In a significant development, Paula Scanlan, a whistleblower and former teammate of Lia Thomas, the UPenn swimmer, has come forward to shed light on the injustices she faced as a female Division 1 (D1) swimmer. Scanlan bravely shares her personal experience of being silenced by both the NCAA and her Ivy League university when she raised concerns regarding the inclusion of a transgender athlete on their team. Joining forces with Riley Gaines, she now actively advocates for the protection of women’s sports.
Scanlan tells her story in the below powerful video (the Daily Wire’s production team is top-notch). Her account is corroborated by others. Quite obviously, Thomas, despite being a man, was permitted to compete against women on the swim team. Scanlan is interviewed in the 2022 Matt Walsh documentary What is a Woman. She talks to Walsh from the shadows, her voice electronically masked. She is now coming forward. I share the Walsh interview at the end of this blog.
“You will regret this” is obviously a threat. This was an email sent by the UPenn athletic department to the women on the UPenn swimming team. This is chilling and wrong. But perhaps the more terrifying piece of this story is the weaponization of UPenn’s psychological counseling services to make the women “okay” with competing against Thomas. This is textbook gaslighting. Gaslighting is a psychological manipulation tactic in which one person or group of persons makes another person or group of persons question their own judgment or sanity.
Characteristics of gaslighting are distorting and twisting information; presenting false narratives to create confusion and undermine the target’s trust in her own judgment; belittling the target’s emotions, opinions, or thoughts, making her feel foolish or overly sensitive; shifting responsibility for actions taken onto the target, making the target feel guilty or responsible for a situation she did not choose; isolating the target from sources of support, further amplifying control over the target and making it harder for the target to explore her doubts or confirm her experiences and suspicions.
In the UPenn case, the women swimmers were being made to feel as if they suffered from a psychiatric malady because they didn’t want to compete with a man who identifies as a woman on the women’s team.
It is a mark of authoritarianism for an educational institution to silence students with threats or gaslight them. The logic of authoritarianism is inherent in the logic of DEI programming (diversity, equity, and inclusion), ideological weaponry designed by corporate state elites and technocrats to control the minds of professionals, students, and workers. DEI programs transgress fundamental human rights, including freedom of association, conscience, speech, and thought. As such, DEI is diametrically opposed to the principles of equality and fairness.
Central to the American Creed is the principle of equality of opportunity. This type of equality emphasizes providing equal access to education, employment, and other resources, enabling individuals to compete on a level playing field and pursue their goals based on their abilities and efforts. In its ordinary meaning, “equity” refers to an approach that seeks to address systemic inequalities and create fair and just outcomes for all individuals. In practice, equity goals recognize that different individuals may face disadvantages or systemic biases that hinder their access to opportunities and resources they need to be successful. The principles of fairness and justice therefore require providing opportunities, resources, and support to individuals based on their unique needs and circumstances.
In two cases, grouped and objective difference across our species require those differences to be taken into account in order to ensure equality of opportunity or equity. These cases are age and sex. Because men and women represent two distinct genotypes in our species, with men possessing physical and physiological characteristics that give them significant advantages over women in athletic competition, achieving equity required the creation of men and women’s sports (as well as sports segregated by age). Within those broad divisions, there is sometimes further segregation, such as the division of boxing into weight classes. Note that we do not segregate sports by ethnicity, religion, or race. This is because these are either not clearly objective categories or are obviously cultural groupings not produced by natural history.
Therefore, unlike strict equality, which focuses on treating everyone the same despite their differences, equity recognizes that individuals may require different levels of assistance or accommodations based on those differences in order to achieve true equality, which is the possibility of success at a given endeavor in light of the requisite dedication and talent to succeed. This is why equity goals focus on addressing systemic barriers that perpetuate disadvantage or marginalization. The fact that girls and women are at a distinct disadvantage in athletic competition with boys and men explains the marginalization of girls and women in sports. In order to address disadvantage and marginalization, girls and women are rationally segregated from boys and men.
It is vital to achieving the goals of equity to ensure that the groups so segregated are objectively-existing and not the result of subjective perception or abstract categories without clear referents in concrete reality. Thomas was permitted to compete against women despite being a man because Thomas’ claims the gender identity of womanhood. However, this is an entirely subjective claim. By definition, gender identity refers to an individual’s deeply-held sense of his own gender, which may or may not align with his sex. In other words, it is an internal and personal understanding of one’s gender. Gender identity is therefore distinct from biological sex, which is determined by objective anatomical and physiological characteristics. Gender identity is a result of self-identification not objective determination. In contrast, the women on the UPenn team are women because of their genotype, an objectively-existing thing common and exclusive to them. UPenn’s actions sacrificed the principle of equity, i.e., true equality, for the politics of inclusion, putting women at a distinct disadvantage.
DEI programming, particularly in academic or corporate settings, also stifles free speech and limits ideological diversity. By promoting certain viewpoints or restricting others in the name of creating inclusive environments, DEI does more than simply impede open dialogue and hinder the free exchange of ideas; it systematically violates the individual’s right to freedom of assembly, association, conscience, privacy, speech, and thought. Scanlan was also a victim of these oppressions. She describes how an editorial she wrote for the campus paper was accepted and published only to be removed within a matter of a few hours. She and her colleagues also had their freedoms of association and privacy violated by being forced to associate with a man in a woman’s only space, a situation in which the man could see naked women while exposing them to his naked body.
It is no exaggeration to say that the assault on sex-based rights is one of the great struggles of our age. It is moreover a defining struggle; if society cannot determine what a woman is on the basis of objective criteria and move to protect women as a group based on those criteria, then we cannot be a fair and justice society. The claim that inclusion requires trans women to be included in women’s sports rest upon a deceitful claim, that trans women are women. But as adult human males, trans woman are by definition men. Once this lie is exposed—and it is exposed simply by affirming the truth that men are not women—it is obvious that women’s rights are being assaulted. There is no rational argument for the inclusion of men in women’s sports.
Moreover, Scanlan is right about how this struggle is part of a much larger struggle for the future of liberty. Those who oppose sex-based rights are trying to impose an ideology on society by silencing the defenders of those rights. This not how a free societies operate. This is not how a society that proclaims women’s rights operates. This is in fact how totalitarianism and misogyny work. The totalitarians and misogynists wrap their authoritarian programs in the language of social justice, but the destruction of women’s rights is anything but just social or otherwise.
freedom and reason 