VIDEO: Matt Walsh Interviews Paula Scanlan About Being Lia Thomas’ Teammate
Here’s something which is blowing up the internet today. It’s Matt Walsh, whose documentary “What Is A Woman” has gone completely viral since it went up on Twitter, interviewing Paula Scanlan about the Lia Thomas debacle on the University of Pennsylvania swim team.
Scanlan was on the team when a male swimmer named William Thomas suddenly decided he’d do a live-action role play as a woman and switch over to the women’s team, and of course the university and its athletic department thought that would be just swell.
She describes what it was like for the women on the team – changing in bathroom stalls rather than the locker room, dealing with the discouraging aspects of the competitive disadvantage in having a man on the team, the oppressive attitude of the university toward any protest about Thomas’ presence. She says one of her teammates went to the athletic department in tears over the invasion of a man on the women’s team and came back after the meeting essentially brainwashed into fully supporting the farce.
And she talks about how Penn flatly told its women’s swimmers they had no choice but to accept a man in that locker room without complaint, specifically telling them they would regret speaking out about the injustice the university was laying down on them.
Scanlan brings up a very interesting point as well: she says you’re supposed to support your teammates, but how as a woman do you support a man on your team? She notes that Lance Armstrong had teammates, too, and what did it do to them when he was doping? Were they supposed to support that?
She doesn’t come out and say it, but there’s the obvious implication, which is that what Penn did was one of the most egregious examples of cheating in intercollegiate sports anyone has ever seen. Paying recruits is one thing. Steroids is something else. But sending men to compete in women’s sports against women is pretty much the height of an unfair advantage, at least until we get to the point where we’re artificially enhancing human bodies by use of robotics.
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She doesn’t quite go there, and neither does Walsh, so perhaps that’s an opportunity missed. But the inference is clear.
Scanlan appeared anonymously in “What Is A Woman.” Now that she’s publicly telling her story the way Riley Gaines has done, she’s hoping there’s a groundswell of female athletes who step forward and fight back against the encroachment of the trans crowd into their space. Hopefully she’ll inspire others – and hopefully she’ll get what she’s also asking for; namely, that states will start passing laws protecting women and girls from a male invasion and the effective end of women’s sports.
Fair warning, though: the uptalking and vocal fry is noticeable, and it can grate a little. Something needs to be done to make this fad go away among the kids and particularly the “well-educated” kids, because a whole country full of uptalkers is something to be dreaded. Otherwise, we like Paula Scanlan a lot.
