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Lia Thomas, 22, made historical past earlier this yr when she turned the primary overtly transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I nationwide championship in any sport after she carried out extremely within the 500-yard freestyle occasion. Since then, the robust swimmer has been residing in an even bigger highlight for each her spectacular achievements and the controversy surrounding transgender girls enjoying in sports activities. Though many critics, together with some teammates, really feel she shouldn’t be allowed to compete towards different girls in swimming -her sport of choice- she feels otherwise, and is trying to change the opinions of these by merely standing up for these like her. “I simply wish to present trans youngsters and youthful trans athletes that they’re not alone,” she informed Sports Illustrated in March. “They don’t have to decide on between who they’re and the game they love.”
Discover out extra about Lia and her journey as an athlete and public determine within the transgender neighborhood beneath!
Lia attended the College of Pennsylvania & was on their girls’s swimming workforce.
Lia, who’s initially from Austin, TX, simply completed learning economics on the prestigious faculty and have become a pressure to be reckoned with when she joined the Penn girls’s swimming workforce in her senior yr after competing for 3 seasons on the boys’s workforce. On the finish of her yr competing for the college, she went from being ranked quantity 65 on the boys’s workforce to being ranked primary on the ladies’s workforce within the 500-yard freestyle, in response to Swimming World.
She got here out as transgender in 2019.
Lia began questioning her id close to the tip of highschool. She then suggested shut household and associates that she felt like and wished to dwell her life as a girl and gained their assist throughout her first two years at UPenn. She began utilizing hormone alternative remedy when she began transitioning throughout her junior yr, and though she got here out to her faculty, she was nonetheless required to compete on the college’s males’s workforce for the 2019-2020 educational yr. After she took a yr off with a purpose to keep eligible to compete in swimming, because the COVID pandemic brought about 2020 competitions to be canceled, she was capable of swap over to the ladies’s swimming workforce for the 2021-2022 educational yr.
Lia has tried to remain optimistic regardless of the damaging reception she’s acquired for competing as a girl.
Each Lia and UPenn swimming coaches and college students have sadly acquired hate mail and harassment from those that don’t agree with Lia’s way of life and though it’s brought about her to be cautious and block some direct messaging on social media, she hasn’t let her stray away from who she is. “I’m a girl, identical to anyone else on the workforce,” she informed Sports activities Illustrated. “I’ve all the time seen myself as only a swimmer. It’s what I’ve finished for therefore lengthy; it’s what I like. I get into the water every single day and do my finest.”
She is headed to regulation faculty & needs to compete within the 2024 Summer season Olympics.
Lia revealed that she utilized for regulation faculty and is planning on swimming within the 2024 Summer season Olympics trials, in response to Sports activities Illustrated. USA Swimming officers informed the outlet that if she meets the standards to proceed swimming within the girls’s class, they’ll don’t have any difficulty together with her representing the USA within the Paris video games.
Her braveness is already inspiring the transgender neighborhood.
Lia declined to attend the NCAA-required postrace information convention in Mar. 2022 after getting known as out by protesters and different critics inside and outside the occasion, and different swimmers spoke out about how she was making an attempt to disregard the negativity she had been receiving to as a substitute, concentrate on the swimming. “It’s an emblem of Lia’s resilience,” Schuyler Bailar, who at Harvard turned the primary recognized transgender man to compete on a Division I males’s workforce, informed ESPN on the time. “The truth that she’s capable of present up right here, regardless of protesters exterior, folks shouting and booing her, I believe it’s a testomony to her resiliency. And it’s additionally an emblem that we will each be who we’re and do what we love.”
