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Former USA Swimming official Cynthia Millen calls for rules to change to ensure fairness in women\u2019s athletics<\/p>\n
Women’s sports advocates are speaking out against the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and its rules on transgender student athlete participation ahead of the NCAA Championships this March, warning that the future of women\u2019s sports is in danger if transgender swimmer Lia Thomas of the University of Pennsylvania is allowed to keep competing on the women\u2019s team.<\/p>\n
The Ivy League and University of Pennsylvania both released statements last week defending Thomas, who has been shattering records in women\u2019s swimming ever since she was allowed to switch from the men\u2019s to the women\u2019s team under NCAA rules after undergoing testosterone suppression treatment.<\/p>\n
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\n Parents who were outraged at the NCAA for allowing University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer Lia Thomas to compete and dominate in women\u2019s competitions wrote a letter to the college athletics governing body demanding a rule change. Unlike Penn and the Ivy League, the NCAA has yet to weigh in on mounting criticism over its transgender athlete policy that critics argue threatens the very future of women’s sports.<\/p>\n “It\u2019s about fairness in women\u2019s sports,” Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a three-time Olympic gold medalist swimmer and chief executive of the advocacy group Champion Women, told Fox News Digital in a phone interview Wednesday. <\/p>\n “The competitive edge that Lia Thomas has is multiple times over the competitive advantage that the most doped-up East German women had,” she said. “The most doped-up East German women that I\u2019ve competed against, at most, were just a little bit better than we were. However, they were never competitive with men. They were not close to the men\u2019s times.”<\/p>\n Critics like Hogshead-Makar argue that athletes like Thomas should be placed in a separate category for trans athletes, or that competitions featuring a trans athlete should be designated as “exhibition contests,” which has to be agreed by both competing institutions and would mean that their times would not count as records and their place would not count as team points.<\/p>\n “It wouldn\u2019t take away a slot from anybody else, but they would be able to be in the pool and compete,” Hogshead-Makar said. “Everybody would welcome that and everybody would be cheering for Lia. But right now, when she touches the wall, nobody cheers until the second-place finisher. <\/p>\n “She\u2019s doing nothing to engender all of the acceptance and love and tolerance that one would hope for transgender people in employment, or in the classroom or any place else in society,” she continued. “If anything, she\u2019s sort of rolling back that goodwill. People automatically want to have goodwill for a transgender person, but when they see this basic unfairness, it\u2019s just not fair, and we\u2019ve got the science and the statistics to prove it.”<\/p>\n \n Lia Thomas of the Pennsylvania Quakers smiles after winning the 200 meter freestyle event during a tri-meet against the Yale Bulldogs and the Dartmouth Big Green at Sheerr Pool on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania on January 8, 2022 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Hogshead-Makar and other critics, like Swimming World editor-in-chief John Lohn, say Thomas has only rolled back her times roughly 2-3% since she left the men\u2019s team and started testosterone suppression therapy, but that male swimmers typically record times that are more than 10% faster than women, meaning she still has a significant competitive edge over her biologically female competitors.<\/p>\n Hogshead-Makar pointed Fox News to a webinar about the NCAA policy last April featuring LaGwyn Durden, director of the NCAA Sport Science Institute, and Amy Wilson, managing director of the NCAA Office of Inclusion, in which Durden admitted the transgender policy was adopted without any significant research guiding its decision.<\/p>\n “This is definitely a complex issue,” Durden said at the time. “One reason why it\u2019s so challenging is because the science\/medical community really hasn\u2019t reached a consensus on testosterone threshold. We don\u2019t have a definitive answer about that. If there is a threshold, what should that threshold be? So that\u2019s one piece that really makes this problematic when we are trying to develop policy.” <\/p>\n “The lack of research is another issue,” she continued. “And not to say that there\u2019s no research there, but when we are taking a deeper dive and considering what\u2019s important for our population of athletes, we aren\u2019t finding the research that\u2019s specific to collegiate athletes. If you drill down a bit more and talk about sport-specific impact, when you consider strength and power and possible cardiovascular benefits, when you think about a sport and look at a sprinter versus a distance runner, and having some of the specific, definitive research and studies to inform us when we\u2019re trying to determine what\u2019s the best policy for our student athletes. Those are really significant challenges we\u2019re facing right now.”<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Thomas, an Austin native, continues to dominate on the women\u2019s team. She won the 500-yard freestyle preliminaries and finals at the Zippy Invitational at the University of Akron last month and set new national and school records in the 1,650-yard, 500-yard and 200-yard freestyle competitions. On Saturday, she won the 200-yard and 500-yard freestyle and finished in fifth place in the 100-yard freestyle during the school\u2019s tri-meet with Yale and Dartmouth.<\/p>\n \n Lia Thomas of the Pennsylvania Quakers gets ready to compete in a freestyle event during a tri-meet against the Yale Bulldogs and the Dartmouth Big Green at Sheerr Pool on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania on Jan. 8, 2022, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Thomas will compete at next month’s Ivy League championships and has already qualified for the NCAA championships in March.<\/p>\n “This is horrible for those UPenn girls \u2026 they\u2019re probably under enormous peer pressure to say, \u2018Oh yay, this is great. Good for Lia.\u2019 But it\u2019s wrong,” former USA Swimming official Cynthia Millen, who resigned in protest last month after three decades officiating swim meets with the organization, told Fox News Digital in a phone interview Wednesday.<\/p>\n Millen says male swimmers are generally faster than women, because they have more fast-twitch muscle fibers that are beneficial during shorter bursts of exertion, like in swimming.<\/p>\n “From the very beginning, boys and girls are different in the way they swim. This isn\u2019t chess,” she said. “We\u2019ve had some pretty fast girls as Olympians, but the boys will always beat them off the blocks.”<\/p>\n Millen said she\u2019s received an outpouring of support, albeit quietly, from swim officials and swimmers since she publicly resigned but that people need to “get over their fear” and stop being so afraid to speak out against unfairness in women\u2019s sports.<\/p>\n “This is unsound science being heralded by some people as liberation \u2013 it\u2019s not. You\u2019re not being phobic in any way to say the truth,” she said. “I don\u2019t give one crap what people say about me. I have nothing to lose. But say you\u2019re a young coach coming up, you want to just kind of toe the line. I think they have to burst that bubble.”<\/p>\n “We\u2019re the grownups here. Shame on you, NCAA,” she added.<\/p>\n \n UPenn Swimmer Lia Thomas Linda Blade, a Canada-based sports performance coach and kinesiologist, said the NCAA\u2019s transgender policy was “poorly conceived” and athletes like Thomas are taking advantage of it.<\/p>\n “Self-identity is not of primary concern in sports. What we care about is the fundamental biological blueprint that predestines an athlete to be either male or female from conception onward,” Blade wrote in a Tuesday op-ed that she also shared with Fox News Digital. “The distinction between male versus female biological design is categorical; in the same way that, say, a NASCAR vehicle is distinct from an F1 car in auto racing,” said Blade, who is a former All American in NCAA track. <\/p>\n “The way to ensure full \u2018inclusion\u2019 while maintaining the integrity of women\u2019s sports is to convert the men\u2019s category into \u2018open\u2019 (for men, transwomen, and other identities) and keep the women\u2019s category restricted to the \u2018female\u2019 athlete (and no doping allowed). Until a non-binary solution is developed for sports eligibility, this \u2018Open\u2019 and \u2018Female\u2019 system will ensure that any competitor with a novel identity claim (and there will be more) does not bring with him or her a competitive advantage.”<\/p>\n The NCAA and its Board of Governors did not respond to Fox News Digital\u2019s multiple requests for comment. <\/p>\n
\n (Penn Athletics)<\/span><\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/a57.foxnews.com\/static.foxnews.com\/foxnews.com\/content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/640\/320\/GettyImages-1363656725.jpg?ve=1&tl=1\")
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\n (Hunter Martin\/Getty Images)<\/span><\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/a57.foxnews.com\/static.foxnews.com\/foxnews.com\/content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/640\/320\/thomas.jpg?ve=1&tl=1\")
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\n (Fox News Digital)<\/span><\/p>\n