Dear Gavin: You are all wrong about trans women athletes

Dear Governor Newsom:

You may “revere” women’s sports, but I played them. And as a former NCAA swimmer, I am not concerned about the 0.002 percent of trans athletes in the NCAA, or their so-called unfair advantages. 

Let me tell you my perspective, as a certified swim nerd. 

In 2022, I was in Philadelphia for my spring break. This was also the time when Lia Thomas was under immense scrutiny and hate for simply…existing. One day I found myself wandering around the Penn campus and noticed a group of similar looking women with swim bags outside the fitness center. Wet hair, broad shoulders, unmistakable bags, waiting for their bus to take them to the 2022 NCAA Championships.

If I didn’t know who Lia Thomas was from all the media, I genuinely wouldn’t have recognized her from the rest of her teammates. She wasn’t extraordinarily taller than the other girls and she had the same build as the rest of them. There was nothing I could point to and say “oh my god. This is a transgender athlete.” She just looked like any other swimmer. 

But despite that, people still found reasons to tear her down and call out her theoretical biological differences as an unfair advantage. So let’s break those “advantages” down.

One of the main concerns with trans women athletes is that even though they have taken hormone replacements that decrease their muscle mass and testosterone levels, their bone structure, lung capacity, and heart size, which develop before puberty, are still larger than the average women’s, thus giving them an inherent athletic advantage. It’s true – those pre-pubescent characteristics are not something that can be altered by taking hormones.

However, most elite female athletes do not have average bone structure and lung capacity. Take Gretchen Walsh for example—she is widely considered to be one of the greatest swimmers of all time. At 6 feet, one inch, she holds 11 world records, four individual NCAA records and was a part of five NCAA record breaking relays. Gretchen Walsh is committed, dedicated, hardworking—but she’s also been able to use her extraordinary height, wingspan, muscle mass, and body proportions to her advantage.

Gretchen Walsh was born as a biological female, but she very likely has higher than average bone structure, lung capacity, and heart size than the average woman. Yet since she was born as a biological female, her physiology is seen as un unproblematic asset to her greatness. Which is fine by me, and it certainly makes watching her swim incredibly exciting. But if we can accept Gretchen Walsh’s biological greatness, why can’t we accept Lia Thomas’s sheer existence?

And the thing about Lia Thomas is that she really isn’t that fast. I mean, she’s fast enough to win the 500 freestyle at the 2022 NCAA championship, and I don’t want to discredit her commitment, hard work, and excellence in the sport of swimming, but she is not in the same field as Katie Ledecky, Katie Grimes, Summer McIntosh, Bella Sims or the Walsh Sisters, to name a few. In fact, Lia Thomas’s best time in the 500 yard freestyle isn’t close to cracking the top ten all time performances in that event.

Before she transitioned, she had a best time in the 500-yard freestyle of 4:21. After transitioning, her best time became 4:33. Katie Ledecky’s best time in the 500 yard freestyle is 4:24. Clearly the hormones worked. Lia Thomas is significantly slower than she was, likely due to her body suddenly operating on a different wavelength, hormonally speaking, and in terms of her times, she is not radically dominating the sport. She is swimming for the sheer love of swimming.

Again, let me remind you that trans female athletes are a teeny tiny minority in this country. Out of the roughly 510,000 women althletes in the NCAA, ten are trans women. And they are being used as a scapegoat for every problem in America. Donald Trump, and now Gavin Newsom want to blame American’s dissatisfaction on trans and non-binary individuals, but realistically, if you didn’t know that athletes such as Lia Thomas were born as males, you wouldn’t have guessed it…because they are really not that extraordinary.

They are not the reason that egg prices are high, they are not the reason healthcare costs so much, they are not the reason why the job market sucks, they are not trying to take your individual liberties away, they are literally just trying to exist. 

And now, our governor is pandering to extremists, hoping to show “bipartisanship,” and gain support from Trump voters. But maybe, just maybe, he could actually focus on issues that a presumptive candidate for president should be focusing on: Investing in education, creating more jobs, protecting and expanding Medicare, safeguarding climate protections, and making sure the American government actually works for all its citizens, not hyper fixating on the gender identity of a few.