Transgender identified athlete Lia Thomas has been the topic of much discussion among both athletes and athletics boards as issues surrounding biological males competing in women’s sports continue to cause controversy,
Lia, formally Will, Thomas is a male to female transgender athlete who has won women’s swimming titles after switching from the men’s to the women’s swimming team at Pennsylvania University in 2020.
The physical advantage over female swimmers of the self confessed ‘trans woman’ has been described as seeing Thomas “soar from a mid-500s ranking (554th in the 200 freestyle; all divisions) in men’s competition to one of the top-ranked swimmers in women’s competition”.
Thomas is 185 cm in height and swam for the men’s team at Pennsylvania University from 2017 – 2020 before joining the women’s team from 2020 – 2021. In March 2022 he became the first transgender person to win an NCAA Division 1 national championship in any sport, after beating female swimmers at the women’s 500-yard freestyle event.
One of Thomas’ teammates, Paula Scanlan, who previously gave an anonymous interview for Matt Walsh’s What is a Woman documentary, rejoined him for another interview revealing her identity for the first time publicly.
Something that has shocked me is the volume of international messages I have received. The world looks to America to do the right and thing and now more than ever it is important as Americans we stand up for the truth. The whole world depends on us to do so.
— Paula Scanlan (@PaulaYScanlan) June 6, 2023
The Taiwanese American swimmer says that although she never personally swam against Thomas, she witnessed the distress of teammates who she says ‘lost out on placing’ for competitions to the biological male.
Scanlan said she decided to speak publicly in order to ‘defend women and girls around the country’, saying that the way Uni authorities used ‘scare tactics’ to elicit silence from her and her teammates.
Describing what it was like to share a changing room with the 185cm male, whose genitalia are intact, she said that hearing a man’s voice in the female locker room ‘always made her jump a little bit’.
“I would jump and realise, oh actually that’s a person on my team speaking,” she said, saying how she tried to avoid changing at the same time as Thomas.
“Woman are told if they feel uncomfortable seeing male genitalia in the locker room, they should seek counseling resources. They’re told they will never get into grad school if they speak out.” -Riley Gaines re herself+other female swimmers
NYP https://t.co/dSB5eAv8rB— Suzanne 🇺🇸♥️ (@snoopsmom123) May 29, 2023
Speaking of how the presence of the male swimmer had affected other female teammates ability to attend and compete in competitions she said, “There were girls who were left off the bus who would have been there if Lia hadn’t been on the team,”
Scanlan said that on losing out on the opportunity to compete, “one of the girls was very upset”,and “went crying to the athletic department” only to emerge from the meeting convinced that Thomas joining the women’s team “was like this magical beautiful thing,”
“She came back from the meeting and suddenly it was the most magical beautiful thing that we were part of this ground breaking team,” she said.
“There was something going on in that athletic department that wanted to keep us quite,”she said adding, “and I was like this is getting scary,”
She says that two days after this incident the team were called to a meeting where they were told “don’t talk to the media, you will regret it,” and that Thomas swimming with them “was a non-negotiable,”
She says the girls were then provided with counselling services to help them “be ok” with the situation.
Scanlan says that after this meeting there was an element of fear among the team saying “it really scared us,” adding that she herself was “petrified”.
She said she began to question if there was something wrong with her “for thinking that this is wrong,”
“The university wanted us to be quiet and they did it in a very effective way,” she said.
They continued to tell us that our opinions were wrong and that if we had an issue with it we were the problem,”
She described this as “frightening” saying how the girls were left with the impression that their future jobs would be “on the line” if they spoke out, adding “After that point no one would talk about it anymore,”
She said that the university “effectively silenced” the team from even talking to each other, but that she had hoped that “someone would step in” from an athletics organisation to prevent the situation lasting the whole season but that this didn’t happen.
Asking herself in hindsight why she ever “trusted” the organisations, she said the Ivy League and NCCA did nothing to remedy the situations.
She said that hoping someone would step in kept her going but that this not happening was one of the reasons she decided to go public.
“These institutions failed us and I think somebody needs to do something about it,” she said
Scanlan said the lack of discussion around the issue was “scary” describing how she had always believed colleges to be “places of free speech,”
She said her experience is that is “agenda is to have everyone believe what they want them to believe,”
“Universities want their agenda pushed into everyone’s mind and they don’t care if you have a different opinion,” she said
After going public with her criticism of how the University of Pennsylvania handled the Lia Thomas controversy, Scanlan said that she has been “shocked” by the volume of international messages she has received, saying that “the world looks to America to do the right and thing and now more than ever it is important as Americans we stand up for the truth,”