Lia Thomas’ complicated place in collegiate swimming

I don’t know about you, but both as a participant and a spectator, I have always looked to sports as a refuge. A refuge from what? Well, what have you got? Work, politics, public controversy, pretty much everything this column is normally about.

All my life, I’ve read the sports page first every morning, sometimes aloud to my wife. A basketball and baseball coach’s daughter, she hushes me only about half the time. Most of the things I suspect might interest her, do — mainly what’s sometimes called the “human interest” side of sports.

During my own inglorious athletic career, I have rarely felt more engaged, more connected, more in the living moment than when playing ball: baseball, basketball, rugby and tennis. Moving, thinking, calculating and reacting. Wide awake and living inside the game.

Win or lose, I never regretted playing.

I can sometimes get there as a passionate spectator. It’s been years since the coach’s daughter and I have missed an Arkansas Razorback basketball game on TV. She was a basketball and tennis player herself, and once won an AAU diving competition — although it was a rare Arkansan back then who could practice in a snake-free environment.

So those are my qualifications. I should also perhaps confess that among the sports I was any good at, competitive swimming was far and away my least favorite. Punishing and boring. A couple of weeks on a college swim team kept me out of indoor pools for decades; I came to hate the smell of chlorine. Your mileage may differ.

Even so, and against my will, I’ve found myself fascinated by collegiate swimming’s controversy over Lia Thomas, a transgender freestyler for the University of Pennsylvania. For three years, Thomas, an Austin, Texas, native, competed for the Penn men’s swim team before undergoing more than two years of hormone therapy and joining the women’s team, where she is breaking Ivy League and NCAA records. Her best time in the 500-yard freestyle event was almost three seconds faster than the best U.S. women’s Olympian.

I’m sorry, but I find that absurd.

If I ran the NCAA, the rule would be simple: If you’ve ever competed at the collegiate level as a man, you cannot then compete as a woman. The End.

What Thomas is doing just ain’t fair. It’s poor sportsmanship.

If she wants to be a woman, God bless her. Political ideology aside, we’ve all known individuals who seem to have been miscast at birth, whose assigned gender has never felt right. This has been true throughout human history. Compassionate societies find ways of making allowances.

Reductionist ideologues who insist that everybody’s either allA or all-B are willfully obtuse. Like virtually every measurable human trait, characteristics we think of as “masculine” or “feminine” can be located somewhere on a bell curve. That is, most of us cluster near the median — the lucky majority who feel comfortable in their own skins, as the saying goes.

We all understand this until somebody makes it into a political issue, at which point everybody gets stupid. There’s been something of a moral panic on the political right about the danger posed by the tiny minority of transgender women taking over girls’ sports — as if athletically inclined young men would undergo surgery and hormone treatment simply to win varsity letters.

Red state legislatures in particular have been filled with punitive proposals to counteract this chimerical threat. So along comes Lia Thomas to prove them right. Or at least to send the bien pensants or fashionable thinkers of Ivy League academia and the NCAA into a frenzy of self-justification. After a group of parents of Penn women swimmers protested that their daughters were being treated unfairly, the university issued a statement declaring its “unwavering commitment to providing an inclusive environment for all student-athletes while condemning transphobia and discrimination in any form.”

Which gives you some idea of the pressure Thomas’ teammates are under. “This is horrible for those UPenn girls,” former USA Swimming official Cynthia Millen told Fox News. “They’re probably under enormous peer pressure to say, ‘Oh yay, this is great. Good for Lia.’ But it’s wrong.”

Tennis greats Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova have expressed similar sentiments. So have many involved in women’s swimming.

To me, it’s got nothing to do with “transphobia.”

See, it’s not life; it’s just a sport. A hobby. A pastime. And it’s manifestly unsporting to expect young women athletes to compete against an opponent who went through puberty as a man, and who consequently has a larger heart and lung capacity, not to mention stronger muscles and bigger hands and feet — all crucial factors in competitive swimming.

No amount of hormone treatment, exercise physiologists are learning, can diminish those advantages sufficiently to make the contest a fair one.

So as a sporting matter, it simply shouldn’t happen.

If she loves her sport, Lia Thomas should simply step aside.