Lia Thomas shook the world of competitive swimming when she won her NCAA title. Now the news has come out that the medical professionals confirmed that Thomas does posses an advantage over biological women even despite being on hormone replacement therapy.
In an interview with The New York Times on Monday, a Mayo Clinic doctor and an international physiologist who consults on the sports both confirmed Thomas’s advantage is inescapable.
‘There are social aspects to sport, but physiology and biology underpin it. Testosterone is the 800-pound gorilla,’ Michael J. Joyner, the Mayo Clinic doctor, said.
Thomas was suppressing hormones – in order to compete. One worthy aspect you won’t see many mentioning is that Thomas still has gonads – so she’s perfectly capable of producing copious amounts of Testosterone.
‘Lia Thomas is the manifestation of the scientific evidence. The reduction in testosterone did not remove her biological advantage,’ Dr. Ross Tucker, a sports physiologist added.
These medical professionals are bold to state what many layman know intuitively – the biological women in the race against Lea had very little to offer in terms of competiton.
She’s soared to the top of the women’s division despite previously being a mediocre male swimmer.
Lia, 22, has rarely spoken about the row but in a recent interview with Sports Illustrated, she defended her position saying: ‘I am a woman, just like anybody else on the team. I’ve always viewed myself as just a swimmer.
In the Times article, one of her teammates revealed she had been rejected from a social club at Princeton because she was branded ‘transphobic’ for questioning Lia’s place in the sport.
Previously a doping expert went on to publish a lengthy video deconstructing the advantages of Thomas over fellow female swimmers. The entire video is 50 minutes long and very interesting. We’ve extracted specific quotes relevant for the topic, but the whole video is still worth watching (attached below).
“…The idea is that if you just suppress your testosterone levels enough with medication, that you do not need to remove your male genitalia. So despite the fact that you have the potential to produce male levels of testosterone as long as you are essentially like pseudo castrating yourself with medication, you are equated to a female and performance, you know, synthetically equated apparently according to the IOC(International Olympic committee ), that’s what they believe. ”
” And it’s obviously highly controversial because you still have a functioning motherf—ing ball sack like obviously, there’s a lot of potential for f—ery there especially when you have medications that are in your system a very short timeframe.”
But beyond the ridiculousness of the IOC guidelines, there is stuff to say just in terms of recovery:
“…if I pseudo castrate myself, and my testosterone levels are equal, above and beyond the, you know, anatomical differences up above and beyond the f—ing energetic exposure, even in your brain, like your recover – recovery capacity, when you are a male going through puberty compared to a female with ten times the testosterone levels you’ve only been transitioning for, you know, a couple years, your peak f—ing your 20 years prior to that you had all of the male hormones, allowing you to be in the pool, practicing in competition, doing competitions, getting increased recovery from those increased test levels, ability to do things that you would never ever be able to do as a female at a significantly heightened level.”