The University of Pennsylvania has been hearing complaints from athletes, former athletes, and parents of athletes about trans swimmer Lia Thomas, the biological male who identifies as a female and has been allowed to compete in all-women competition events.
And now the Ivy League school has responded: ‘We don’t care what you think.’
The university recently nominated Thomas for the coveted “NCAA Woman of the Year” award apparently seeing nothing wrong with it. But plenty of other people think it’s messed up and outrageous, especially current and former female collegiate competitors.
Kim Jones, the mother of an Ivy League daughter who swims competitively, joined “Fox & Friends First” on Monday to call the nomination “humiliating” and “devastating” while accusing the school of sending a message that “women don’t matter.”
“[The message is] they’re not even worthy of dignity and comfort in their locker rooms. And this nomination is just the embodiment of that message. It’s really frustrating to understand where the current NCAA and Ivy League and especially Penn’s stance is on the value of women in modern society,” said Jones, a former All-American tennis player whose daughter competed against Thomas, Fox News reported.
Jones went on to say that all college athletes spend endless hours training, which is “dismissed” and rendered moot when biological males can compete against females with obvious and unfair physical advantages.
“That’s what all that effort, all those hours, all that hard work and the journey that was supposed to be so empowering and fulfilling has been reduced to something that people think is a sideshow. It’s really frustrating,” she told Todd Piro.
Fox News adds:
Jones and Marshi Smith, a former NCAA champion swimmer, co-founded ICONS, the Independent Council on Women’s Sports.
Smith said the NCAA needs to acknowledge fundamental truths.
“There is a biological difference between men and women. And if we can’t agree that that foundational truth is a reality, then how can we protect our girls and women?” Jones said.
WATCH:
Jones is far from the only former NCAA female athlete to stand up for the rights of young women who are now being forced to compete with biological males while the leftists who run college and university sports programs look the other way.
In a December interview on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Cynthia Millen said she stepped down from officiating USA Swimming meets after 30 years because she said she can’t just sit and watch as female swimmers are “thrown under the bus” by “biological” male competitors.
“The fact is that swimming is a sport in which bodies compete against bodies. Identities do not compete against identities,” Millen said of her decision to quit just a few days before the U.S. Paralympics Swimming National Championships in Greensboro, N.C. “Men are different from women, men swimmers are different from women, and they will always be faster than women.”
The former swimming official said Thomas’ record-setting dominance of collegiate women’s swimming was grossly unfair in her resignation letter, in which she wrote that she can “no longer participate in a sport that allows biological men to compete against women.”
