Well, it’s still progress. Conservative, Trump cheer-leading outlets are pushing the “So much winning!” line, but anyone progressive, conservative or otherwise who couldn’t see that UPenn’s “transitioning” swimmer Lia Thomas (above: guess right or left) was a cheat had his or her brain eaten by the Woke Virus.
UPenn announced yesterday that it would no longer allow transgender women to compete on its women’s sports teams and erased Thomas’ records from UPenn’s list of all-time school records in women’s swimming. “Competing under eligibility rules in effect at the time, Lia Thomas set program records in the 100, 200 and 500 freestyle during the 2021-22 season,” the UPenn weasels injected as a footnote. That’s part of UPenn’s spin. A cheating swimming coach (who should be fired) let Thomas, a mediocre male swimmer who saw a loophole to exploit, be the star of the women’s team to enhance his coaching record. But UPEnn could get away with it then, so it was all right.
The change in policy was part of an agreement reached with the Education Department yesterday about two months after the department found that Penn had violated Title IX, the federal statute prohibiting sex discrimination in schools, when it allowed transgender athletes to compete on women’s sports teams. The Trump administration had frozen millions of dollars in federal funding for the school over its transgender athlete policies. AUTOCRACY! No, this is called “using legitimate government power for justice and the public good.” As part of the deal, UPenn says it will “apologize” to the women placed at a competitive disadvantage by its allowing a penised swimmer with male-puberty musculature to slaughter competing female swimmers in one pool after another last year.
I can’t wait to read what will be the epitome of a “forced or compelled” apology according to the Apology Scale. A forced apology is no apology at all.
In its statement, UPenn essentially adopted Marion Barry’s “if it’s legal, it’s ethical” rationalization, implying that it has always followed Title XI and was doing so when it allowed Thomas to steal titles and records from female swimmers. Right. UPenn could get away with unethical conduct for its own benefit and did until Trump’s Executive Order made it prudent to reverse its policy.
The school’s conduct was detestable and indefensible, and the fact that it took the threat of losing millions of dollars to make UPenn stop it would tell me that this is an institution I don’t want warping my child’s values.
At least UPenn isn’t playing martyr and defying Trump’s effort to make it do what it should have been doing all along. You know…like Harvard.
Ethics Alarms 
UPenn’s announced yesterday that it would no longer allow ersatz women …
FIFY.
Hey! I fixed that typo!
There is no such a thing as “transgender women” or “transgender men.” There is only a person who self-identifies as a gender than what is biologically a fact. Adopting “trans-anything” language buys into current trendy ideas about gender and sex.
jvb
Precisely.
Money, may not be able to buy happiness, but it can buy justice!
Why do we continue to get wrapped up in terms like men a women. If sports are to be differentiated by biological sex just write the code to say male and female and not men and women. It might be possible to alter definitions of what constitutes gender but you cannot alter what defines male and female. I would say those with both sex organs at birth can claim either sex but must keep the designation maintained beforehand when applying for sex specific programs.
Interesting proposal re those born with DSD. Would it apply regardless of whether the parents asked for surgery to make their child appear more definitely male or female? Also regardless of XX and XY?
And then how about a different case from obviously intersex at birth: Some XY children born with DSD appear NOT to have male sex organs but actually have undescended (and non-functioning) testicles…. they are typically raised as girls and grow up with a female identity. I believe (not a specialist here, just from what I’ve read) they received zero performance benefit from masculinizing testosterone (in this form of DSD the body fails to respond to testosterone in a typical way) so allowing them to compete as females would see fair.
We do have a specialist on board, Zoe Brain, and I’m sure she has an answer…
Holly A has it right.
In the 1890s, the X and Y chromosomes were discovered. It was found that the men who were tested had 48 chromosomes, including an X and a Y, while women who were tested also had 48 chromosomes, including 2 X chromosomes.
So obviously the conclusion was that the Y chromosome defined masculinity. A reasonable conclusion.
Fast forward 50 years… and it was found that some men had 47 chromosomes, including 2 X’s and a Y, while some women had 45, including only one X. Still no problem with the “Y chromosome defines masculinity” idea. By 1956, most people were found to have 46 not 48 chromosomes.
Then… it was found that fully 1 in 300 men weren’t 46,XY. Some women were.
Oops.
After DNA was discovered in the 50s, it was found that the SrY gene, usually found on the Y chromosome, sometimes was missing. And sometimes had been translocated to another chromosome, hence 46,XX men and 46,XY women. So SrY defined masculinity. Whew!
Then.. it was found out that some men didn’t have an SrY chromosome, not anywhere. Some women did. Other genes were involved sometimes.
Oops again.
Worse, other factors, such as Androgen Insensitivity made 46,XY people female, and Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia masculinised 46,XX people.
Then in the 70s, other syndromes, such as 5alpha-reductase-2 deficiency were identified, which caused babies to look like one sex at birth, then the other at puberty.Even worse, in some places 1 in 50 infants had this natural sex change, it was not rare there.
Science 1974 Dec 27; 186 (4170): 1213-5
“ In an isolated village of the southwestern Dominican Republic, 2% of the live births were in the 1970’s, guevedoces….These children appeared to be girls at birth, but at puberty these ‘girls’ sprout muscles, testes, and a penis. For the rest of their lives they are men in nearly all respects.”
In the 90s, it was found that hormonal hiccups in the womb caused some parts of the body to develop as one sex, others as the other, regardless of genetics.
Male–to–female transsexuals have female neuron numbers in a limbic nucleus. Kruiver et al J Clin Endocrinol Metab (2000) 85:2034–2041
“The present findings of somatostatin neuronal sex differences in the BSTc and its sex reversal in the transsexual brain clearly support the paradigm that in transsexuals sexual differentiation of the brain and genitals may go into opposite directions”
It’s a matter of timing during foetal development.
Sometimes a boy is born looking like a girl, sometimes a girl is born looking like a boy, regardless of chromosomes.
This is complex stuff. We don’t teach the Theory of General Relativity in grade school, Newtonian physics, or at most Special Relativity (far simpler than General) is enough. Similary, “XX is female, XY is male” is good enough unless you do medicine or biology in college.
It’s only really relevant when talking about Trans or Intersex people, just as Relativistic effects only become relevant in the domain of the very big, very small, or very very fast, close to 186,000 miles a second.
People do *not* need psychiatric help when they think that things get heavier, more massive, as they go faster… while lengths contract. People do *not* need help when they think their sex is something different from their genetics.
Intersex people exist. Trans people exist. They are unusual, so trying to apply the usual approximations is as silly as trying to apply Newtonian physics to things moving close to or at light speed. Legislating such things is as insane as legally ruling that Pi=3… as has been done in the past.
Mind-boggling. So, all it took for the holier than thou administrators at Penn to change their enlightened policy was the threat of losing a few million bucks?
Cue Kevin Klein in “A Fish Called Wanda:” “ASSHOLES!”
People in power care about money. Change the monetary incentives (or threaten someone’s hold on power), watch people in power change their position. An entirely new development in modern political history! Mind-boggling indeed.