The UK Daily Mail Goes There

The one absolute no-no in 21st century etiquette -- surpassing all others, I think -- is to ask whether a transgendered person has had their plumbing repaired. (I assume "repaired" is the correct word, since the assumption is that the original plumbing, though functional, was incorrectly installed.) In one of the consummate gaucheries of our time, the UK Daily Mail has nevertheless asked this about the transgendered Ivy League swimmer Lia Thomas.

Sharing a locker room with transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has become a point of contention for some of her University of Pennsylvania teammates, who feel uncomfortable changing in the private space with someone undergoing gender transition, the DailyMail.com can reveal.

'It's definitely awkward because Lia still has male body parts and is still attracted to women,' one swimmer on the team told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview.

Lia has told her teammates that she dates women.

While Lia covers herself with a towel sometimes, there’s a decent amount of nudity, the swimmer said. She and others have had a glimpse at her private parts.

She stated that team members have raised their concern with the coach, trying to get Thomas ousted from the female locker room, but got nowhere.

'Multiple swimmers have raised it, multiple different times,' the UPenn swimmer said. 'But we were basically told that we could not ostracize Lia by not having her in the locker room and that there's nothing we can do about it, that we basically have to roll over and accept it, or we cannot use our own locker room.'

'It's really upsetting because Lia doesn't seem to care how it makes anyone else feel,' the swimmer continued. 'The 35 of us are just supposed to accept being uncomfortable in our own space and locker room for, like, the feelings of one.'

But equity!

This raises an awful lot of questions for me. The first is that, although Thomas has taken some sort of hormonal treatments, there doesn't seem to be any sort of surgery in the plan, and while Thomas somehow qualifies as female for the purpose of the swim team, they continues to function sexually as a male. The only concession to outward norms, leaving hormonal treatments aside, is that they shaves their chest, armpits, and legs and probably peroxides their forearms. As far as I can see, there's been no chest enhancement surgery. Thomas's coy pose in the photo is probably to conceal this as much as anything -- well, maybe to cover their Adam's apple, too.

So at this stage, we may call Thomas's status something like "transgender lite". In fact, it seems like when their collegiate swim career is over, assuming they don't go for the Olympics, they can just re-transition and go back to being a guy with no regrets and maybe even a book deal. (I would guess that even for a guy competing as a woman, the Olympics would still be too much commitment and too much work.)

But this leads to another question. Thomas appears to be standing next to a male swimmer competing as a male, wearing a male swim suit. What prevents Thomas from simply announcing that since they identifies as female but has not had any surgery to look female, there's no reason they can't compete on the women's team wearing a male swimsuit? Are there Ivy League or NCAA rules on which gender's swimsuits must cover what? Or is this just some sort of pro forma thing to make it all seem more legitimate?

My next questoin is just how big a charade is this whole story?

A biological female member of the University of Pennsylvania women’s swimming team said she believes her transgender teammate Lia Thomas colluded with a Yale transgender athlete so she could lose to prove a point, according to a report.

. . . Her biological female teammate told OutKick on condition of anonymity that she believes Thomas and Henig hatched a plan during the recent meet.

“Looking at [Lia’s] time, I don’t think she was trying,” she told the outlet. “I know they’re friends and I know they were talking before the meet. I think she let her win to prove the point that, ‘Oh see, a female-to-male beat me."

It's interesting that this is all intra-Ivy as well. But it confirms my sense that Thomas is not so much focused on trophies or records, but they gets some sort of inner satisfaction from controlling a larger narrative about transgenderism.

Who benefits? This is the biggest question. Those who suffer from gender dysphoria, if this is even a legitimate condition, are an extremely tiny segment of the population, but there's a massive effort to readjust the whole culture to accomodate it. It isn't Marxist; as I keep saying, Marx had nothing to say about it, and the only use the Soviets found for gays was as bait for blackmail.

And strangely, the trend is currently most visible in the Ivy League, where this already privileged white dude is trying to carve out an even more privileged tiny niche for themselves. All for equity or something. Can someone explain this to me?