College of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas turns into the primary transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I title, ending first within the girls’s 500-yard freestyle occasion Thursday night.
[Previous story, published at 3:11 p.m. ET]
College of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas is favored to make historical past as the primary transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I title when she takes to the pool Thursday night time on the Ladies’s Swimming and Diving Championships in Atlanta.
Thomas, a fifth-year senior, certified first in prelims of the ladies’s 500-yard freestyle Thursday morning with a time of 4:33.82. Her time was about three seconds quicker than the following closest competitor, Texas freshman and Olympic silver medalist Erica Sullivan, and represents the quickest time of this NCAA season.
The A last within the 500-yard freestyle are set for six p.m. ET.
Thomas is also favored to win the 200-yard freestyle on Friday and is ready to compete within the 100-yard freestyle on Saturday.
With a win, Thomas could be the primary transgender athlete to win a D-I title in any sport. CeCé Telfer was the primary transgender athlete to win an NCAA title of any sort when she gained the 2019 Division II championship within the girls’s 400-meter hurdles.
Thomas, who beforehand swam for the lads’s group at Penn, has come to personify the continued debate on trans girls’s participation in sports activities and the steadiness between inclusion and truthful play.
She first launched into the general public eye with a shocking efficiency on the Zippy Invitational in Ohio in December, when she set NCAA season finest instances within the 200-yard and 500-yard freestyle races. On the Ivy League girls’s championships final month, she gained the 100-yard, 200-yard and 500-yard freestyle races.
With success has come criticism about whether or not trans girls ought to be allowed to compete in girls’s sports activities. Her face has been prominently displayed on Fox Information and right-wing information websites important of society’s altering views on intercourse and gender.
A few of her Penn teammates even have taken concern along with her participation. Final month, an nameless letter written on behalf of 16 of her 40 Penn teammates criticized what they noticed as her “unfair benefit,” saying they supported her gender transition out of the pool however not essentially in it.
In response, greater than 300 present and former swimmers, collegiate and elite, signed their names to an open letter defending Thomas’ capability to compete. A type of signees was Sullivan, her closest competitor within the 500 free prelim Thursday.
“I used to be lucky sufficient to be welcomed with open arms within the swim neighborhood once I got here out as homosexual,” Sullivan mentioned in a press release. “Simply with my very own private good expertise of popping out and feeling all that love and assist inside my swim neighborhood, I really feel like [Lia] deserves the identical factor.”
What Thomas has mentioned
Thomas beforehand informed the SwimSwam podcast she realized she was trans the summer time of 2018, however stored it secret, cautious that popping out would take away her capability to swim.
“I used to be struggling, my psychological well being was not superb. It was plenty of unease, about mainly simply feeling trapped in my physique. It did not align,” she mentioned.
The NCAA at the moment requires trans girls athletes to have one 12 months of hormone substitute remedy (HRT) to be cleared to take part in girls’s sports activities. Thomas mentioned she began HRT in Could 2019 and got here out as trans that fall, and the NCAA has authorized her participation within the girls’s subject.
Via an Ivy spokesperson, she declined to talk to CNN in the course of the Ivy championships. She spoke to Sports activities Illustrated earlier this month to defend her capability to compete.
“The quite simple reply is that I am not a person,” she mentioned. “I am a girl, so I belong on the ladies’s group. Trans individuals deserve that very same respect each different athlete will get.”
The NCAA has since adopted a set of stricter pointers that require elite trans lady athletes to have three years of HRT and to show to a panel of medical consultants that they don’t have a aggressive benefit over cisgender girls. These guidelines will probably be instituted in phases over the approaching seasons.
