So, Why Is Penn Doing This?

Over the weekend, my wife and I watched a TV special on the Hart family murders, in which a lesbian couple drove an SUV with themselves and six adopted children off a northern California coastal cliff to their deaths in 2018. As more information emerged, it became clear that the couple, who had adopted the children in two groups of siblings in Texas, had received funding -- as much as 50% of their family income -- from the State of Texas for doing this, but had systematically starved, abused, and neglected the children over a period of years but had managed to evade successive complaints about the abuse to child welfare authorities in multiple states.

My wife immediately remarked that there was something eerily reminiscent of the Penn trans swimmer story here. Somehow a group of the less powerful, though part of a "family" were being callously sacrificed to a larger narrative that the more powerful wished to enforce at whatever cost.

In fact, the women seem to have moved frequently to thwart further investigations. The final murder-suicide appears to have been the result of yet another complaint by new neighbors to child welfare authorities. There was consensus among those interviewed for the program that the Hart ladies were able to put up what was effectively an upper-class, altruistic front with minimalist clothing, hair, and makeup styles characteristic of northeastern US elites, although both were from South Dakota, had spotty academic and employment records, and were living in some part on state assistance. The most articulate of the commentators referred to their style as simply "white", but I think it's possible to be much more specific here. It wasn't just "white ladies" taking care of adopted African-American children; it was white ladies affecting an upper class noblesse oblige.

Both women lived extensive lives on social media and were able to parlay this into corporate media attention, most notably, according to the link,

Prior to the murders, 12-year-old Devonte came into the national spotlight when he was photographed crying as he embraced a police officer during a 2014 protest in Portland, Oregon, resulting from the Ferguson unrest. The image became known as the "hug felt 'round the world." Jennifer was very active on social media and used Facebook to project an image of a loving, happy family while also sharing her thoughts on race, politics, and trips the family went on. This helped mask some of the problems within the family. One allegation of child abuse from 2013 touched upon Jennifer's use of Facebook, saying that, "... the kids pose and are made to look like one big happy family, but after the photo event, they go back to looking lifeless."

The children were starved, apparently to maintain the appearance that they were much younger than they actually were; they were punished and beaten to make sure they kept up their part of the act. I would guess that Davonte, 16 at the time of the murders but still looking like a preteen, was nevertheless maturing and would, like some of the other older children, soon be beyond the women's control. Thus, faced with the children beginning to escape and approach neighbors themselves, the women had little choice but to end the charade as cleanly as they could before things got completely out of hand.

This brings us to the University of Pennsylvania, Lia Thomas, and the biological women on the women's swim team. The first similarity here is class. The Ivy League -- which as we have seen has officially endorsed Penn's policies as a body -- represents the upper class as few other US institutions. It is putting its prestige on endorsing transgenderism as an act of noblesse oblige. This is beyond mere virtue signaling; it's as serious as a Brooks Brothers tie.

The second similarity is the power divide. It's significant that discussions of sexual harassment in the workplace often raise the issue of a "power divide", where more powerful managers, not always necessarily men, use the prospect of either promotion or termination to force sexual cooperation from subordinates. In the Penn case, the accounts we've seen from the women swimmers make it plan that the administration and the coach are adamant that they tolerate a man posing as a woman to win women's competitions, with the women's only choice being to leave the team or the university.

In fact, it's hard to avoid thinkng this is a case of sexual harassment in itself, displaying a particular form of male privilege that discriminates on the basis of sex.

The third issue, I think, is that the women swimmers are being punished much as the children in the Hart family were, to enforce the mindset that they must be with the overall program and to reinforce their lower status in rhe context of the program. I think this is consistent with Ivy League attitudes that began with James Conant at Harvard, who discontinued specific athletic scholarships, which the Ivies all then emulated. However, athletes could certainly use athletic prowess in support of their admissions applications notwithstanding, and I would assume financial aid could nevertheless could be jiggered as needed to accommodate favored candidates, it's just that nobody got a specific "athletic scholarship".

But this has inevitably lowered the overall status of athletics in the Ivies, and indeed, there was controversy at Dartmouth when the admissions office reduced the size of the quotas available to the coaches for athletic recruitment. I would guess that Penn's move, with the full endorsement of the Ivy League as a body, is just a further step in devaluing athletics and athletes in its programs. The women swimmers are second class citizens now to be sure, but the football team, I suspect, is not far behind. (The late Rush Limbaugh thought football at any level was in the crosshairs of the elites; it was culturally unacceptable for any number of reasons.)

Like the Hart women who abused and eventually murdered their adopted children, enabled by their ability to project noblesse oblige, this is part of a deliberate narrative fostered in the name of the elites. It's a narrative about power, and it isn't pretty.