Penn Trans Swimmer’s Teammates Speak to OutKick

CLAY: We are gonna be joined by one of the writers at OutKick, the site that I run, for a story that he has broken, and I want to open up with that. We’ve been talking about, Buck, the idea of a transgender swimmer. This was a three-year swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania — a man — who was a successful swimmer, obviously, as he was swimming in college at the University of Pennsylvania in the Ivy League.

He took a year off and then came back as a member of the women’s swimming team. And since that has happened, the records are through the roof that this swimmer is setting. This swimmer won — a biological man swimming with a group of women won — by 38 seconds, an annihilation of the second-place swimmer.

And the question has been asked: What do the women who are on the team — the biological women on the team — think about having a transgender swimmer? Well, we talked about, Buck. Many of them — and we’re gonna talk to the writer of this article who’s been talking to some of these Penn swimmers who have reached out to OutKick and are telling us what they think as women swimmers about having a biological man who is crushing them, and here are some quotes.

“Pretty much everyone individually has spoken to our coaches about not liking this.” This is a Penn’s women swimmer. “Our coach really likes winning. He’s like most coaches. I think secretly everyone knows it’s the wrong thing to do.” “When the whole team is together, we have to be like, ‘Oh my gosh, go Lia, that’s great, you’re amazing.’ It’s very fake,” she added.

A couple of other quotes from this Penn swimmer who talked to OutKick — and, by the way, another member of the Penn’s women’s swimming team is going to be up tomorrow morning with her own quotes. “One year doesn’t mean anything” in regards to sitting out. “What about the years of puberty as a male, the male growth you went through as a man?” and then she said at the end of the article something that I think really sticks home here.

“When I have kids,” this Penn women swimmer said, “I kinda hope they’re all boys because if I have any girls that want to play sports in college, good luck. [Their opponents] are all going to be biological men saying that they’re women. Right now[,] we have one, but what if we had three on the team? There’d be three less girls competing.”

That final quote to me, Buck — and these Penn women swimmers are so terrified to actually go public they reached out privately to OutKick after we had written about this, because they go to an Ivy League school. Buck, you went to an East Coast school. You can imagine these girls are afraid.

Will they get into grad school? Will they be called transphobic? Will they be able to get a job in the Northeast if they come out and say, “We don’t think it’s right for a biological man to be competing against us”? But this is where the transgender agenda inevitably ends, in my opinion, with the destruction of women’s sports.

BUCK: This is why when they say that men can get pregnant it’s important to say, “No, that’s a lie.” This is why when the left says a man can become a woman or a woman can become a man, it’s important to say, “No, that’s a lie,” because the moment you surrender reality to their political whims, they can mold it to whatever purpose they see fit.

They can change as they need to in the circumstances of the moment, and what we’re seeing is just the end stage of the trans agenda’s incrementalism. I’ve been talking about this specific issue for 10 years. And at every phase we say, “Well, you know what’s next? Here’s what’s next,” and they say, “Don’t be bigoted. That will never happen!”

Then two or three years passes and sure enough, there are 12-year-old boys using the same bathrooms and change facilities as a 12-year-old girl. And if you oppose that, they say you’re a bigot. You can actually see some mirror imaging, I think, here of Fauci a year ago. “Oh, no, we don’t want vaccine mandates!” I know we’ll get into this in a few moments. But now it’s, “Sorry, yeah, I kind of like freedom, but I like mandates more.”

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: And we say, “Hold on. You used to say that you would never do this and now you’re doing it. What happened? What changed?” They push until they meet the resistance, and then they back off a little, and then they push until they meet the resistance, and they back off a little. This has been what the progressive left has done on all cultural and cultural war issues, so to speak.

The trans agenda is very high up on the list. And now we’re at that place where you have women… Clay, you spent a lot of time speaking to and following and involving sports. I know from friends of mine even at D3 school. I went to Amherst College. They spent a tremendous amount of time at a very young age, often, on their sport. It’s important to them.

CLAY: No doubt.

BUCK: There’s something about being the best they can be at that level. Yeah, a lot of them aren’t gonna go pro and all that. Fine. But it matters to them. There are women who are being humiliated. That’s a part of this, and that’s why they’re coming to you at OutKick. They are being humiliated not just in the loss — and this is why I think the piece on OutKick is so important.

It’s not just, “We’re losing to this person” or even “our records are being broken.” The social pressure to then have to celebrate that? It feels very Soviet, doesn’t it? It feels like the commies are running things when you have to say, “Yeah, the ‘biological male,'” also known as a man, “who is swimming against the women in the pool and winning is not something that we should have to celebrate.” It’s wrong — and every reasonable, rational person knows it’s wrong.” That’s why these women coming out and speaking about this I think is so important, ’cause they’re telling us what we all know!

CLAY: And to your point, Buck — and I know you find this unbelievable — OutKick is probably the only sports media site almost on the entire internet that would even allow these girls to talk and will tell their story. Just think about how crazy that is for the world that we live in. ESPN wouldn’t do this story. CBS wouldn’t do this story. NBC wouldn’t do this story.

Almost no other sports media outlet would allow these girls to have a voice — and think about this also for a minute. Title IX is about saying, “Hey, women are the equal of men.” For people out there who haven’t paid a lot of attention to Title IX, it requires that there be equal scholarships given in colleges for men and women.

This represents, Buck, the direct conflict between feminists — people who are saying, “Hey, girl power! We’re as good as men; we deserve as many scholarships as men!” — and now the transgender the agenda where men are now taking over women’s sports. The easy solution here isn’t very clear to me because if you just say, “Hey, okay, do away with sex-based classifications for sports.

“We’re not gonna have men’s and women’s sports anymore.” Women don’t make any teams, and they don’t win, ever. They don’t even make the teams, Buck. If you had men’s soccer and women’s soccer and you just made it “soccer,” there would never be a woman who played on a high-level soccer team once puberty occurs because men are so much better. Same thing for basketball. There would be no women’s basketball.

There would just be men who played basketball. So this transgender from male to female competition threatens this. Like the quote that I read of her at the end, if there are two or three or four transgender athletes on a team, they win every championship, and there is no longer any women’s sports. That is where we are headed. It is a reality that people refuse to acknowledge.

BUCK: Right. What we saw before this with Laurel Hubbard was somebody who was not that good so did not break all the records.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: It was only a matter of time before someone came along who was an elite athlete as a male and then decided to transition in that sport and beat women. We have seen this years ago with a transgender MMA fighter which I think honestly should just be illegal.

CLAY: So gross.

BUCK: I think that’s grotesque. I think everybody should know that. But there’s also the broader sense we should have that the corporate media apparatus of the Democrat Party — the Democrat Party overall, Nancy Pelosi, any prominent Democrat right now — if you sat them down on TV and you asked them, “Does this seem right to you?” they will not condemn it.

So this is not a minor issue. This is not something we’re blowing out of proportion and “Oh, what’s the big deal?” They are either cowards or complicit in this massive lie, complicit in this Soviet-style erasing of the obvious. This isn’t a complicated matter, right? This isn’t how long are we gonna deal with covid and what will we do with all the vaccines?

This is men are bigger, stronger, faster than women because of biology we also grow facial hair and there are other things we all know that are different than women and that we’re supposed to negate that because it is fashionable on the left, because it makes them feel good? Think about what do they really accomplish with this, other than knowing they have the power to get rational people to debase themselves publicly by going along with the lie.

I know this might… I was warning everybody about incrementalism before. You say, “Oh, but, Buck, it’s just on this issue.” Really? It’s just on this issue? As you see all those people walking around wearing masks outside? It’s only the people that…? It’s only on transgender issues that you have to live by lies? I don’t think so.

CLAY: I think Joe Biden should get asked about this.

BUCK: Yep.

CLAY: And have to go on the record. There’s a lot of people who cover the White House that listen to this show. Does Joe Biden — who, by the way, played high-level sports his whole life before, obviously, moving into politics. There’s no way that 78-year-old Joe Biden believes that a biological man should be beating the crap in swimming out of women.

But I think he should get asked about it ’cause, you know what? I think he’ll lie. And this ties in, by the way, also with Dave Chappelle because Dave Chappelle is not allowed to make a joke in Netflix ’cause somebody who’s transgender might be offended.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: We opened up the show talking about a good article, good work being done on the Pennsylvania, UPENN trans swimmer by Joe Kinsey. He is a writer at OutKick, the site that I run. If you haven’t checked out OutKick.com and you’re a sports fan and you think the world has gone insane, hopefully it will make it a little bit more sane for you there, and Joe does fantastic work. Joe, good job on this first story.

I know there’s the second story from an additional Penn women swimmer that is going up tomorrow morning so want to start with this question. How did you come to get in contact with these girls? Why did they reach out to you and why do they want their story told through OutKick?

KINSEY: Clay, thanks for having me on. Listen, we’ve been writing this story about the Lia Thomas for about 10 to 14 days now, and last week one source was tipped off that we had written a story, and she was comfortable enough to do a phone interview and really share her emotions about what is going on with this team, and she felt comfortable with OutKick, that we were gonna tell her story fairly and we don’t have an agenda here. We’re just telling the story about what’s going on, and now we have another swimmer on the Penn women’s team that has stepped forward, and that will be coming soon.

BUCK: Joe, it’s Buck. Good to meet you, and good work on the story. Want to know when you’re talking to your source here, to the degree you can tell us, you know, what are they worried or in this case this one woman in particular worried will happen if they wouldn’t come forward?

I mean, usually when athletes are upset about something, particularly they think something unfair has happened, whether it’s refs or anything else, they’re pretty vocal about it. Obviously, these women on the team who are upset don’t want to be vocal. What do they think happens if they were to speak out with their names attached to it?

KINSEY: Well, look, thanks for having me on, Buck. Listen, last week the first swimmer was — she was just concerned about the general climate in society where she was gonna be attacked for having a different opinion. And that has escalated. Last night I was told that we now have a situation where the university calls a mandatory team meeting last night where the swimmers were strongly advised against speaking to media outlets.

And they were also told that it is nonnegotiable that Lia Thomas will be swimming for the women’s team, but we are here to support you however you want to come to terms with it, is what the swimmers were told. So we have now entered a different phase of this where the school is definitely taking a stance. They’re definitely telling these athletes not to speak out, and these two women are being brave in this moment where they risk reprisal from the university.

CLAY: How wild is this, Joe? You have covered sports for as long as I can remember. I read you before you came over and started working with us at OutKick. Did you ever think we’d end up in a space where a biological man was competing at an Ivy League school, one of the elite academic institutions in the country and potentially going to do set all-time women’s swimming records as a man swimming as a woman? It’s through the looking at glass-level crazy, isn’t it?

KINSEY: Clay, when I keep putting that towards the whole records thing to these women, they’re just blown away. They’re like us. They’re completely perplexed on what this means for the sport other than all the records are gonna be smashed in the freestyle race. They’re looking at the Olympics. They’re like, what does this mean for the Olympics?

So you have what’s coming in March is these times are going to win national titles. And as a country, as a swimming nation, they haven’t even come to terms with this. Because these records are just being washed over the last two weeks. And they tell me — the swimmers tell me– that these times are gonna be lowered, Clay.

And it’s just absurd to think that they’re now being strongly advised against speaking out against something that is going to completely affect them, completely affect the sport. These times are gonna be lowered, Clay, to the point to where they may never be broken again unless by another transgender athlete.

BUCK: It’s interesting, Joe, it comes across in the piece that you wrote for OutKick that the coach seems to be on board and actually kind of excited about this. Is that where things are? Now it’s very tough to tell I would think as an outsider, is the coach toeing the line because of just the politics around this and seeming excited, or is the coach happy that he…

I’m assuming it’s a “he.” I don’t know. The coach may actually now have the national champion swimmer on the team, you know what I’m saying? Like do we have some sense from the people have spoken out about this as to whether the coach is just on board for it top to bottom or feels pressured to be on board?

KINSEY: I think there’s two different things going on here, Buck. I think that the first source told us that the coach just likes to win and that he’s looking at this like this is gonna go on my record as a win. And that’s great for me. I’m a coach. The second source said that this has now become a situation, in her opinion, that the coach is just going along with it so that he’s not gonna rock the boat.

He’s not gonna get attacked. He’s gonna say, “Listen, I just have to go along with what the university says, and the university says this is what we’re gonna do, I just have to go along with it,” and so you have a combination of things going on here. You have the fear of what could happen if you spoke out versus the love it when it’s on my record. So two different things going on.

CLAY: Joe, I want to read this quote ’cause I read it to start the show, and I think some people may have missed it ’cause they weren’t listening. This Penn female swimmer who spoke to you that’s on this team that is now being dominated by a biological man — a transgender swimmer who swam for the men and now is swimming for the women.

She said, “When I have kids, I kinda hope they’re all boys because if I have any girls that want to play sports in college, good luck. [Their opponents] are all going to be biological men saying that they’re women. Right now, we have one, but what if we had three on the team? There’d be three less girls competing.” That, to me, is the essence of this, right?

All of these women have been getting up bright and early in the morning, their parents have been taking them their whole lives for them to be able to excel enough for them to be able to compete at an Ivy League level. And then out of nowhere, a man decides to be a woman and he crushes all of them, making their work and their excellence and their pursuit of championships totally not able to be accomplished no matter how hard they work. This represents a straight on existent threat to women’s sports, doesn’t it?

KINSEY: Completely, Clay, and if you listen to the experts the people that have been fighting for Title IX for their whole lives, they know that they have a huge fight on their hands here so these women that they had fought for years and now all of a sudden look we have this other threat coming, and it’s from a transgender perspective.

So these women that are on these teams? Again, no scholarships, Clay. These are just women that get up and want to swim for their school, and yet they have to deal with this where they’re just getting crushed in the pool. I’m being told that in Akron there were tears. There was no cheering for Lia. There was massive cheers for the woman that finished 38 seconds behind in the mile. So there are some serious emotions going on here, and these women, they feel like they have nothing, nobody out there to support them. This is a fight they’re in.

CLAY: Joe, second story is gonna be up tomorrow. You’ve got another woman story. It’s at OutKick.com. Appreciate all the work that you’re doing, and keep it up, my man.

KINSEY: Thanks, Clay, Buck. Thanks.

BUCK: Thanks so much for being with us.

CLAY: That’s Joe Kinsey.