Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center has been spewing hate at transgender swimmer Lia Thomas ever since she starting winning college competition, thus making her a designated enemy of anti-trans right-wingers. As Thomas competed in college conference competitions, the hate ratcheted up. Alex Christy huffed in a March 18 post:
MSNBC’s Hallie Jackson took a break from Ukraine coverage towards the end of her Thursday show to hype the “potentially history-making night” to come as transgender swimming Lia Thomas prepared to compete in the NCAA swimming championships -- which Thomas did win later in the day. Together with activist Chris Mosier, the duo demanded Thomas be celebrated for making it to the championships.
After touting the historic nature of the situation, Jackson asked Mosier to “Talk a little about what's at stake tonight.”
Christy complained that Jackson "cherry-picked" a competitor who didn't object to competing against her and ignored "plenty of reports that her teammates resent having to share the same locker room as Thomas and compete at such a biological disadvantage." But the reports Christy cited come from the New York Post, which has the same right-wing anti-trans agenda as the MRC, and are anonymous sourced, which we knowthe MRC doesn't like. Christ went on to baselessly suggest that Thomas became transgender solely because she couldn't compete successfully as a male:
Thomas went from being the 462nd ranked male swimmer to the number one ranked female swimmer and later on Thursday would go on to win the national championship. It doesn’t take an advanced biology or anatomy and physiology degree to figure why and that is not a cause for celebration.
The same day, John Simmons cheered that "tranny" Thomas received "warranted backlash" for winning a race at the NCAA championships:
In the most unsurprising sports headline of the week, Lia Thomas - a transgendered female - defeated a pool (no pun intended) of real women in the 500-yard freestyle event at the NCAA Division I Championships in Atlanta, GA on Thursday, with a time of 4 minutes, 33.24 seconds.
Thomas, who has been rightly scrutinized for being a biological male that the NCAA has somehow let compete in women's sports, defeated the next closest competitor by roughly two seconds and was just a little over nine seconds from breaking Olympic gold medalist Katie Ledecky’s world record time.
While the NCAA and ESPN fawned over Thomas’ “win,” plenty of people condemned Thomas' charade, and several of Thomas’ teammates have anonymously decried Thomas' actions for several months. They don't support what this tranny is doing and that it eliminates any competition before the race has started.
Simmons didn't explain why anonymous sources should be trusted to trash Thomas. And like Christy, his sources of criticism of Thomas were mostly right-wing activists, and the first one he cited was notorious homophobe Matt Walsh. Simmons concluded by ranting:
When you start to lose the support of feminists for what you are doing, maybe it’s time to take stock in just how bonkers of a situation we have on our hands.
We have stooped to the level of allowing men who fail competing against other men to mutilate themselves, claim they are women, beat biological women in sporting events, and then hail them as individuals worthy of praise. We have abandoned reason, forsaken truth, and embraced foolishness with open arms.
What a sick world we live in.
By contrast, Simmons and the rest of the MRC have stayed silent about Walsh's sick stunt of deceiving transgender people into thinking he was making a pro-transgender film.
Jay Maxson -- who has ironically made so little personal information availabale online that we don't know the person's gender -- cheered the right-wing backlash as well in a March 21 post:
America’s college women’s swimming season is over, but the controversy over transgender fraud Will “Lia” Thomas isn’t disappearing any time soon.
[...]
Thomas (at left, on NCAA victory stand, in photo) won the national championship in the 500-yard freestyle last week, preventing real women from advancing to the finals and relegating them to lower finishes than they would have gained had the NCAA not allowed him to compete. He defeated three U.S. Olympic silver medalists in the process.
“We think everyone should play sports fairly,” Save Women’s Sports told the New York Post on Saturday. The group aims to restore biology-based eligibility and identifies itself as “pro women,” but not specifically targeting Thomas.
Beth Stelzer, an amateur powerlifter and the founder of Save Women’s Sports, says that defending women in athletics shouldn't be seen as a partisan or religious issue. The group protested the NCAA policy of allowing men to compete on college women’s sports teams during the national women’s swimming championships last week in Atlanta.
Maxson hid the fact that Save Women's Sports is very much making it a partisan political issue; members protested outside the NCAA swimming championships even though none of them had any background in swimming and have consistently misgendered Thomas. Maxson deliberately misgendered her too:
Meanwhile, Thomas, who is a senior and finished with college competition, is setting his sights on the 2024 women’s Olympic swimming competition. He’s aiming to take his ill-gotten eligibility for women’s swimming to its highest competitive level. The unfairness never ends in this mad, mad, mad world of woke sports.
Maxson put out another rant the same day complaining that "NBC airbrushed a photo of Penn University swimmer Will “Lia” Thomas to portray him [sic] more like a cover girl than a manly man."
John Simmons used a March 25 post to gush over how transgender person Caitlyn Jenner criticized Thomas while also misgendering her as well:
Caitlyn Jenner is an odd individual. He transitioned to a she in 2015 and has been an outspoken supporter of trans rights in recent years, but yesterday Jenner made a statement that might have some trans people scratching their heads.
[...]
Many Americans need to take note of what just happened.
A transgender individual just came out and blasted the fact that a man who wants to be a woman is competing against and beating women in women’s sports. Not only is she saying this is wrong, she is saying that it is common sense. Even someone who is living their life in the transgender delusion can say that what Thomas is doing should not be applauded, celebrated, or allowed.
That means everyone else, whether conservative, progressive, or somewhere in the middle, should also be seeing Thomas’ actions for what they are: abominable in every sense of the word. There is no middle ground, there is no rationalizing Thomas’ actions, there is no sympathizing with this delusion.
Tolerating the ideology that Thomas’ embraces needs to stop. Ironically, even transgendered people get that.
Yes, Simmons really thinks being transgender is an "ideology" like his being a hateful right-winger.
Simmons used a March 29 post to cheer that a college swimmer went on a right-wing podcast and "detailed how repulsive it was being in the same locker room with a man," going on to rant that Thomas was destroying American society:
A growing contingent of NCAA swimmers have had enough with Lia Thomas ruining women’s swimming not just in the pool, but in other aspects as well.
According to one of Thomas’ peers, the transgendered female, who still has male genitalia and is by any objective measure still a man, currently undresses and gets ready for races in a women’s locker room.
Is nothing sacred anymore?[...]
The problem with enabling men like Thomas to dictate our norms is that we destroy basic human barriers that have kept our society functioning. Just 10 years ago, it would be common sense to say that a man cannot be a woman, and that men cannot be in the same locker room as women (or vice versa). When we destroy the basic building blocks of what makes a society function properly, like acknowledging that there are two genders that are separate in function but equal in value, society will devolve into chaos and ruin.
Simmons concluded by sneering, "Hopefully, pressure like this will be enough to get Thomas out of the pool with biological women and get him back to being mediocre against other men."
An April 7 post by Maxson championed another swimmer bashing Thomas, prompting yet another transphobic rant:
Excuse me, but Lia does not need anything but a one way ticket out of women's swimming.
Thomas has been a disgrace to the sport and one of the biggest proponents of an ideology that is bringing ruin upon our culture. Because the NCAA has indulged his fantasies and desires for what he wants reality to be, women like Gaines are being erased from today's culture.
Maxson used an April 11 post to baselessly claim that Thomas became a woman to win more medals, then bashed the NCAA for not hating LGBT people as much as he (or she) does:
For three long seasons, Pennsylvania University student William Thomas toiled at the back of the pack in men’s collegiate swimming. To say he was an also-ran would be an insult to also-runs. After ranking a woeful 462nd in men’s swimming, he re-invented himself as “Lia” Thomas, a transgender “woman.”
A season in which Thomas reduced women’s swimming competition to rubble is over, but nearly 40 former women’s college swimmers are collectively demanding the NCAA stop the charade of male transgender migrants ruining the integrity of women’s sports.
[...]
The 40 letter signees are courageous in standing against the NCAA’s prevailing tide. However, the group that oversees collegiate sports has never had the guts to oppose LGBT priorities, and that isn’t likely that will change. In fact, the anacronyms NCAA and LGBT could just as well be combined to form NCAALBGT.
The MRC's war on Thomas has always been about dehumanizing and smearing her for being transgender, and it's a part of the organization 'soverall hatred of anyone and anything LGBT. Let's not pretend it involves any sort of desire for "integrity."
