Male Swimmer Wins 4 Ivy League Female Titles

CLAY: Buck, there are a couple of ridiculous stories that happened over the weekend that I wanted to hit you with, and I can’t believe that this is not becoming a bigger story now, although it is starting to cross over outside of just people who have functional brains. We had a transgender swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania won four different Ivy League championships, Buck — four different Ivy League championships.

And if you haven’t paid attention to this story, we’re talking about a man who swam for three years on the University of Pennsylvania’s team and then decides to become a woman and now is poised with the NCAA championships coming up in a few weeks to potentially become the greatest “woman,” in quotation marks, swimmer of all time. And we have such identity politics colliding here, Buck.

You have Democrats whose predominant base to a large extent is female voters, and so they don’t want to offend women who might enjoy competition. I know a ton of you out there, dads and moms, are seething over a story like this. So, they’re pretending it doesn’t exist. Simultaneously, they’re not saying, “Hey, men are bigger, stronger, and faster than women.” Just because you decide to become a woman and start taking whatever drugs are necessary in order to for that to occur, it doesn’t make you not over six feet tall or have bigger hands and feet and be better at swimming than a woman would be, which is what men are.

BUCK: He’s effectively had almost 10 years of nature’s testosterone therapy already. Let’s be honest about this. Right? His biochemistry has been such that he has been receiving, as any male listening to this would be, receiving the benefits of male biochemistry when it comes to size, strength, speed, and those issues. One thing that this brings to bear here, Clay, because it is fascinating, and you’ve been reminding me of just how the sports media —

CLAY: Pretend it doesn’t exist.

BUCK: — should be doing back flips about how amazing this is, what a moment of huge progress this is, right? You’ll notice that when it came to the first, I believe…? Was it the first transgender cabinet-level official that was…? Maybe state level. I think it was state level official in Pennsylvania, a health official —

CLAY: It was a huge story, everybody was praising it, how significant it was.

BUCK: — breaking a glass ceiling of sorts or whatever, however they want to frame it. If this is a good thing, they should view this as an enormously positive story they want to tell all over the place. They know that this is an issue where I think honestly 80 to 90% of the country is just saying it’s wrong.

CLAY: I think it’s like 95%. I think it’s crazy.

BUCK: This is not anywhere near a 50-50. This is not a Democrat-Republican issue. This is a sane-versus-insane issue, and it does, though, remind me of how you have to see a lot of this starts with — and even conservatives fall for this. It’s about being polite. “Let’s just be polite. Let’s use the preferred pronouns. Let’s be inclusive! You don’t want anyone to feel bad.”

I do think conservatives have culturally a desire for politeness and for courtesy that is often used against us in politics. I don’t want anyone to feel bad. I want people to feel safe and have a good day and all the rest of it. But it’s not courteous to make 12-year-old girls get undressed in their locker room with 12-year-old boys. It’s not polite.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: It’s not okay. It’s not “courteous,” which is a new policy. It’s not courteous to have female swimmers getting annihilated by someone who’s a biological male. What ends up happening is if you don’t see this for what it is in the early stages, courtesy cannot be at the expense at the truth, politeness cannot be at the expense of truth, and that’s what you see in the transgender issue in sports all the time.

CLAY: I keep coming back to a quote that an anonymous member of this Penn swimming team gave to one of our writers, Joe Kinsey, at OutKick. That swimmer said — and I’m paraphrasing her — that she hopes when she is married and has children of her own, that she has boys, because women’s sports are going to cease to exist in many ways if tons of transgender male athletes decide to become a part of women’s sports.