Welcome to the Quillett Podcast. I'm your host Jonathan Kay, a senior editor at Quillett.

Quillett is where Freethought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

If you'd like to support the podcast, you can do so by going to Colette.com and becoming a paid subscriber.

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articles and early access to Colette social events. And this week I'm coming to you

from Sunny Las Vegas where I've been watching my daughter compete in the Las Vegas Classic girls volleyball tournament.

And as anyone who's been reading our articles at Quilett for the last year or three will know,

female athletics is something our editors also think about professionally,

in response to the threat to the integrity of female sports coming from trans-identified biological men who seek to compete in female competitions.

In recent months, common sense seems to be winning the day on this issue in some spheres,

with world athletics voting to exclude biological men from competing in elite female competitions if they have gone through male puberty.

And yet much of the media is still peddling the claim that such exclusions are inherently transphobic.

In late March, in fact, E-S-P-N decided to celebrate Women's History Month by celebrating

none other than Leah Thomas, the also ran male swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania,

who suddenly began dominating the pool after announcing a transition to the women's category in 2021. Earlier this year I interviewed Mary O'Connor,

an Olympic rower who wrote for Yale University in the late 1970s and who is now a

member of the Independent Council on Women's Sports, or ICONS, a U.S.

based group that lobbies for the protection of female sport.

This week my guest is O'Connor's colleague, ICON's co-founder Marchee Smith, a former University of Arizona

swimmer and Backstroke Champion, who began raising the alarm about Leah Thomas even before

Thomas's controversial appearance at the NCAA swimming

championships in 2022.

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