Juno News - March 18, 2022


Candice Malcolm discusses biological man Lia Thomas


Episode Stats

Length

9 minutes

Words per Minute

152.02556

Word Count

1,396

Sentence Count

66

Misogynist Sentences

20

Hate Speech Sentences

11


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 You mentioned researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, and it reminded me that I wanted
00:00:03.360 to ask you about this trans swimmer named Leah Thomas. So the NCAA swimming champions are
00:00:08.920 happening, championship is happening this week, and there's a trans swimmer on the University
00:00:13.440 of Pennsylvania team, so a biological male who competed with the men's team and then had a
00:00:19.040 transition or began identifying as a woman. And now that Leah Thompson swims with women has just
00:00:26.400 shattered all of the records. And I've been reading into it. I take some interest in it
00:00:31.000 because it's a fascinating sort of human events story. And when I read about it, I mean, there's
00:00:35.440 two emotions that I feel. One is like just kind of remorse, like I feel sorry for this individual
00:00:42.360 because it's such a spectacle taking away from the sport. I feel sorry for the girls involved. I feel
00:00:47.100 pity for everybody involved in the situation because it's so excruciating seeing this tension
00:00:53.380 between a clearly, you know, biological male who can swim at a pace that's just nothing like what
00:00:59.980 these women can swim at. And then also a sense of anger and frustration that, you know, you have this
00:01:05.080 separate division. NCAA still splits sports into men and women. And the whole purpose of women's sports
00:01:11.540 as a dedicated separate event for men's is so that women can succeed and women can have their own,
00:01:17.560 you know, can compete on a level playing field. And it's just so, so much injustice here that it's
00:01:24.720 so out of hand. So I wanted to get your take on this because it kind of adds in another element to
00:01:29.200 your critiques on feminism. How do trans women, like Leah Thomas, fit into that?
00:01:36.620 Yeah, well, that's a really big subject. And I agree with you that, you know, my heart goes out to
00:01:42.880 everybody involved. And the trans issue in general is a really complicated one. But if we're going to
00:01:52.000 focus just on trans women in women's sport, it's a fascinating instance of one of the consequences of a
00:02:04.320 significant part of feminist theory. And it also really exposes some of the incoherencies of the
00:02:11.200 feminist position on gender. Now, it seems to me just to cut to the chase, it seems to me clear
00:02:17.220 that Leah Thomas is a man biologically. I don't have any problem calling Leah Thomas she and treating her
00:02:28.860 as a woman in general society. But Leah Thomas has only made the decision to transition a couple years
00:02:36.980 ago. She's been, I think, doing a year of hormone therapy. Her body is still a male body. And to
00:02:45.700 pretend that it isn't that it isn't so much significantly stronger and faster than a female
00:02:52.280 body. I mean, men have a larger muscle mass, a much larger heart and lungs. Their upper body strength
00:03:01.100 strength is significantly greater than women's. Men have much greater hand grip strength. You know,
00:03:10.320 their bones are heavier and larger. You know, a year of hormone therapy doesn't change that. And so,
00:03:18.700 if we can't recognize the fundamental truth of biological reality, we are really at sea as a society.
00:03:27.580 And, you know, and there are other examples of this happening all across sport. There was a case of
00:03:35.180 a mixed martial art fighter named, mixed martial arts fighter named Fallon Fox, who actually
00:03:43.260 broke a woman's skull in a competition. And the woman said that she'd never encountered strength like
00:03:50.680 that in all the years she'd been competing in mixed martial arts. Because Fallon Fox has a man's body.
00:03:58.360 And there are many other examples of this. And yet, you know, I can't help sometimes but feel a kind of
00:04:05.460 rueful, not satisfaction. Well, yeah, it is satisfaction. I have to admit, I do, I feel a kind of
00:04:11.440 satisfaction because feminists have for decades claimed that almost all of gender, sex itself as a
00:04:20.800 biological condition is a social construct. You can find, you know, PDFs of articles by major feminist
00:04:29.840 theories. There's one by Judith Lorber and Yancy Martin called the socially constructed body, where they
00:04:37.200 essentially argue that although there is an underlay of biological reality, it we really don't even know
00:04:43.680 what it is, because it is so thoroughly constructed. And they're, they're talking about women in sport.
00:04:49.920 And their fundamental argument is that there is really no difference between women and men in sport
00:04:56.880 that we can definitely point to. And that much of what we think we know about the differences between male and
00:05:03.200 female bodies is as a result of social conditioning, women are supposedly trained, you know, from the
00:05:09.120 time they're two or three, to act differently from men, they move differently in space, they they're told
00:05:16.240 they throw like a girl, and therefore they do throw like a girl, like they make those arguments over and
00:05:21.600 over again. If we had not allowed those arguments to achieve credence in academia, and then moving out into
00:05:29.360 the wider world, we would not be where we are now, with this bizarre situation, where a good portion of
00:05:39.280 feminist intellectuals and others claim that simply by deciding that a man wants to be a woman, that that
00:05:48.000 man becomes a woman, it's truly bizarre. And on the other side, of course, then there is this sort of
00:05:55.760 a grieved entitled anger on the part of other feminist women who do not appreciate the encroachment into
00:06:08.640 women's sports and other female domains of male persons claiming to be women. And but that falls often back
00:06:19.200 into a kind of feminist grievance argument about how these men are oppressing women. This is just another
00:06:28.160 example of patriarchal oppression. These men want to be women because allegedly, you know, men hate women,
00:06:36.000 and but somehow want to destroy women and take over their spaces. And so, and that I think, you know,
00:06:43.680 that really gets at that tension that is so much a part of feminism. On the one hand, women are no
00:06:49.520 different from men, we should never say that women can't do certain things, because that's sexist. And
00:06:55.200 yet now, suddenly, again, we hear that women need special rights, they need special women only spaces,
00:07:02.480 where, you know, male bodies must not intrude. All the while, though, over the last 30 years, male spaces have
00:07:10.800 been continually eroded. You know, if men in a fire hall said, you know, look, we're really uncomfortable with the
00:07:18.720 idea of having women working as firefighters along us because they are simply, they don't have the strength, they
00:07:24.560 can't do what is required to fight fires. Same with the military, all sorts of standards have been lowered in these
00:07:32.400 various formerly male domains in order to admit women and to pretend that there is no significant difference between women and men.
00:07:40.160 So I think we have to stand on the bedrock ground of biological reality. If we've lost that, we really can't have
00:07:49.360 sane conversations about any of these issues. And I'm not that sympathetic to either side of the feminist debate
00:07:58.880 on the question of trans women in sports, because I think both, you know, buy into various feminist
00:08:06.160 postulates either anger at men, and exaggerated claims about toxic masculinity and patriarchal oppression,
00:08:16.960 or the gender as a social construct position, neither of them is helpful in finding a sane solution to
00:08:24.160 these kinds of conflicts. I tend to agree. I sometimes just sort of sit back and laugh at the two sides of the
00:08:31.200 left, you know, warring over this issue. The only reason I want this issue to be resolved is because
00:08:38.640 I have a daughter and I want her to be able to enjoy women's sports like I did growing up. I loved playing
00:08:43.440 sports. I was on a hockey team, I played with the boys until I hit about 12. And then I went on to a
00:08:48.960 girls team, I played soccer, baseball, and I love that. And the idea that perhaps if we continue down this
00:08:55.760 path, like the idea of women's sports just simply won't exist, because we'll go back to mixing. So that's, that's,
00:09:01.840 that's part of the reason why I think it's important to push back at least and try to find some truth here,
00:09:08.320 because truth seems to be left behind.