Lia Thomas at the 2022 NCAA Swimming and Diving Championships standing next to Riley Gaines, who is one of sixteen plaintiffs in the class-action suit. (Credit: Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Over a dozen female athletes are suing the National Collegiate Athletics Association for letting transgender athletes compete against them and use female locker rooms in college sports.
At the center of the class-action lawsuit is Lia Thomas, the trans woman who dominated the 2022 NCAA Swimming Championships while a student at the University of Pennsylvania. The suit states that both the NCAA and Georgia Tech, which hosted the event, knowingly violated Title IX, the federal statute that guarantees equal opportunity for men and women in college education and sports.
The lawsuit, the first federal action of its kind, seeks to change the rules, rendering any biological males ineligible to compete against female athletes. It demands the NCAA revoke all awards given to trans athletes in women’s competitions and “reassign” them to their female contenders. It also asks for “damages for pain and suffering, mental and emotional distress, suffering and anxiety, expense costs and other damages due to defendants’ wrongful conduct.”
In 2022, Thomas clinched the 500-yard freestyle title at the NCAA Division I Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships and was named All-American in all three events Thomas participated in. Thomas first competed for the University of Pennsylvania’s men’s swim team as a male from 2017 to 2020 but never reached the NCAA championships during that time. After two years on hormone therapy, Thomas switched to the women’s team, trouncing female competitors in both sprint and endurance races.
Thomas’s switch to the team also meant a switch in the locker room. The lawsuit accuses the NCAA of “destroying female safe spaces in women’s locker rooms,” in a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. It claims the association allows “naked men possessing full male genitalia to disrobe in front of non-consenting college women” and creates “situations in which unwilling female college athletes unwittingly or reluctantly exposed their unclad bodies to males, subjecting women to a loss of their constitutional right to bodily privacy.”
The Free Press sits down with plaintiffs Riley Gaines and Réka György:
Kylee Alons, a plaintiff in the suit who swam for North Carolina State, told The Free Press she was so uncomfortable knowing Thomas was using the women’s locker room at the championships that Alons started changing in a “dimly lit storage and utility closet” she found under the bleachers.
“I was literally racing U.S. and Olympic gold medalists and I was changing in a storage closet at this elite-level meet,” Alons said. “I just felt that my privacy and safety were being violated in the locker room.”
Riley Gaines and Kaitlynn Wheeler, two more plaintiffs who both swam for the University of Kentucky, said they first discovered that Thomas, who is more than six feet tall, had access to the women’s locker room when Thomas walked past them as they changed into their racing suits. The suits are so tight they “require 15–20 minutes to put on,” the lawsuit states.
“While you’re doing this, you’re exposed,” Wheeler said. “You can’t stand there and hold a towel around you while putting the suit on at the same time.”
“Never in my 18-year career had I seen a man changing in the locker rooms. I immediately felt the need to cover myself,” added Wheeler, who said she was exposed from the waist up at the time. “I could feel the discomfort of the other girls in there.”
Another athlete, a plaintiff named in the suit as “Swimmer A,” took to changing into her suit in a bathroom stall because she “was shocked to see a naked Thomas 10 feet in front of her and a full frontal view of Thomas’s genitalia” when she first entered the locker room, the suit states.
Along with Riley Gaines, the college swimmers who have joined the lawsuit as named plaintiffs include (from top, left to right): Kylee Alons, Katie Blankenship, Réka György, and Julianna Morrow; and (from bottom, left to right): Lily Mullens, Kate Pearson, Carter Satterfield, and Kaitlynn Wheeler. (Photos via NC State Swimming, Roanoke College Women’s Swimming, VA Tech Swimming and Diving, Kaitlyn Wheeler, University of KY Swimming and Diving)
(Read more: The Free Press, 3/14/2024) (Archive) (Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS))