Elis Lundholm is a woman

Swedish skier Elis Lundholm is a woman who calls herself a man but still competes against women.

If that sounds confusing to you, it certainly was to commentators covering women’s freestyle skiing on an NBC-streamed broadcast at this year’s Winter Olympics in Italy.

Many media outlets covering the Olympics have hyped the fact that the 23-year-old Lundholm is the first so-called “transgender” athlete to compete in the Winter Games. Lundholm’s self-proclaimed gender identity is really the only thing that makes her noteworthy. The skier didn’t come close to contending for a medal in the women’s moguls competition on Feb. 10, placing 25th out of 30 skiers and missing a spot in the event’s final.

Despite Lundholm’s low finish, her name was quite prominent in the Olympic news cycle the following day. Lundholm generated more press than the gold medalist in her event, American Liz Lemley. That’s because commentators on a feed broadcast into American homes via NBCUniversal’s streaming website, Peacock, apparently forgot that Lundholm self-identifies as male. The broadcasters repeatedly referred to her with the correct pronouns – “she” and “her”—rather than Lundholm’s preferred “he/him” pronouns.”

This, of course, is an unpardonable sin to the LGBTQ community and among their woke allies. NBC thus went into full damage control mode, groveling profusely for “misgendering” Lundholm.

“NBC Sports takes this matter seriously,” a network spokesperson told the LGBTQ website Outsports, which first reported the news. Seriously?

“Today we streamed an international feed with non-NBCUniversal commentators who misgendered Olympian Elis Lundholm. We apologize to Elis and our viewers, and we have removed the replay of that feed.”

Media outlets have speculated about the source of the international feed: According to Yahoo.com, it may have been Olympic Broadcasting Services, the broadcasting arm of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). As of this writing, the offending commentators also remained unidentified.

NBC has since deleted the footage from its Olympic website and taken it out of replay rotation.

One may wonder why, if Lundholm truly believes she is a man, she’s not competing against men. That would certainly alleviate any confusion the sportscasters may have suffered in the heat of calling the action. It’s certainly reasonable, after all, to think that athletes competing in a women’s event are, in fact, women.

According to Newsweek, the IOC lets international federations for individual sports determine their athletes’ eligibility criteria for Olympic competition. The International Ski Federation lets women, regardless of gender identity, compete in the women’s category so long as they have registered as female in the federation’s system. The LGBTQ sports news website Them has reported that because Lundholm competes in the category that aligns with her sex as determined at birth and hasn’t begun the so-called “transitioning” process—not that someone actually can transition—“[she] qualifies to compete per the trans athlete rules in any sport.”

Even so, if Lundholm is truly “living authentically,” as the LGBTQ community and its supporters so often claim about trans-identifying individuals, competing against men—even if it meant losing badly or not even qualifying for the Olympics—would be the honest thing to do, wouldn’t it?

Regardless, the fact that Lundholm chose to compete against women speaks volumes—as does the offending commentators’ repeated references to Lundholm with female pronouns. Both are a tacit, if not overt, acknowledgment of the basic universal truth that God makes all of us male and female and biology determines what category we belong in.

It’s a truth that we need to quit apologizing for. That includes secular media outlets like NBC, too.

Those who don’t are perpetuating a lie. There’s a story about Abraham Lincoln: America’s most celebrated president reportedly once asked, “How many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg?” He then answered his own question: “Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.”

The same goes for those who refer to women who claim to be men as men, and vice versa: Even if done with good intentions, out of compassion or respect, truth is sacrificed in the process. It’s this very sort of thing that Christian influencer Allie Beth Stuckey refers to as “toxic empathy.” And as we’ve seen multiple times over when male athletes who claim to be female compete against actual women, such toxic empathy can have disastrous consequences for their female opponents, be it the loss of athletic opportunities at best or life-altering physical injuries at worst.

NBC’s apologies to its woke viewers notwithstanding, the sportscasters who repeatedly referred to Lundholm as “she” and “her” on live television didn’t “misgender” the Swedish skier. They correctly gendered her. Whether that was the commentators’ intent or not, they spoke truth. That’s what good journalists do.