UPenn Nominates Transgender Swimmer Lia Thomas for NCAA Woman of the Year Award
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Lia Thomas, the transgender swimmer who dominated the 2021-2022 NCAA women’s swimming and diving season, has been nominated by the University of Pennsylvania to receive the NCAA’s Woman of the Year award. Up to two female athletes can be nominated by eligible schools and this year, there is a total of 577 nominees.
The award is designed to recognize “female student-athletes who have exhausted their eligibility and distinguished themselves in their community, in athletics and in academics throughout their college careers.”
Prior to this past season, Thomas had competed on the UPenn men’s team with middling results, before breaking out as a member of the women’s team, setting numerous records over the course of the season and dominating at both the Ivy League and NCAA championships.
Thomas’s historic season was the subject of much controversy, and drew criticism from even her teammates, 16 of whom wrote an anonymous letter to UPenn and the Ivy League imploring them not to challenge stricter NCAA rules for transgender athletes’ participation, which were released seemingly in no small part due to Thomas’s competitors’ experience.
“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,” reads the letter, which went on to argue that its signatories would be kicked off the team and blacklisted on the job market if their names were made public.
In one meet last December, Thomas finished nearly 38 seconds before the second-place finisher in the 1,650-yard freestyle.
The frustration with Thomas’s easy accumulation of wins and accolades was on display at the NCAA championships, where activists supporting and opposing Thomas’s participation clashed, and Thomas faced boos from the crowd.
The swimmer was permitted to participate under the previous NCAA guidelines, but would not have been able to if the new ones — which require male-to-female transgender athletes to spend three years on testosterone suppressants before competing in women’s sports — were in place at the start of the season. Thomas has been unapologetic about last season’s events, calling critics of transgender athletes participation in the gender category of their choice “incredibly othering” and asserting that “trans women are not a threat to women’s sports.”
Thomas has expressed interest in eventually competing in the Olympics.
