(LifeSiteNews) — Harvard swimmer Abby Carr excoriated President Joe Biden for framing the forced inclusion of biological males in women’s athletics as a “civil rights” cause during a recent appearance on Fox Business.
Carr, who competed against “transgender” University of Pennsylvania swimmer William “Lia” Thomas last year, told Fox host Stuart Varney that the “Biden administration, quite frankly, is trying to have their civil rights moment. They’re trying to make this their civil rights activism purpose is they’re going to save transgender sports. However, they’re doing that by discriminating against women.”
“My team raced against Thomas [in] 2022 and she won. She won pretty much everything she swam,” Carr said. “At the time, we were advised to stay quiet just to focus on our own races, really just to focus on winning our own Ivy Championship. In reflection, this was quite out of line. Thomas clearly had the biological advantage in every race she competed in.”
“What unfortunately should just be a blunt scientific reality determining an athletic issue has become so far politicized that we can’t even have a rational conversation about it,” she lamented. “I spoke about it a few weeks ago, and I said something to the effect of my, you know, my journey in athletics has been far-reaching and formative, but I should not have to race biological males. I’ll even use the terminology that the left wants – assigned male at birth. I should not have to race someone in that capacity because it is simply not fair. And yet it’s become so politicized that we can’t even have these conversations open and honestly.”
Thomas, who “transitioned” to identifying as a female yet retains male genitalia and reportedly remained heterosexual (despite self-identifying as lesbian), drew headlines last year for generating unease among his actual female teammates and opponents, partly due to having to share lockers and partly due to his domination of women’s swimming competitions since switching from the men’s team.
Former teammates have reportedly been intimidated into silence about their objections to Thomas by officials at Ivy League schools, though some have spoken out anonymously, describing Thomas as “mentally ill” and thoroughly dismissive of the feelings or interests of his teammates.
Some of his opponents have been more willing or able to go public, such as former University of Kentucky All-American collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines, who has discussed the experience of tying with Thomas for fifth place at the NCAA championships’ 200 freestyle competition. Despite both swimmers performing the same, Thomas was given a trophy to pose with for photos, and Gaines had to settle for one coming in the mail.
Mandatory inclusion of gender-confused individuals in opposite-sex sports is promoted by the left as a matter of “inclusivity,” but critics note that indulging “transgender” athletes in this way undermines the original rational basis for having sex-specific athletics in the first place, thereby depriving female athletes of recognition and professional or academic opportunities.
There have been numerous high-profile examples in recent years of men winning women’s competitions, and research affirms that physiology gives males distinct athletic advantages that cannot be fully negated by hormone suppression.
In a 2019 paper published by the Journal of Medical Ethics, New Zealand researchers found that “healthy young men [do] not lose significant muscle mass (or power) when their circulating testosterone levels were reduced to (below International Olympic Committee guidelines) for 20 weeks,” and “indirect effects of testosterone” on factors such as bone structure, lung volume, and heart size “will not be altered by hormone therapy;” therefore, “the advantage to transwomen [biological men] afforded by the [International Olympic Committee] guidelines is an intolerable unfairness.”
For her part, Gaines encourages other female athletes to refuse to participate in competitions against males claiming womanhood and has endorsed Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis for providing “crucial” leadership “in rooting out the radical ideology that’s really driving this insanity and really bringing visibility to these cultural issues.”