Former Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines was among more than a dozen college athletes who filed a lawsuit against the NCAA on Thursday, accusing it of violating their Title IX rights by allowing transgender woman Lia Thomas to compete at the national championships in 2022.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Atlanta, details the shock Gaines and other swimmers felt when they learned they would have to share a locker room with Thomas at the championships in Atlanta. It documents a number of races they swam in with Thomas, including the 200-yard final in which Thomas and Gaines tied for fifth but Thomas, not Gaines, was handed the fifth-place trophy.
Thomas swam for Pennsylvania. She competed for the men’s team at Penn before her gender transition.
Thomas was the first openly transgender athlete to win a Division I title in any sport, finishing in front of three Olympic medalists for the championship. By not making the final, the lawsuit mentions that Florida swimmer Tylor Mathieu, who was not a plaintiff, was denied first-team All-American honors in that event.
Other plaintiffs included athletes from volleyball and track.
Vote inertia and dog piling. I’ve seen it happen so many times. If you are voted to the negatives, it’s less likely you’ll receive many positive votes unless you receive enough to tip you back into positive numbers or someone points out that other, similar comments aren’t being down voted. The converse is also true, although the follow up comment phenomena seems not to hold.
I’ve even experimented with it on Reddit, way back. I’d leave a comment I know would be well received, then edit it to make it poorly received, but not so awful that it’d get mobbed. It’d usually keep going up, albeit less quickly, or sit stagnant.
On the flip side, I’d leave a shitty comment, then change it to a paraphrasing of a different, very well received sentiment once it was around -3 to -5. Despite the notion being well received elsewhere, the negative votes kept rolling in unless someone pointed out the collective hypocrisy in a follow up comment.
Tl;dr: Lemmy is run by bipedal, social apes whose behavior and opinions are biased by the perceived opinions of their fellow apes. This bias can sometimes be overcome by pointing it out.