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The man who changed his name to Lia from Will is pretending to be a woman. He swam against women in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I national championship in 2022, easily defeating the women in the 500-yard freestyle race. He threw the 200-yard and 100-yard freestyle races to allow the women to win.
Thomas probably looked forward to racking up easy wins at the Paris Olympics this summer, but World Aquatics, an international sports governing body, just denied him the opportunity — just as he denies women the opportunity for fair competition.
Fox News reported that he lost an arbitration with World Aquatics, which banned men from competing against women and created an open category for “transgender” people. An excerpt:
The ruling also squashes any hope Thomas had of making the Olympics.
World Aquatics’ policy for transgender athletes essentially bans any biological male athletes from competing in women’s events unless they transitioned by the age of 12 or before undergoing “any part of male puberty.”
Sixteen female athletes filed a lawsuit in Georgia in March against the NCAA for violating their Title IX right to equal opportunity and fair competition in sports — all because of Thomas.
Kylee Alons, one of the swimmers who competed in the NCAA 100-yard freestyle, said she had to change in a closet because of Thomas. The organization apparently didn’t warn the female athletes that Thomas would also be changing in their locker room.
Riley Gaines, who swam for the University of Kentucky, has been Thomas’s most outspoken and loudest critic. She said the NCAA didn’t care about their discomfort over changing in front of a man and tried to make them feel guilty about it.
Gaines tied with Thomas for fifth place in the NCAA championship 200-yard freestyle race. Thomas allowed this, of course. He easily could have swept all the races but likely realized how much worse the optics would have been.
“Now the @ncaa needs to strip him of every award, title, and record he stole from a deserving female athlete,” she wrote on X.
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