Irreconcilable differences

We have previously reported on Will Thomas, the male swimmer for the University of Pennsylvania, who decided that he was really a woman, started calling himself “Lia”, and went on to compete on Penn’s women’s swim team. A 6’3″ tall man male, ranked 462^nd, he quickly became number one in women’s swimming. Why, it’s almost as though there are real physical differences between males and females, differences which make a difference in sports and physical activities.

There are many, many things which made something of a difference in the campaign between former President Donald Trump and then-Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff, and one of the issues hammered on by our then-former President was the far-left’s insistence that ‘transgender’ women, like Mr Thomas, really are women. Mr Trump won the election, and has been putting his policies into place.

Penn strikes agreement with Trump administration over trans athletes

It was unclear if the university’s agreement with the administration on trans athletes would affect $175 million in paused federal funding.

by Susan Snyder | Tuesday, July 1, 2025 | 4:02 PM EDT | Updated: 6:58 PM EDT

The University of Pennsylvania will send “personalized” letters of apology to its female athletes who felt aggrieved by transgender swimmer Lia Thomas’ participation on their team, and will restore Penn records and honors they would have won if not for Thomas, as part of a resolution agreement reached with the federal government.

Penn becomes the first Ivy League university to strike a truce with President Donald Trump’s administration — at least on this issue — since it began targeting some of the nation’s elite universities, threatening funding and damaging policy changes if they did not comply with certain demands.

It was not immediately clear whether the deal would result in the restoration of $175 million in federal funding to Penn that the White House said was paused in March, citing Thomas’ participation.

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Susan Snyder reported the following day that the Trump administration has now released the funds.

The initially cited story had a few awkwardly-written paragraphs which were structured to avoid pronouns to refer to Mr Thomas, to avoid labeling him as either male or female, but, sadly, in the 11^th paragraph from the end, Miss Snyder slipped and referred to him as “she”.

As documented in the second linked story, while Paula Scanlon, an actually female swimmer who had to share a locker room and facilities with Mr Thomas, expressed gratitude and support for the Trump Administration’s efforts and actions, the Usual Suspects, who never had to compete athletically in anything, were appalled:

Philadelphia City Councilmembers Rue Landau and Jamie Gauthier and State Rep. Rick Krajewski, all Democrats, condemned what they called Penn’s decision to “surrender” to the Trump administration’s demands.

“We are deeply disappointed in the University of Pennsylvania’s decision to reward a politically motivated campaign that seeks to erase transgender athletes under the narrative of equity in sports,” they said. “This move is not about equity. It is about appeasing the Trump Administration. It is about deliberately targeting a vulnerable community for political points.”

Lingel said Penn would have been on firm ground to reject the department’s demands and note that it had been complying with NCAA policy at the time Thomas competed. The school did not have its own policy on trans athletes.

Penn’s decision, she said, is going to make queer and trans students feel “like second-class citizens” at the university.

“I think the real apology should be to LGBTQ students on campus who are going to feel like they’ve been used as a political football,” she said.

Naturally, the Inquirer provided OpEd space to Carolyn Steinhofer, “a human rights advocate, a mother, an artist, and a writer dedicated to amplifying marginalized voices and promoting social justice,” to defend transgenderism. I eagerly await the newspaper’s far-left columnist Will Bunch to yell that Penn “bent the knee” to President Trump on this issue. After all, he’s done it before!

For millions of transgender people, freedom remains more a dream than a reality. Imagine being told you can’t wear the clothes that reflect who you are, use your chosen name, or get basic medical care — simply because of your identity. That’s the daily experience for many transgender Americans, including some right here in Pennsylvania.

UPenn Women’s Swim Team, via Instagram. It isn’t difficult to pick out the one man male in a women’s bikini top. Click to enlarge.

None of what Miss Steinhofer wrote is true, at least not when it comes to adults; there are restrictions when it comes to minors, people too young to take decisions on whether they are really ‘transgender’ on their own. What is true is that not everyone else will accept the claim of the ‘transgendered’ that they are actually the sex they claim to be, as opposed to the sex they actually are. If Will Thomas wants to call himself Lia, that’s his business; if he wants to try to require the rest of us to accept his claim that he’s really a woman, then he has made it everyone else’s business as well.

And that’s the problem. If Mr Thomas had made his social transition — at least as far as his last known athletic competition is concerned, he remained a “fully-intact male” — quietly, no one outside his circle of friends would have known or cared about him. Miss Steinhofer claimed that only 0.002% of NCAA athletes are ‘transgender,’ but with Mr Thomas having dominated in the pool, and Brayden Fleming, a male claiming to be female, dominating on San José State University women’s volleyball team, it ought to be asked just how much this (alleged) 0.002% have dominated in their sports?

There is a wholly irreconcilable difference in all of this. It is inarguable that males and females are physically different; if we weren’t, why would ‘gender-affirming care’ be a requirement for the ‘transgendered.’ That males and females are physically different in ways which make a difference when it comes to sports is made inarguable by the differences in their performances, in the records set in the same sports by men and women.

But today’s left have taken the position that men and women are equal in everything, and they cannot accept the obvious truth of measurable records in sports saying that no, they are not physically equal in everything, because that challenges their entire world view. That women now outnumber men in winning collegiate admissions is celebrated by the left, but no one seems to care that such is a thing in which men and women can compete on an equal footing. That men and women should be equal under the law does not mean that they are identical in every field.

Bad causes attract bad people: transgender advocate Stephen Ireland, who was attacking J K Rowling for not going along with transgenderism, was just sentenced to 24 +6 years in prison for raping a 12-year-old boy.

We have come to the point in which the views of the left have so strongly conflicted with just plain common sense that our friends on the left are having to take impossible positions. If they concede that men and women are different from each other, they are deathly afraid that they will be admitting that the sexes are not equal. And, as is always the case, whenever a subject arises which is even remotely connected to sex, the left feel the need to take the furthest left position they possibly can, or they might be thought of as going along with evil, reich-wing Republicans. J K Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, is fairly far to the political left, but she does not believe that girls can be boys and boys can be girls, so she’s been viciously attacked as a TERF, trans exclusionary radical feminist, and the subject of real hatred.

At least a few of the positions taken by today’s left can at least have some rational thought behind them, but when it comes to ‘transgenderism,’ they have completely lost touch with reality. I just wish that our nation’s third oldest continuously published newspaper wasn’t going along with this stuff.