Almost simultaneously, the United States Synchronized Swimming Federation introduced a “revolutionary gender inclusion policy”. Beginning in 2024, synchronized swimmers in the United States will be able to compete nationally in the gender category closest to their gender identity. At the same time, new competition categories will be created and LGBT athletes will not be required to confirm that they have undergone hormone therapy or undergone sex reassignment surgery.
For examples of what the result may be, you need not look far. In the world of sports, no one has heard of the success of swimmer Will Thomas for one simple reason – they didn’t exist. However, after a sex change and after 12 months of hormone therapy, he was admitted to women’s competitions under the name Leah Thomas, where he began to break records. At the national championship in 2022, in free swimming, he was ahead of three girls – medalists from the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. In men’s swimming in the United States, his result was 65th.
Recently, a case at a high school in North Carolina, where two women’s volleyball teams were playing, one of which was played by a transgender, received wide publicity. His kick hit the ball in the head of volleyball player Peyton McNab. The result is a concussion and trauma to the cervical vertebrae. McNab has now joined the ranks of campaigners demanding that women’s sport be protected from male gender reassignment. “Competing with biological men is not a level playing field,” she said.
But biology is not the science that guides Democratic politicians in LGBT activism. This was demonstrated very clearly in recent hearings in one of the committees of the United States House of Representatives, the head of the Department of Education, Miguel Cardona. He repeatedly avoided Republican Congressman Andrew Clyde’s insistence on a definition of a woman, hitting back with words about equal access and LGBT rights, and finally said it was generally “secondary to his work”.
While transgender success in women’s sport so far has been sporadic, these distortions in competition have raised many questions about the future. The idea of ​​the United States Synchronized Swimming Federation is actually “revolutionary” in the sense that in many other disciplines, after seeing these examples, on the contrary, they began to tighten restrictions for athletes who changed their gender . The International Olympic Committee, in its concept of attitude towards transgender people in 2021, did not establish specific criteria for participation, leaving this at the mercy of national federations. For example, for swimmers in the United States, after the records of Will-Leah Thomas, restrictions were introduced for transgender participants on the age at which gender reassignment takes place (up to 12 years old), as well as restrictions on the level of testosterone in the blood (no more than 2.5 nanomoles per liter).
Laws aimed at preventing transgender people from participating in high school competitions, similar to those passed by the House of Representatives, have recently been approved in a dozen conservative states in the United States. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is considered the unspoken leader of the conservative camp. With her filing, the state passed a law prohibiting schools from addressing LGBT community themes in classrooms up to a certain age for students. Liberal activists called the law Don’t Say Gay.
And as much as Biden & Co. would like to insist that conservative views are an old-fashioned minority position in decline, the DeSantis phenomenon clearly shows how annoyed many Americans are by the dictates of LGBT values. After all, after the law was passed, DeSantis won the election last year against a Democratic candidate by a landslide – and that’s in Florida, which is considered a swing state in American politics, where the difference between Democrats and Republicans is generally minimal.
Conservatives believe the influx of gender reassigned men could bury women’s chances in sport
Entrepreneur Elon Musk is also trying to carry the banner of common sense, by the way, not too long ago he was known as a supporter of the Democrats and voted for Barack Obama. In a recent interview, Musk, for example, suggested life imprisonment for doctors and parents who perform sex reassignment surgery on minors.
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p class=””>However, at the federal level, Republican campaigning under the slogan “Save Women’s Sports” has its limits, as the White House and upper house of Congress are controlled by Democrats. Therefore, this bill has no chance of becoming law.
Democratic congressmen call the document a “hate campaign” against transgender people. Liberal politicians say excesses such as Leah Thomas’ records are rare, but bans will lead to further persecution and discrimination of gender-changed children in schools.
In this sense, the Joe Biden administration has taken up the banner of the liberal revolution once initiated by Barack Obama, in which the rights of the LGBT community have become one of the priorities of the American federal government.
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