Transgender athlete Lia Thomas pushed again at her critics throughout her first sit down interview following her historic NCAA swimming championship win this spring, reiterating that “trans girls will not be a menace to girls’s sports activities.”
“I intend to maintain swimming,” she stated in an interview with ABC Information’ Good Morning America after making historical past in March as the primary brazenly transgender athlete to win a NCAA Division I nationwide championship in any sport.
Thomas graduated from the College of Pennsylvania this month after competing for 3 years on the lads’s swim workforce after which on the ladies’s workforce this previous season after transitioning. In that ultimate season, after finishing a yr of hormone alternative remedy as required by the NCAA to alter gender classes, she received the ladies’s 500-yard freestyle occasion with a season-best time of 4 minutes, 33.24 seconds. She stated she now plans to attend legislation faculty with a aim of competing within the 2024 U.S. Olympic Workforce Trials.
“It’s been a aim of mine to swim at Olympic trials for a really very long time, and I'd like to see that via,” she stated.
However her NCAA win was met with controversy with critics saying that she had an unfair, bodily benefit in opposition to her feminine cisgender rivals. Some members on her personal swim workforce stated they help her as a trans lady however stated she posed a menace to girls’s sports activities and shouldn’t compete in opposition to cisgender girls like them.
Thomas dismissed her teammates’ claimed help.
“You'll be able to’t go midway and be, like, ‘I help trans girls and trans folks, however solely to a sure level,’” Thomas stated. “The place if you happen to help trans girls as girls, they’ve met all of the NCAA necessities, then I don’t know if you happen to can actually say one thing like that.”
She additionally questioned whether or not some cisgender girls who've naturally larger testosterone ranges and bigger bone construction and physique needs to be allowed to compete in opposition to different cisgender girls if folks like her are disqualified.
“I’m not a medical professional, however there’s loads of variation amongst cis feminine athletes,” she stated.
The longer term for transgender athletes competing in ways in which Thomas has stays in query, nonetheless, with the NCAA in January updating its transgender athlete eligibility tips to say that every sport’s nationwide governing physique could make their very own guidelines. These tips are slated to enter impact subsequent season.
At the very least 18 states have in the meantime enacted legal guidelines or statewide guidelines that prohibit or restrict transgender athletes from taking part in women’ sports activities at public faculties. Some states have additionally handed, or tried to go, laws that targets transgender toilet entry and gender-affirming care for kids.
Thomas was personally cited as motivators for a few of these athletic rule modifications. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who final yr issued one such ban in his state, personally issued a proclamation in opposition to Thomas’ NCAA victory in March whereas naming Thomas’ second-place competitor the “rightful winner.”
“The NCAA’s actions serve to erode alternatives for ladies athletes and perpetuate a fraud in opposition to girls athletes in addition to the general public at massive,” he stated in a press release.
Thomas continues to dismiss her critics’ findings and imposed limitations.
“Trans girls competing in girls’s sports activities doesn't threaten girls’s sports activities as a complete,” she stated. “Trans girls are a really small minority of all athletes. The NCAA guidelines relating to trans girls competing in girls’s sports activities have been round for 10-plus years. And we haven’t seen any huge wave of trans girls dominating.”
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