Epistemologies of ignorance in constructions of fairness and biology: the online swimming community responds to Lia Thomas’ inclusion in women’s swimming events
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Organized sport has largely been, and remains, segregated by sex. A long history of cultural norms and gender socialization discouraged women from participating and competing in sport. The conflation of sex and gender is produced by and further reinforces notions of biological essentialism that denies the full inclusion of trans people. Anchoring our analysis in epistemologies of ignorance, this paper critically examines the online discourses surrounding Lia Thomas’ participation in NCAA women’s swimming events to understand how the swimming community constructs notions of sex, gender, and fairness. We reviewed 1696 online comments on articles about Thomas’ participation in women’s events on a globally renowned swimming website, SwimSwam. We argue that biological essentialism functions as an epistemology of ignorance, where the dominant group actively reject or misrecognize scientific, historical, and sociological knowledges to justify the exclusion of trans women swimmers. In turn, biological essentialism erases equity issues within sport and, thus, effectively works to reproduce the privilege position of particular groups—in this case cisgender women and men—by protecting their opportunities to swimming success.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".