Allisa Pandit

Transgender female athlete Lia Thomas’s participation in elite swimming has sparked nationwide debate and has influenced legislation across the country.

The long-debated topic of transgender athletes’ participation in sports resurfaced with the recent success of University of Pennsylvania’s Lia Thomas, a transgender female swimmer. An elite athlete, Thomas has had outstanding victories in events such as the 500-yard freestyle, the 200-yard freestyle and the 100-yard freestyle, and she has been breaking records along the way. 

But her undeniable success has come with a wave of transphobia. 

Born in Austin, Texas, Thomas began swimming at 5 years old, and prior to transitioning, she was a highly talented athlete. When she swam on the men’s team, her impressive times drew warranted attention when she took second place in the 2019 Ivy League championships as a sophomore. 

Realizing her identity in 2018, Thomas decided to keep it a secret before starting hormone replacement therapy (HRT) in May of 2019 and eventually coming out later that year. After taking a year off of school and swimming because of the pandemic, Thomas returned to swimming this season after about two and a half years on HRT – and the response was not one of acceptance.

Sixteen of Thomas’s teammates sent an anonymous letter to the University of Pennsylvania and the Ivy League that reads, “We fully support Lia Thomas in her decision to affirm her gender identity and to transition from a man to a woman. Lia has every right to live her life authentically.” The letter continued, “However, we also recognize that when it comes to sports competition, that the biology of sex is a separate issue from someone’s gender identity. Biologically, Lia holds an unfair advantage over competition in the women’s category, as evidenced by her rankings that have bounced from #462 as a male to #1 as a female.”

The letter was written to encourage University of Pennsylvania and the Ivy League to refrain from taking legal action against the NCAA’s new policies that could threaten Thomas’s ability to compete. Prior to Thomas’s participation, the NCAA required transgender women to be on testerone suppression treatement for a year before being allowed to compete, “[y]et in January, a month after Thomas’s record-setting pace at the Invitational, the NCAA said it would take a sport-by-sport approach to its rules on transgender athletes’ participation and defer to each sport’s national governing body,” CNN reported. 

“USA Swimming then released a set of stricter guidelines that require elite trans woman athletes to have three years of hormone replacement therapy and to prove to a panel of medical experts that they do not have a competitive advantage over cisgender women,” the article continued. This could directly affect Thomas’s eligibility to compete; but for now, the NCAA has decided to not implement USA Swimming’s guidelines. 

Still, many feel what is truly unfair is the conditional support of transgender people.

Trans non-binary person Griffin Maxwell Brooks competes on the Princeton swimming and diving team and offered their perspective via TikTok. “The reality is that [Lia Thomas’s] ‘genetic advantage’ is no more a source of unfairness than the genetic advantage that we see from person to person within the same gender,” Brooks said. “Many of you probably know that Michael Phelps has an abnormally large wingspan and produces lactic acid, the chemical that makes your muscles sore, at half the rate of his competitors – genetic advantages which he has over others.”

They continued, “The reality is that the opposition to transgender women competing in sports only exists because they are winning, not because people are pushing for equity. Nobody has made any similar statements on how we can accommodate for the ‘genetic advantage’ when it comes to transgender men in athletics because transphobic people do not care about equity. They only care about preventing transgender people, women in this case, from winning over cisgender people.”

Though this may seem like a distant issue of elite athletics, bills against transgender athletes, specifically transgender women, are popping up around the nation – even here in Iowa. One example is House File 2309 (HF 2309) which will restrict transgender women from competing on school sports teams that match their gender identities. The bill’s supporters claim it is about protecting girls in sports and is not rooted in transphobia. But it seems that in protecting cisgender girls, transgender girls are neglected.

Senior swimmer and Division I commit Taylor Buhr has long participated in competitive sports and shared her perspective as a cisgender female athlete. “From what I’ve heard throughout the swim community, most people are very encouraging of trans athletes and want to make sure that they have a place to compete and that they are included in practices and competitions,” she said.

Buhr believes this is where things get complicated, especially in Thomas’s case. “I think the fact that she is winning is bringing a lot of press, but I also think this is something that has been talked about for a while but was never actually fully considered until now,” she explained. “When it comes to Lia’s case in particular, it’s a really tough situation because everyone wants her to feel included, but many people don’t think it’s fair that she went through puberty as a male and still gets to set records and win against [cisgender] females.”

But not everyone holds this perspective. The Des Moines Register interviewed high school freshman from Decorah, Iowa, Gavy Smith, who is a trans athlete. “If I were told I couldn’t play the sports that I want to and for the gender that I identify as, I would feel less about myself, like I am being forced to feel different about who I am. At the same time I would be confused, because I’m a girl,” she said. “So shouldn’t I be able to play for the girl’s team?”

So while bills such as HF 2309 claim to be protecting girls’ sports, it is coming at the cost of trans athletes’ mental well-being and inclusion.

This issue is pressing, and it is not far from home. Like Lia Thomas, trans people’s participation in athletics in Iowa is evolving – so the age-old debate of fairness, equality and inclusion in sports continues to grow in complexity.