Wikipedia Deep Dive

Lia Thomas

11 min read

In March 2022, a twenty-two-year-old swimmer touched the wall first in the 500-yard freestyle at the National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I championships and became the center of one of the most heated debates in American sports. Her name was Lia Thomas, and her victory made her the first openly transgender athlete to win a national championship at the highest level of college athletics. Within days, a Florida governor would declare someone else the "rightful winner," protesters would gather outside swim meets, and Thomas would find herself described as "the most controversial athlete in America."

What made this particular swimmer so controversial wasn't her time—she finished more than nine seconds behind the existing record. It wasn't that she dominated every event—she placed eighth out of eight in the 100-yard freestyle final at the same championship. The controversy centered entirely on the fact that Thomas had, until 2019, competed on the men's swimming team.

The Swimmer Before the Storm

Lia Thomas grew up in Austin, Texas, and started swimming at age five. By the time she was competing for Westlake High School, she had worked her way up to sixth place in the state championships for boys' events. In 2017, she enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania—an Ivy League institution with a competitive swimming program—and joined the men's team.

She was good. Really good.

During her freshman year, Thomas clocked eight minutes and 57.55 seconds in the 1,000-yard freestyle, a time that ranked sixth-fastest among all male college swimmers in the country. Her times in the 500-yard and 1,650-yard freestyle events placed her in the top 100 nationally. As a sophomore in 2019, she finished second at the Ivy League championships in three different distance freestyle events.

But by then, Thomas was wrestling with something that had begun troubling her toward the end of high school. During the summer of 2018, after her freshman year, she came out to her family as transgender. A year later, in May 2019, she began hormone replacement therapy and told her coaches, teammates, and the women's swim team about her identity.

How Transition Changes an Athlete's Body

To understand the debate that would later engulf Thomas, you need to understand what hormone replacement therapy actually does to the body of someone assigned male at birth.

Testosterone is the primary driver of the physical differences between typical male and female bodies. It promotes muscle mass, bone density, and the development of larger hearts and lungs. When a transgender woman takes estrogen and testosterone blockers, these advantages begin to diminish—but how quickly and how completely remains a subject of intense scientific debate.

Thomas lost muscle mass and strength through testosterone suppression. Her time in the 500-yard freestyle dropped by more than fifteen seconds compared to her personal bests before transitioning. To put that in perspective, fifteen seconds is an eternity in competitive swimming—it's roughly the difference between winning a race and finishing far behind the leaders.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association, or NCAA, had rules governing when transgender athletes could compete. Thomas met their hormone therapy requirements by 2021, making her eligible for the women's team. She had also taken a year off from school to maintain her eligibility while competitive swimming was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Rankings Question

Here's where the numbers get complicated, and where much of the controversy originates.

When Thomas competed on the men's team in 2018-2019, she was ranked 554th nationally in the 200-yard freestyle, 65th in the 500-yard freestyle, and 32nd in the 1,650-yard freestyle. After transitioning and joining the women's team in 2021-2022, those rankings became fifth, first, and eighth respectively in the women's categories.

Critics seized on these numbers as evidence that Thomas had gained an unfair advantage by switching from men's to women's competition. Sixteen anonymous members of her own team wrote a letter claiming her rank "bounced from 462 as a male to number one as a female."

But the picture is more nuanced. According to the swimming data website Swimcloud, Thomas was ranked 36th among female college swimmers in the United States for the 2021-2022 season. She was the best on her team, but she wasn't dominating women's swimming nationally. In fact, at the same NCAA championships where she won the 500-yard freestyle, another swimmer named Kate Douglass broke eighteen NCAA records. Thomas broke zero.

Perhaps most telling was a race in January 2022 against Yale, Penn's Ivy League rival. In the 100-meter freestyle, Thomas finished sixth—behind four cisgender women (meaning women who were assigned female at birth and identify as female) and also behind Iszac Henig, a transgender man who was competing without hormone therapy.

The Championship and Its Aftermath

The NCAA Division I championships in March 2022 became a flashpoint. About fifty protesters and counter-protesters gathered outside the Georgia Tech Aquatic Center. Some carried banners reading "Save Women's Sports."

Thomas won the 500-yard freestyle with a time of four minutes and 33.24 seconds. Emma Weyant, an Olympic silver medalist, finished 1.75 seconds behind her. For context, the NCAA record in that event—held by Katie Ledecky, perhaps the greatest female distance swimmer in history—stood at 4:24.06. Thomas was more than nine seconds off that pace.

In her other events, Thomas was far from dominant. She finished fifth in the 200-yard freestyle final after qualifying second in the preliminaries. In the 100-yard freestyle, she qualified tenth and finished dead last in the final—eighth out of eight swimmers.

None of this nuance mattered to some critics. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis issued a proclamation declaring Weyant the "rightful winner" of the 500-yard freestyle, though he had no authority over NCAA competitions. Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert introduced a bill honoring Weyant, co-sponsored by twenty other Republicans.

Even Caitlyn Jenner—the former Olympic decathlete who is herself transgender—said Thomas was not the "rightful winner," calling it "common sense." Social media users quickly pointed out that Jenner had previously expressed support for transgender athletes and had competed in women's golf tournaments.

The Science and the Rules

The debate over transgender athletes in women's sports involves genuinely difficult scientific and philosophical questions that have no easy answers.

On one side are those who argue that going through male puberty confers permanent physical advantages—larger skeletal frames, different muscle fiber compositions, larger hearts and lungs—that testosterone suppression cannot fully reverse. Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a three-time Olympic gold medalist, argued that Thomas had not "demonstrated that she lost her sex-linked, male-puberty advantage prior to competition in the women's category."

On the other side are those who point to Thomas's dramatically slower times after transitioning, her middling overall rankings, and her defeats to cisgender women. Olympic silver medalist Erica Sullivan wrote in Newsweek that Thomas "has trained diligently to get where she is and has followed all of the rules and guidelines put before her... she doesn't win every time."

Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympic swimmer in history with twenty-three gold medals, tried to stake out a middle ground: "I believe that we all should feel comfortable with who we are in our own skin, but I think sports should all be played on an even playing field." He admitted, "I don't know what that looks like in the future."

The Doors Close

In June 2022, World Aquatics (formerly known as the International Swimming Federation, or FINA), the organization that governs international competitive swimming, voted to bar transgender women from elite women's competitions unless they had not experienced any part of male puberty beyond Tanner Stage 2—a very early phase of puberty—or before age twelve.

Tanner Stage 2 is when puberty's physical changes begin to become visible. For most people assigned male at birth, this happens well before age twelve. The practical effect of this rule was to exclude virtually all transgender women who transitioned after childhood from international women's swimming competition.

Thomas had hoped to compete at the 2024 United States Olympic trials. The World Aquatics rule ended that dream. "The new FINA release is deeply upsetting," Thomas said. "It is discriminatory and will only serve to harm all women."

In January 2024, Thomas opened a legal challenge to the policy, arguing it was discriminatory. But in June 2024, the Court of Arbitration for Sport—the international body that adjudicates disputes in global sports—ruled that Thomas did not have standing to bring the challenge. She remains ineligible to compete in international women's swimming.

The Political Dimension

Thomas's case became inseparable from broader American political conflicts over transgender rights. In February 2022, Vicky Hartzler, a Republican Senate candidate in Missouri, featured Thomas in a campaign advertisement declaring "Women's sports are for women, not men pretending to be women"—language that CNN described as "a transphobic trope belittling trans women."

During the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in spring 2022, Republican senators raised questions about gender identity. The New York Times observed that after Thomas's championship win and two governors' vetoes of anti-transgender sports legislation, "Transgender rights are dominating outrage on the right."

The American Civil Liberties Union defended Thomas, declaring "It's not a women's sport if it doesn't include ALL women athletes." The National Women's Law Center said Thomas "deserves all the celebration for her success this season, but instead is being met with nationwide misogyny and transphobia."

Meanwhile, a swimmer named Reka Gyorgy, who finished seventeenth in the 500-yard freestyle—one place short of qualifying for the finals—complained to the NCAA. Her argument was straightforward: if Thomas had not been in the race, Gyorgy would have made the finals.

The Trump Administration Intervenes

The controversy took another turn in 2025. In March of that year, the Trump administration withheld $175 million in federal funding from the University of Pennsylvania—about 17.5 percent of the university's total federal funding—for having allowed Thomas to compete as a woman.

By July, Penn had agreed to release a public statement affirming compliance with the administration's new interpretation of Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education. The university stated:

While Penn's policies during the 2021-2022 swim season were in accordance with NCAA eligibility rules at the time, we acknowledge that some student-athletes were disadvantaged by these rules. We recognize this and will apologize to those who experienced a competitive disadvantage or experienced anxiety because of the policies in effect at the time.

The university updated its swimming records to reflect current eligibility guidelines, adding a footnote: "Competing under eligibility rules in effect at the time, Lia Thomas set program records in the 100, 200 and 500 freestyle during the 2021-22 season."

Following this agreement, the government released the withheld funding.

What Thomas Herself Has Said

Throughout the controversy, Thomas has given relatively few interviews. In May 2022, she told Good Morning America, "I intend to keep swimming. It's been a goal of mine to swim at Olympic trials for a very long time, and I would love to see that through."

In an interview with ESPN, she reflected on her experience: "It has been incredibly rewarding and meaningful to be able to be authentic and to be myself."

Thomas graduated from Penn in 2022 with plans to attend law school. By then, she had become what CNN called "the face of the debate on transgender women in sports"—a role she never sought and could not escape.

The Questions That Remain

The Lia Thomas controversy illuminates questions that sports governing bodies around the world are still struggling to answer. How do you balance inclusion with competitive fairness? What does a "level playing field" actually mean when athletes' bodies vary enormously even within the same sex category? Should rules be based on testosterone levels, on when puberty began, or on something else entirely?

There are swimmers who supported Thomas competing. Brooke Forde, an Olympic silver medalist, said, "I believe that treating people with respect and dignity is more important than any trophy or record will ever be." More than 300 current and former collegiate swimmers signed a letter supporting "Lia Thomas, and all transgender college athletes, who deserve to be able to participate in safe and welcoming athletic environments."

There are also swimmers who felt they were at a disadvantage. And there are scientists on both sides of the debate who can cite studies supporting their positions.

What's clear is that Lia Thomas—a person who just wanted to swim—became a symbol in a culture war far larger than any swimming pool. Her championship lasted a few minutes. The debate it sparked shows no signs of ending.