Trans swimmer Lia Thomas finishes fifth in bid for second NCAA championship
Dan Wolken, USA TODAY
ATLANTA — University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas failed to add a second national title at the NCAA women’s swimming and diving championships on Friday, finishing fifth in the 200-yard freestyle race.
© Brett Davis, USA TODAY Sports Penn swimmer Lia Thomas talks to head coach Mike Schnur after the 500 free prelim.
One night after becoming the first openly transgender person to win a Division I national championship, in the 500-yard free, Thomas struggled from the beginning of the race and came up more than two seconds short of completing a sweep of the two events in which she entered as the top seed. Stanford's Taylor Ruck was the winner. Thomas will contest a third event Saturday in the 100-yard freestyle.
Friday’s loss is unlikely to quell the media scrutiny and controversy surrounding Thomas’ ability to participate in the NCAA championships or whether this was a fair competition given the circumstances of her transition.
From NFL plays to college sports scores, all the top sports news you need to know every day.
Thomas, who competed for the Penn men’s team for three seasons, started hormone therapy in 2019 to begin the process of transitioning to a woman and almost immediately began threatening Ivy League records.
Her story launched into national consciousness in December when some anonymous parents of Penn swimmers publicly circulated a letter to the conference and NCAA looking for answers.
Earlier this year, USA Swimming changed its requirements for trans competitors, mandating three years of low testosterone levels. The NCAA declined to immediately adopt those restrictions, which would have barred Thomas from this competition, but will likely feel pressure from the public and politicians to adopt more stringent standards for trans athletes.
Several state legislatures are considering laws that would regulate trans sports participation, some of which critics claim are harmful to transgender children and discriminatory.
IN HER WORDS: Oregon's Sedona Prince, whose video at last year's women's NCAA Tournament showed inequalities, speaks out
Thomas, who declined to participate in the NCAA's supposedly mandatory press conference for race winners, told ESPN in a brief interview after the 500-yard win that it “means the world” to be able to compete here.
But her mere presence drew small protests outside the venue Thursday, and there was a noted lack of enthusiasm from the fans in attendance when she was introduced on the podium as the national champion.
“I try to ignore it as much as I can,” Thomas told ESPN. “I try to focus on my swimming, what I need to do to get ready for my races and try to block out everything else."
Follow Dan Wolken on Twitter @DanWolken
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trans swimmer Lia Thomas finishes fifth in bid for second NCAA championship
One night after becoming the first openly transgender person to win a Division I national championship, in the 500-yard free, Thomas struggled from the beginning of the race and came up more than two seconds short of completing a sweep of the two events in which she entered as the top seed. Stanford's Taylor Ruck was the winner. Thomas will contest a third event Saturday in the 100-yard freestyle.
Friday’s loss is unlikely to quell the media scrutiny and controversy surrounding Thomas’ ability to participate in the NCAA championships or whether this was a fair competition given the circumstances of her transition.
From NFL plays to college sports scores, all the top sports news you need to know every day.
Thomas, who competed for the Penn men’s team for three seasons, started hormone therapy in 2019 to begin the process of transitioning to a woman and almost immediately began threatening Ivy League records.
Her story launched into national consciousness in December when some anonymous parents of Penn swimmers publicly circulated a letter to the conference and NCAA looking for answers.
Earlier this year, USA Swimming changed its requirements for trans competitors, mandating three years of low testosterone levels. The NCAA declined to immediately adopt those restrictions, which would have barred Thomas from this competition, but will likely feel pressure from the public and politicians to adopt more stringent standards for trans athletes.
Several state legislatures are considering laws that would regulate trans sports participation, some of which critics claim are harmful to transgender children and discriminatory.
IN HER WORDS: Oregon's Sedona Prince, whose video at last year's women's NCAA Tournament showed inequalities, speaks out
Thomas, who declined to participate in the NCAA's supposedly mandatory press conference for race winners, told ESPN in a brief interview after the 500-yard win that it “means the world” to be able to compete here.
But her mere presence drew small protests outside the venue Thursday, and there was a noted lack of enthusiasm from the fans in attendance when she was introduced on the podium as the national champion.
“I try to ignore it as much as I can,” Thomas told ESPN. “I try to focus on my swimming, what I need to do to get ready for my races and try to block out everything else."
Follow Dan Wolken on Twitter @DanWolken
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trans swimmer Lia Thomas finishes fifth in bid for second NCAA championship
Dan Wolken, USA TODAY
ATLANTA — Lia Thomas took off the oversized jacket with “PENN” on the back, revealing her long arms and broad shoulders, and stepped onto the platform to be introduced before the 500-yard freestyle race at the NCAA women’s swimming and diving championships.
© Brett Davis, USA TODAY Sports Penn swimmer Lia Thomas holds a trophy after winning the 500-yard free final on Thursday.
Hardly anyone in the Georgia Tech Aquatic Center cheered.
If you watched Thomas swim in the preliminaries earlier Thursday, it was obvious what was about to happen: In a few minutes, she wasn’t merely going to be a pariah of political opportunists and a cog in the outrage machine. At this moment, in this pool, she was going to forever be the first openly transgender athlete to win an NCAA championship in Division I.
“Lia did everything right,” said Naiki Kaffezakis, a Georgia Tech graduate student who runs one of the LGBTQ organizations on campus and was among the group of roughly 50 protestors and counter-protestors who had to eventually be moved to different sides of the street here Thursday. “She did nothing wrong.”
Of course, nothing about the Thomas story has been that simple, which is what makes everything that surrounds her so frustrating and disheartening.
There’s a legitimate and necessary conversation to be had over whether Thomas, who competed for three seasons on Penn’s men's swimming team before coming out as transgender and starting hormone therapy in 2019, should have been allowed to compete against women.
From the national-best times she posted this season in multiple events, to the dominance she displayed Thursday in beating three Olympians by more than a second, it’s not only fair but important to question whether this is a level playing field.
But that’s not the debate those who purport to be most upset by Thomas want to have.
On the walkway outside the Georgia Tech Aquatic Center, a group of protestors affiliated with the “Save Women’s Sports” organization had lined up early Thursday to distribute stickers and shout down anyone in support of Thomas.
ANTI-TRANS LAWS: Conservatives want to ban transgender athletes from girls sports. Their evidence is shaky.
When they eventually organized into a rally, their rhetoric suggested a world in which transgender athletes like Thomas don’t merely have an undefined competitive advantage, but that they’re predators who seek to take women’s sports for themselves if they’re not stopped. Mostly, it was obvious they are using Thomas’ prominence as a thin veil to spread hate and animosity against one of America’s most vulnerable minorities.
“This is not an exaggeration," Macy Petty, a volleyball player at Lee University said. "Women's sports are at risk of disappearing.”
And K. Yang, who claims to have been a former trans rights activist who now runs “Stop Female Erasure,” characterized what was happening in the pool as a “war on sex-based rights of women and girls around the world.”
With all that ridiculous hyperbole swirling around her, you can understand why Thomas hasn’t had much interest in explaining herself publicly – and why her competitors have mostly been silent.
After the race, third-place finisher Erica Sullivan of Texas immediately reached over to shake Thomas’ hand. But on the podium, Thomas stood awkwardly by herself while the three swimmers who finished behind her hugged for photos.
Following the race, Thomas gave a brief on-camera interview but refused to participate in the NCAA-mandated news conference. Other competitors were not made available to the news media.
Perhaps the most notable statement that has been made thus far came from Stanford’s Brooke Forde, who has won multiple NCAA championships and a silver medal in Tokyo.
“I have great respect for Lia,” Forde wrote in January. “Social change is always a slow and difficult process and we rarely get it correct right away. Being among the first to lead such a social change requires an enormous amount of courage, and I admire Lia for her leadership that will undoubtedly benefit many trans athletes in the future. In 2020, I along with most swimmers, experienced what it was like to have my chance to achieve my swimming goals taken away after years of hard work. I would not wish this experience on anyone, especially Lia, who has followed the rules required of her. I believe that treating people with respect and dignity is more important than any trophy or record will ever be, which is why I will not have a problem racing against Lia at NCAAs this year.”
Of course, not everyone in the swimming world has been that magnanimous – including complaints from within the Penn swimming team and their parents.
It's understandable that some competitors would feel threatened by Thomas’ rapid rise from a middling collegiate swimmer as a man to the top of the sport as a woman. We know that Thomas would have had athletic advantages over women for most of her life. What we don’t know very much about is how those advantages change for men transitioning to women or what is necessary to ensure fair competition.
“We need to have better science,” Kaffezakis said. “Every trans person here, honestly we should have better science about what (hormone therapy) does to bodies of transitioning people, but that isn’t being funded. If the NCAA and these other leagues and the Olympic committee really put in the money to learn where to regulate these things, we can have a conversation. But when we have just a few studies here and there, there’s not enough to work on. You can’t blame the athletes.”
Thomas is only doing what the NCAA allowed her to do, based on the rules it had in place when the season began. In February, USA Swimming adopted tougher restrictions for transgender competitors, lowering its testosterone threshold by half and subjecting them to an eligibility panel.
The NCAA, which usually operates in lockstep with the national governing body, did not follow suit for this season because it did not want to implement a rule change late in the season that would have expressly kept Thomas out. The urgency of adopting a firmer policy, though, will only intensify for the NCAA – not just with Thomas' success, but a series of state legislatures attempting to pass laws that regulate transgender participation in sports.
If the circus surrounding Thomas proves anything, it's that this issue requires a delicate, measured, science-based conversation. Unfortunately, the loudest voices are fueled only by emotion.
Barbara Ehardt, a former college basketball coach at Cal State Fullerton who now serves in the Idaho House of Representatives and sponsored a bill that would require transgender athletes to play on teams that correspond to their sex at birth, was asked what she would say to Thomas.
“My message is, recognize you’re the one who is discriminating,” she said. “You had your opportunity.”
It is, of course, an ugly, rotten suggestion – that Thomas wanted to become a woman for competitive reasons. Meanwhile, across the street, there was a glimmer of common sense in a simple sign being held up by one of the Georgia Tech students: “Do y’all have nothing better to do?”
Hardly anyone in the Georgia Tech Aquatic Center cheered.
If you watched Thomas swim in the preliminaries earlier Thursday, it was obvious what was about to happen: In a few minutes, she wasn’t merely going to be a pariah of political opportunists and a cog in the outrage machine. At this moment, in this pool, she was going to forever be the first openly transgender athlete to win an NCAA championship in Division I.
“Lia did everything right,” said Naiki Kaffezakis, a Georgia Tech graduate student who runs one of the LGBTQ organizations on campus and was among the group of roughly 50 protestors and counter-protestors who had to eventually be moved to different sides of the street here Thursday. “She did nothing wrong.”
Of course, nothing about the Thomas story has been that simple, which is what makes everything that surrounds her so frustrating and disheartening.
There’s a legitimate and necessary conversation to be had over whether Thomas, who competed for three seasons on Penn’s men's swimming team before coming out as transgender and starting hormone therapy in 2019, should have been allowed to compete against women.
From the national-best times she posted this season in multiple events, to the dominance she displayed Thursday in beating three Olympians by more than a second, it’s not only fair but important to question whether this is a level playing field.
But that’s not the debate those who purport to be most upset by Thomas want to have.
On the walkway outside the Georgia Tech Aquatic Center, a group of protestors affiliated with the “Save Women’s Sports” organization had lined up early Thursday to distribute stickers and shout down anyone in support of Thomas.
ANTI-TRANS LAWS: Conservatives want to ban transgender athletes from girls sports. Their evidence is shaky.
When they eventually organized into a rally, their rhetoric suggested a world in which transgender athletes like Thomas don’t merely have an undefined competitive advantage, but that they’re predators who seek to take women’s sports for themselves if they’re not stopped. Mostly, it was obvious they are using Thomas’ prominence as a thin veil to spread hate and animosity against one of America’s most vulnerable minorities.
“This is not an exaggeration," Macy Petty, a volleyball player at Lee University said. "Women's sports are at risk of disappearing.”
And K. Yang, who claims to have been a former trans rights activist who now runs “Stop Female Erasure,” characterized what was happening in the pool as a “war on sex-based rights of women and girls around the world.”
With all that ridiculous hyperbole swirling around her, you can understand why Thomas hasn’t had much interest in explaining herself publicly – and why her competitors have mostly been silent.
After the race, third-place finisher Erica Sullivan of Texas immediately reached over to shake Thomas’ hand. But on the podium, Thomas stood awkwardly by herself while the three swimmers who finished behind her hugged for photos.
Following the race, Thomas gave a brief on-camera interview but refused to participate in the NCAA-mandated news conference. Other competitors were not made available to the news media.
Perhaps the most notable statement that has been made thus far came from Stanford’s Brooke Forde, who has won multiple NCAA championships and a silver medal in Tokyo.
“I have great respect for Lia,” Forde wrote in January. “Social change is always a slow and difficult process and we rarely get it correct right away. Being among the first to lead such a social change requires an enormous amount of courage, and I admire Lia for her leadership that will undoubtedly benefit many trans athletes in the future. In 2020, I along with most swimmers, experienced what it was like to have my chance to achieve my swimming goals taken away after years of hard work. I would not wish this experience on anyone, especially Lia, who has followed the rules required of her. I believe that treating people with respect and dignity is more important than any trophy or record will ever be, which is why I will not have a problem racing against Lia at NCAAs this year.”
Of course, not everyone in the swimming world has been that magnanimous – including complaints from within the Penn swimming team and their parents.
It's understandable that some competitors would feel threatened by Thomas’ rapid rise from a middling collegiate swimmer as a man to the top of the sport as a woman. We know that Thomas would have had athletic advantages over women for most of her life. What we don’t know very much about is how those advantages change for men transitioning to women or what is necessary to ensure fair competition.
“We need to have better science,” Kaffezakis said. “Every trans person here, honestly we should have better science about what (hormone therapy) does to bodies of transitioning people, but that isn’t being funded. If the NCAA and these other leagues and the Olympic committee really put in the money to learn where to regulate these things, we can have a conversation. But when we have just a few studies here and there, there’s not enough to work on. You can’t blame the athletes.”
Thomas is only doing what the NCAA allowed her to do, based on the rules it had in place when the season began. In February, USA Swimming adopted tougher restrictions for transgender competitors, lowering its testosterone threshold by half and subjecting them to an eligibility panel.
The NCAA, which usually operates in lockstep with the national governing body, did not follow suit for this season because it did not want to implement a rule change late in the season that would have expressly kept Thomas out. The urgency of adopting a firmer policy, though, will only intensify for the NCAA – not just with Thomas' success, but a series of state legislatures attempting to pass laws that regulate transgender participation in sports.
If the circus surrounding Thomas proves anything, it's that this issue requires a delicate, measured, science-based conversation. Unfortunately, the loudest voices are fueled only by emotion.
Barbara Ehardt, a former college basketball coach at Cal State Fullerton who now serves in the Idaho House of Representatives and sponsored a bill that would require transgender athletes to play on teams that correspond to their sex at birth, was asked what she would say to Thomas.
“My message is, recognize you’re the one who is discriminating,” she said. “You had your opportunity.”
It is, of course, an ugly, rotten suggestion – that Thomas wanted to become a woman for competitive reasons. Meanwhile, across the street, there was a glimmer of common sense in a simple sign being held up by one of the Georgia Tech students: “Do y’all have nothing better to do?”
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