How Mainstream Media Enables Trans Mediocrity
Much has been made of the Lia Thomas controversy, but the media’s hand in shaping the debate cannot be overlooked
The media coverage of Lia Thomas has been an outright sales pitch designed to grab the audience and sell a story about a maligned, innocent transwoman fighting for “her” rights. Thomas, a man claiming to be a woman, competed on the University of Pennsylvania women’s swim team, and has now “spoken out” about the joy he felt in dominating the female sport. After swimming on the men’s team for three seasons, Thomas won the NCAA Division I championship, the highest level of college athletics in the country, in the women’s 500-yard freestyle. This usurpation did not go without protest from the female athletes. In February 2022, sixteen anonymous members of the UPenn women's swim team sent a letter to the University and Ivy League officials objecting to Thomas’ inclusion on their team. They wrote that Lia “holds an unfair advantage over competition in the women’s category,” and that his rankings have “bounced from #462 as a male to #1 as a female.” Despite their pleas for fairness, the next month, March 2022, Thomas was allowed to compete on the women’s team, and took the national championship.
Now, Thomas “breaks silence” about his feelings in an interview with ABC News. On such a controversial topic, one would expect tough questions to be asked. But it is no surprise to those of us steeped in the trans debate that the interview was instead a showering of approval for Thomas. The piece, which runs more like an infomercial for “trans rights” than a serious look at the debate, fits right in with the media coverage on this issue. Trans people, especially transwomen, are treated like a sacred class that must not be confronted by facts, logic, or even jokes. True to form in this debate, we are given only one choice by the media on this issue: to take Thomas’ side, and to sympathize with the pain of being trans.
Asked about his competitive advantage, Thomas quickly pivots to talking about his personal happiness: “there’s a lot of factors that go into a race and how well you do,” he said. “And the biggest change for me is that I’m happy.” It is a bit strange that personal happiness is the linchpin of his argument for inclusion in women’s sports. Thomas even breaks out the ultimate trans trump card–the manipulative and irresponsible suicide narrative–as he says that his depression before transitioning made him feel suicidal. He then reveals that he put off transitioning for so long in part due to his fear that he would not be able to continue swimming competitively. He would of course not have been barred from swimming with men, but he wanted to ensure that he would be allowed to compete with women before he took the leap and claimed womanhood as his “authentic self.”
The wholesale support of this blatant cheating from the media has been disheartening but expected. From the beginning of the Thomas interview, the framing is totally one-sided. After their use of female pronouns for this 6’1” man, the ABC interviewers indulge in the trans movement’s torturous manipulation of language when they inform us that Thomas was “assigned male at birth.” This terminology is an attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of the American public, who can clearly see that this is a man.
Photos of Thomas as a young boy are trotted out even while they push the lie that he is male only because the category was “assigned” to him at birth–as though a doctor made a mistake, and that Thomas was always truly a girl. We can hear and see a grown man in front of us, and yet we are told constantly that he is a she.
To throw further insult upon the viewer, the piece presents without question the framing of this issue as trans rights versus uptight, mostly female bigots. When asked about the letter from his dissenting teammates, who made clear that their objection was not about his identity but his inclusion on their team, Thomas makes a very telling statement about this entire debacle. “You can't go halfway,” he lectures, “and be like, I support trans women and trans people, but only to a certain point. If you support transwomen as women, and [they have] met all the NCAA requirements, then I don’t know if you can say something like that. Transwomen are not a threat to women’s sports.” But they are. And Thomas himself is exhibit A. He is inadvertently revealing that there is no middle ground on this particular issue. In the eyes of trans activists, it is either full support, or you are a transphobe.
During the interview, Thomas seems to continuously fight the urge to smirk. Perhaps just nerves, it nonetheless appears as though he is confident that his lies will go unchallenged, and that he will receive the coddling treatment from the media that he and other trans athletes have come to expect. He tells us with a small smile, “I’ve been able to do the sport I love as my authentic self,” as if that justifies a man facing down women in sports competition. His “authentic self” is of no relevance in a matter of physical ability. No matter how badly Thomas wants to be a woman, his mental state simply has no bearing on the fact that he retains his male advantage. His hormone replacement therapy does not change the fact that he is a man competing against women, the most cowardly form of cheating imaginable. The media’s cringe-worthy adulation of him is all the proof we need that we are living through the Emperor's New Clothes in real time.