Penn Swimmers Voice Support for Transgender Teammate Lia Thomas
Members of the Penn women’s swimming and diving team released a statement announcing their support for Lia Thomas amid recent criticism of the transgender swimmer.
Thomas competed for Penn’s men’s swimming team for three years before transitioning and moving to the women’s team. This season, she has set multiple program records and has qualified for next month's NCAA swimming and diving championships in the 200-yard, 500-yard and 1,650-yard freestyle events.
In the last two months, multiple national outlets have published anonymous accounts attributed to Penn swimmers and parents that denounced Thomas’s participation on the women’s team.
“We want to express our full support for Lia in her transition,” the athletes said, per ESPN. ”We value her as a person, teammate, and friend. The sentiments put forward by an anonymous member of our team are not representative of the feelings, values, and opinions of the entire Penn team, composed of 39 women with diverse backgrounds.
“... We recognize this is a matter of great controversy and are doing our best to navigate it while still focusing on doing our best in the pool and classroom.”
Two weeks ago, the NCAA said it would be changing its policies on transgender participation so that each sport’s rules mirrored those of their national governing body (in this case, that meant the NCAA swimming rules would mirror those of USA Swimming). Penn Athletics then announced it would work with the NCAA in support of Thomas.
On Tuesday, USA Swimming announced a new policy that laid out a series of requirements and tasks a three person panel with determining whether a transgender woman athlete holds “a competitive advantage over the athlete’s cisgender female competitors.” The NCAA, though, has not yet announced how—and when—the USA Swimming rules will be implemented at the collegiate level.
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