, can come to the aid of Thomas and the trans community.

The IOC makes a «knight’s move»

The current IOC rules, dated 2015, state that transgender people have the right to compete in women’s sports if they kept testosterone levels below 10 nanomoles per liter (nmol/L) of blood in the last 12 months before the competition. For comparison, the normal level in men is 11-33 nmol/l, in women — 0.24-3.8 nmol/l.

Already from these figures it is clear that the current rules of the world sports authority are too soft. But instead of tightening the requirements for people like Lia Thomas, the committee made a «knight’s move.»

On November 12, the IOC Executive committee presented the new rules of the game to the world, which will take effect from March 2022. Under the guise of human rights, inclusivity and gender equality, it gave the sports federations the right to decide «by eye» which athlete has an unfair advantage over rivals and which one does not. And it admonished them with ten guiding principles that abolish any «presumption of advantage» in sports.

First of all, the role of testosterone in transgender people achieving a head start is declared «unclear», so it is no longer necessary to reduce its level. By default, any person gets the right to compete among athletes of the gender to which they consider themselves. From now on, the athletes themselves do not need to prove anything — it is sports organisations that must prove that they have a disproportionate superiority.

At the same time, since a change in hormonal levels can be harmful to health, medical procedures should be abandoned in favour of greater involvement of «all women» in competitions. The most important thing is the physical, psychological and mental well-being of the athletes: they should not suffer. And no invasive or gynaecological checks — long live privacy and «autonomy of the body»!

Here is what is hidden behind this bird language. The International Swimming Federation, in whose bureau the posts of Executive Director, First Vice-president, Second Vice-president and treasurer are occupied by people from the Anglo-Saxon world, will certainly support Thomas’ participation in world-class competitions, not finding any injustice in her «otherness» towards others. And after Lia, a stream of crooks will pour into the big women’s sport, ready to cut anything off themselves for the sake of Olympic awards.

And these people will no longer be losers like the unfortunate transgender weightlifter from New Zealand, Laurel Hubbard, who could not lift a barbell at the 2020 Games in Tokyo. And not even clones of the Williams sisters, whose masculinity is proverbial. Women’s swimming, tennis, skiing and rowing are doomed to an invasion of unshaven types with adam’s apple, whose only belonging to the fair sex will be a bow on a pigtail.

Fortunately, there are a couple of sports that you don’t have to worry about. This is sports and rhythmic gymnastics: what girls do on a log and with a ribbon, no man can do.

Институт международных политических и экономических стратегий Русстрат

(@russtrat)