Become a Clash Insider!
Don’t let Big Tech pre-chew your news. Sign up for our free email newsletter, and we’ll keep you in the loop.
It would be hard to imagine someone who could weigh in on this issue with greater gravitas than Michael Phelps.
Not only is he the most decorated Olympian in all of history, but the sport at the center of the controversy is the very one in which he has earned all those medals.
For anyone not paying attention, here’s a succinct description of the controversy that caught Phelps’s attention.
Controversial swimmer Lia Thomas was crushed by fellow transgender athlete Iszac Henig in front of stunned onlookers in an Ivy League women’s swim meet in the US.
Thomas, a swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania who transitioned from male to female in recent years, garnered attention when she smashed two US women’s records in the 200m and 500m freestyle disciplines last year.
Making her return to competition over the weekend, Thomas took part in four races during an Ivy League meeting against rivals Dartmouth and Hale[sic], and won her first two, but was beaten in her second two by Henig, who is currently transitioning from female to male. — Mirror
The debate centers on the perceived fairness of ‘trans’ athletes competing in women’s events.
Phelps used his experience competing against athletes who participated in blood doping as a starting point from which to share his opinion.
Speaking with CNN host Christiane Amanpour, Phelps said that sports must “be played on an even playing field,” something critics of Thomas say is not possible when a biological male completes against biological females.
“Look, like, I will say — I can talk from a standpoint of doping. I don’t think I have competed in a clean field in my entire career,” Phelps said. “So, I think this leads back to the organizing committees again, because it has to be a level playing field.”
“I think that’s something that we all need, because it’s — like, that’s what sports are,” Phelps continued. “And, for me, I don’t know where this is going to go. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I believe that we all should feel comfortable with who we are in our own skin. But I think sports should all be played on an even playing field. I don’t know what that looks like in the future. But it’s hard.”
…”This has been my sport my whole entire career. And I — honestly, the one thing I would love is everybody to be able to compete on an even playing field. That’s all I can say,” Phelps said.
It’s nice to see that actual athletes are now catching up to problems that satire site The Babylon Bee, and ClashDaily were foreseeing when this people-identifying-as-other-things trend hit the mainstream in 2017. It wasn’t just about gender but included adults identifying as children, women identifying as cats and so on.
We used the Babylon Bee’s t-ball piece to predict exactly these implications in women’s sport all the way back then.
From our June 2017 piece, 36yr. Old Man Identifies As 6yr. Old – Wins T-Ball Game With EPIC Home Run!:
There are only two sensible options.
The first is to agree with this Psychiatrist who called BS on the whole Transgenderism trend.
The other is to go all-in and stop having ANY gender-binary events. Don’t have races for the fastest man AND the fastest woman alive. Just the fastest PERSON.
(Because who can really say who is what gender anymore, if its fluid or a social construct. What’s the point when even male Olympian Bruce Jenner isn’t even ‘Bruce’ anymore?)
How is it that an upstart like ClashDaily was asking this very question way back then? It took almost 5 years before anyone started seriously looking for an answer.
Why do we even HAVE a ‘mainstream press’ if they’re so far behind the trendline?
Psalms of War: Prayers That Literally Kick Ass is a collection, from the book of Psalms, regarding how David rolled in prayer. I bet you haven’t heard these read, prayed, or sung in church against our formidable enemies — and therein lies the Church’s problem. We’re not using the spiritual weapons God gave us to waylay the powers of darkness. It might be time to dust them off and offer ‘em up if you’re truly concerned about the state of Christ’s Church and of our nation.
Also included in this book, Psalms of War, are reproductions of the author’s original art from his Biblical Badass Series of oil paintings.
This is a great gift for the prayer warriors. Real. Raw. Relevant.
