The Patriot Post® · Gutless NCAA Punts on Transgender Participation

Just once, it’d be nice if the craven moneygrubbers at the NCAA issued a decree based on principle rather than pure partisan politics. We’re not holding our breath, though.

Quietly, on Wednesday, the NCAA’s bureaucrats changed their “transgender” athletic policy by punting it. Effective immediately, eligibility requirements for transgender athletes will be determined by each sport’s national governing body. The NCAA’s previous policy, adopted in 2010, was uniform across all sports and was based on hormone therapy requirements, which clearly aren’t working.

“We are steadfast in our support of transgender student-athletes and the fostering of fairness across college sports,” said Georgetown president and chair of the board John DeGioia, unsurprisingly. “It is important that NCAA member schools, conferences and college athletes compete in an inclusive, fair, safe and respectful environment and can move forward with a clear understanding of the new policy.”

John Lohn, editor-in-chief of Swimming World magazine, disagrees. “Through its decision, or lack thereof, the NCAA once again disrespected women’s sports,” Lohn writes. “The organization did not deem this issue important enough to craft specific, science-based guidelines that would protect women’s athletics. It failed to protect female athletes, which should have been at the heart of the Board of Governors’ discussion. Rather than stand up for women, the NCAA handed that duty to other groups.”

Michael Phelps, the greatest swimmer of all time, also disagrees, as our Emmy Griffin wrote recently. “Honestly,” says Phelps, “the one thing I would love is everybody being able to compete on an even playing field.”

On an even playing field. In other words, on a field where men compete against men, and women compete against women.

Perhaps you’ve noticed, but a man named Lia Thomas is making a mockery of this issue at the University of Pennsylvania. A former member of Penn’s male swim team, he’s now swimming on the women’s team. And he’s been behaving selfishly, beating the crap out of the competition (unless he’s throwing a race to “prove” a point), and even comparing himself to the great Jackie Robinson, who broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947.

And now, we must confess: We’re actually rooting for Lia Thomas. We’re actually hoping he continues to crush the aquatic dreams of brilliant, well-to-do Ivy League girls, but only to elevate and thereby expose the utter preposterousness of the Left’s position on men competing against women in sports. Yes, we want Lia Thomas to shatter every collegiate women’s swimming record he can, because the more resounding his triumphs, the more difficult they become to ignore.

And then we want everyone associated with women’s athletics to recoil in revulsion, to reach for their daughters and hug them, and to then arise en masse and say, “Enough.”

And from there, we want the governing bodies of women’s track and field, and golf, and tennis, and softball, and volleyball, and soccer, and field hockey, and basketball to draw a clear line with xx chromosomes on one side, and xy chromosomes on the other. Born with a vagina? This way. Born with a penis? That way.

And then, years from now, we can all look back on the first fifth of the 21st century as that moment when we began to go mad; when we went right to the edge of the cliff, stared down into the abyss, and said, “Thanks. But no.”

This author speaks as the father of daughters who competed in club sports and high school athletics. He speaks as a man who was spared the ghoulish sight of his daughter’s head bouncing off the hardwood with a sickening thud because a young man steamrolled her on his way to the hoop. He speaks as a man who never had to collect his daughter’s teeth and stanch the flow of blood from her mouth because a young man wound up and ripped a vicious slapper with that heavy, hard plastic field hockey ball.

In this respect, we root for Lia Thomas like we root for chemotherapy. We root for her to wreak havoc on women’s sports in order to save them; in order to kill this perversity, this abominable idea, once and for all.