UPENN REAL WOMEN SWIMMERS GO TO COURT

In other news this week away from Trump going gaga over Gaza (Make Gaza Great Again!), three former University of Pennsylvania women swimmers alleged in a lawsuit that they suffered emotional trauma by having transgender swimmer Lia Thomas as a teammate and called for the Ivy League to expunge Thomas’ records. The lawsuit against the university claims that the UPenn administrators told the women that if anyone was struggling with accepting Thomas’ participation on the UPenn Women’s team, they had psychological problems and should seek counseling from the LBGTQ center. Furthermore, they were asked to attend a talk entitled “Trans 101.”

The swimmers claimed that school officials warned them against speaking out about the situation, lest they be branded as transphobes and consequently not able to find jobs in the future. And this ladies, gentlemen, and non-binaries is a good example of how progressive ideology becomes “systematic.” If you don’t tow the line, we will cancel you and you’ll have trouble getting a job.

Thomas stands on the first place podium as other medalists pose together at the NCAA Division I Women’s Swimming & Diving Championship on March 17, 2022.

I wrote the following letter to then UPENN president Magill and athletic director Shanahan back in 2022 when Penn announced that it was nominating Lia Thomas as NCAA Woman Athlete of the Year.

Ms. Magill and Ms. Shanahan:

As a graduate of the Wharton School, I have been a proud alumnus of the university ...until now. When I heard that U Penn had nominated Lia Thomas as the NCAA Woman of the Year, I chuckled. I thought that surely that must have come from The Babylon Bee. How cheeky, risible, and absurd. But I didn't chuckle when I realized that this was not a woke joke but true.

How can an institution that is run by people who are always exhorting the more benighted amongst us to "follow the science" nominate as woman athlete of the year a person who a couple of years ago was a mediocre member of the men's swim team. If I'm not mistaken, Lia Thomas has testicles and a penis, an X and a Y chromosome. Thomas went on to set women swim records. Shocker! What an insult to women athletes not only at Penn but across the country. I imagine that many women on Penn's swim team seethe with anger, but they dare not express it because they know that the arbiters of "correct thinking," who rule with an iron fist most college campuses today, would make them pay dearly for that heresy. A figurative burning at the stake. My daughter, who plays lacrosse at a small liberal arts school in upstate NY and who is a progressive feminist, was outraged by this nomination. You embarrassed yourselves and the university. Underlying this preposterous nomination is an arrogance that is all too common on Ivy League campuses, like you are above common sense, common knowledge, and common decency. You are willing to defy the truth of biology to make your sanctimonious, self-righteous, idiotic gesture.

You should be ashamed and make a public apology to all the real women athletes at the University of Pennsylvania.

Michael Goodwin

I knew that of course this letter was nothing more than me venting and pissing into the wind. And sharing this letter breaches an agreement I had with Penn that it would reimburse my tuition if I didn’t tell people that I was an alumnus. I was an affirmative action student: male, English major, non-Asian gentile hick from Tennessee.

A Dem friend asked me why Repubs get so worked up over dysphoria dudes playing women’s sports when there are probably just a handful in high school/college athletics. And he does have a point. But it’s not the numbers but the principle that matters. As I said in my letter, it’s the display of arrogance by the progressive intelligentsia (oxymoron) that sticks in the craw of the vast majority of Americans who don’t buy into militant trans politics. It’s like we’re being told, “We don’t care what you’ve been taught, what has been accepted as fact for millennia, what your beliefs and values are. If you don’t accept what we are telling you, then there’s something wrong with you and you will be punished until your thinking is corrected.” This intolerant, holier-than-thou, superiority complex infuriates people more than the transgender issue itself does.

Next to the migrant disaster, I can’t think of a bigger loser for the Dem party in the 2024 elections than its trans politics. The most impactful ad of the season was Kamala saying that she was okay with taxpayer money funding male prison inmates’ sex changes. Most Americans understand and accept that some individuals do feel that their gender identity doesn’t align with the sex that they were born with. Most agree that those people should be able to live and work in peace and without being discriminated against. Live and let live is part of the nation’s credo. Caitlin Jenner (a Repub btw) is a good example of someone coming out as trans and being widely accepted as the person she wants to be. But Jenner has never gotten political about it, understanding that hers was a personal journey. About ten years ago, what was considered to be a very rare mental disorder turned into a political civil rights movement that demands we all change our basic understanding of sexual reality, including our thousand-year-old language usage regarding it.

If you don’t think this sudden dysphoria epidemic hasn’t been fomented and encouraged by our media and education system, then you haven’t been paying attention. See for example the People’s Republic of California’s recently-passed law that teachers can no longer inform parents if their kid identifies as a gender other than what’s on the school records. This law applies to all public schools, including elementary. Trans advocates view schools as “environments for young people to have the freedom to explore their identities,” and describe the rules that alert parents about gender or name changes as “forced outing policies.” Meanwhile, the latest nations report card shows only 61% of eight-graders score basic on math and 67% on reading. We can only imagine what the requirements for “basic” are.

Trump can sign all the executive orders he wants to, but it’s going to take Congress and the courts to bring long-lasting sanity back to this issue. I predict that within the next few years, we’ll start seeing a wave of law suits by adults who received puberty blockers and gender-changing surgery as minors. One estimate is that “gender reassignment procedures” (nice euphemism) on minors totaled almost 14,000 between 2019-2023. The plaintives’ claims will be along the lines of “I was a thirteen-year old kid—confused, anxious, and sometimes depressed like a lot of thirteen-year-olds. But I was convinced by people responsible for my well-being that if I had an irreversible sex change, then I wouldn’t be confused, anxious, or depressed any longer. Now ten years later, I wonder what the fuck were you thinking when you did what you did to me!”

This insanity will end when enough doctor practices and childrens hospitals go bankrupt. Congress should pass a law waiving statute-of-limitations on such law suits.