Transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has lashed out at the women who don’t want her to compete in women’s sports, claiming that they’re too scared to ‘fully manifest’ their ‘implicit bias’ and play it off as half-support.
The trans athlete joined the first NCAA transgender swimmer Schuyler Bailar on his podcast Dear Schuyler on Monday to discuss the division over whether or not trans-female athletes should be on women’s sports teams.
During the fiery podcast, Thomas said a ‘true feminist’ would be working for everyone to ‘come together to break down theese patriarchal ideals of what a woman is’
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The Mail Online reports: Thomas, who was widely criticized throughout the swim season, has called her former teammates and critics fake feminists who are pushing transphobic values under the disguise that they are ‘supporting women.’
They’re like: “Oh, we respect Lia as a woman, as a trans woman, whatever, we respect her identity, we just don’t think it’s fair.”
‘You can’t really have that half support. Like I respect you as a woman here, but not here,’ the NCAA gold medalist said on a promotional clip for the podcast, posted to Instagram.
‘They’re using the guise of feminism to sort of push transphobic beliefs. I think a lot of people in that camp sort of carry an implicit bias against trans people, but don’t want to, I guess, fully manifest or speak that out. And so they try to just play it off as this sort of half-support.
‘You can’t do that you can’t sort of break down me as a person into little pieces.’
Bailar agreed with the controversial athlete, saying: ‘They’re coming from…this whole protect “protect women’s sports,” [which] has become a very big movement and that they do it under the guise of feminism. “Oh, we’re just feminists, we’re just fighting for women,” and whenever anybody says that I’m always [like]: ‘Okay, you’re fighting for women by excluding women so that’s not fighting for women.’
The athletes discussed how black women faced the same criticism that transgender women are facing now, saying that people ‘don’t want a woman who doesn’t look like you perhaps or who isn’t fitting your version of womanhood to win.’
Bailar went on to say that feminism has become ‘twisted’ and ‘turned into excluding women’ and reduced them to ‘reproductive capacity.’
‘At the end of the day, everybody’s trying to – under a true feminist – is everybody trying to come together to sort of break down these patriarchal ideals of what a woman is and who can be a woman and sort of open that up to to the very broad range of possibilities that there are,’ Thomas said.
Thomas’ own teammates’ parents wrote a letter in December to NCAA, demanding it change the rules that permitted the young transgender athlete to compete, declaring ‘at stake here is the integrity of women’s sports.’
