Juno News - March 18, 2022


Candice Malcolm discusses biological man Lia Thomas

Mentioned
Leah Thomas Judith Lorber Yancy Martin Fallon Fox
Justin Trudeau extends gun buyback by 18 months (feat. Rod Giltaca) Trump rally in Florida held lessons for Canada

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

152.03

Word count

1,396

Sentence count

67

Harmful content

Misogyny

20

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

11

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transgender swimmer Leah Thomas has become the first woman to break the American record for the number of breaststroke breaststroke attempts in the women s division of the NCAA, breaking the previous record set by a biological male swimmer who competed with the men s team and then began identifying as a woman.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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 1.00
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 1.00
00:01:05.080 separate division. NCAA still splits sports into men and women. And the whole purpose of women's sports 0.97
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? 0.97
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 1.00
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 0.59
00:02:17.220 that Leah Thomas is a man biologically. I don't have any problem calling Leah Thomas she and treating her 0.92
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 0.99
00:02:45.700 pretend that it isn't that it isn't so much significantly stronger and faster than a female 0.97
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, 1.00
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 0.56
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. 0.99
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 1.00
00:04:20.800 biological condition is a social construct. You can find, you know, PDFs of articles by major feminist 0.65
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 1.00
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 1.00
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 0.98
00:05:55.760 a grieved entitled anger on the part of other feminist women who do not appreciate the encroachment into 1.00
00:06:08.640 women's sports and other female domains of male persons claiming to be women. And but that falls often back 0.96
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, 0.86
00:06:36.000 and but somehow want to destroy women and take over their spaces. And so, and that I think, you know, 0.84
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 1.00
00:06:49.520 different from men, we should never say that women can't do certain things, because that's sexist. And 0.51
00:06:55.200 yet now, suddenly, again, we hear that women need special rights, they need special women only spaces, 0.99
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 1.00
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, 0.99
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.