Former Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines was among more than a dozen college athletes who filed a lawsuit against the NCAA on Thursday, accusing it of violating their Title IX rights by allowing transgender woman Lia Thomas to compete at the national championships in 2022.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Atlanta, details the shock Gaines and other swimmers felt when they learned they would have to share a locker room with Thomas at the championships in Atlanta. It documents a number of races they swam in with Thomas, including the 200-yard final in which Thomas and Gaines tied for fifth but Thomas, not Gaines, was handed the fifth-place trophy.
Thomas swam for Pennsylvania. She competed for the men’s team at Penn before her gender transition.
Thomas was the first openly transgender athlete to win a Division I title in any sport, finishing in front of three Olympic medalists for the championship. By not making the final, the lawsuit mentions that Florida swimmer Tylor Mathieu, who was not a plaintiff, was denied first-team All-American honors in that event.
Other plaintiffs included athletes from volleyball and track.
It’s not that they shouldn’t be allowed to compete, I think there needs to be a greater restriction on who and how they compete.
This whole thing started because of Lia Thomas who was a competetive male swimmer from the age of 5 until they completed hormone treatment at the age of 22.
They had the benefit of male puberty and trained as a male. That’s going to make a difference.
Now if you take a child who has not yet hit puberty, put them on blockers, then allow them to transition with hormones and surgery, you’re going to end up with a completely different athelete.
It’s good that the sports organization recognizes that trans atheletes need to be on hormones for a set period of time before being allowed to compete, but there needs to be a policy addressing WHEN they started the hormone treatment.
Starting after puberty has completed should be a non-starter, or at the very least a different category of competition.
I have a name you should look up: Caster Semenya. She has too much natural strogens but she was born a girl. And the same kind of claims were made against her. “She is not a real woman”, “she is actually a man”, …