Lia Thomas

Lia Catherine Thomas ( born May 1999) is an American swimmer and the first openly transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I national championship, having won the women's 500-yard freestyle event in 2022, before being barred from competing in women's events by World Aquatics. Thomas's career has been a part of the public debate about transgender women in women's sports.

In July 2025, after the second Trump administration had previously cut the University of Pennsylvania's federal funding in March 2025, UPenn agreed to issue a public statement and update university swimming records based on the Trump administration's changed interpretation of Title IX, while still crediting Thomas with having set certain school records in the 2021–2022 season in accordance with the eligibility guidelines at the time.

Early life and education Thomas was born in May 1999 and grew up in Austin, Texas. She has an older brother. Thomas began swimming at the age of five, and was sixth in the state high school swimming championships for boys' events while competing for Westlake High School. In 2017, she enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 2022 with plans to attend law school. Thomas began to question her gender identity toward the end of high school, and came out as transgender to her family during the summer of 2018 after her freshman year at Penn. During the 2018–2019 season, Thomas recorded the top UPenn men's team times in the 500 free, 1,000 free, and 1,650 free, but was the sixth best among UPenn men's team members in the 200 free.

Thomas began transitioning using hormone replacement therapy in May 2019, and came out as a trans woman during her junior year to her coaches, friends, and the women's and men's swim teams at the University of Pennsylvania. By 2021, she had met the NCAA hormone therapy requirements to swim on the women's team. Thomas's event progression peaked in 2019 for distance swimming, with a drop in times during the 2021–2022 season. Her event progression for sprint swimming reflected a dip at the start of 2021–2022 season before returning to near-lifetime bests in the 100 free and a lifetime personal best in the 50 free in 2021. In the 2018–2019 season, when competing in the men's team, Thomas was ranked 554th in the 200 freestyle, 65th in the 500 freestyle, and 32nd in the 1650 freestyle, though these rankings have been called into question because they were based on an event that was not a full championship competition and Thomas did not reduce her training before the race to perform at her best. In the 2021–2022 season, those ranks when competing in the women's team were fifth in the 200 freestyle, first in the 500 freestyle, and eighth in the 1,650 freestyle. According to an archived page of the swimming data website Swimcloud, Thomas was ranked 89th among male college swimmers for that season.

In March 2022, Thomas became the first openly transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I national championship in any sport after winning the women's 500-yard freestyle with a time of 4:33.24; Olympic silver medalist Emma Weyant was second with a time 1.75 seconds behind Thomas. Thomas did not break any records at the NCAA event, while Kate Douglass broke 18 NCAA records. Thomas was 9.18 seconds short of Katie Ledecky's NCAA record of 4:24.06. In the preliminaries for the 200 freestyle, Thomas finished second. In the final for the 200 freestyle, Thomas placed fifth with a time of 1:43.50. In the preliminaries for the 100 freestyle, Thomas finished tenth. In the finals for the 100 freestyle, Thomas placed eighth out of eight competitors in 48.18 seconds, finishing last.

The March 2022 NCAA championship was Thomas's last college swimming event. By the conclusion of Thomas's swimming career at UPenn in 2022, her rank had moved from 65th on the men's team to 1st on the women's team in the 500-yard freestyle, and 554th on the men's team to fifth on the women's team in the 200-yard freestyle. According to the swimming data website Swimcloud, Thomas was ranked 34th among female college swimmers in the United States for the 2021–2022 season, and 54th among women swimmers nationally. In March 2022, Sports Illustrated reported that Thomas applied for law school and planned to swim at the 2024 Summer Olympics trials. In an interview with ESPN, Thomas said that "It has been incredibly rewarding and meaningful to be able to be authentic and to be myself". In June 2022, the International Swimming Federation (FINA), an organization that administers international aquatic sports competitions, voted to bar all transgender athletes from competing in professional women's swimming, with the exception of athletes who "can establish to FINA's comfortable satisfaction that they have not experienced any part of male puberty beyond Tanner Stage 2 (of puberty) or before age 12, whichever is later". This action prevented Thomas from competing in the women's competition at the 2024 United States Olympic trials as she had planned. In response to the decision, Thomas said: "The new FINA release is deeply upsetting. It is discriminatory and will only serve to harm all women."

Media and political attention In 2021, conservative media, including Fox News, began widely covering Thomas. In early December, anonymous parents of University of Pennsylvania swim team members wrote to the NCAA, seeking for Thomas to be declared ineligible to compete. In a January 10, 2022, article, The Washington Post wrote, "Thomas has shattered school records and has posted the fastest times of any female college swimmer in two events this season. She'll probably be a favorite at the NCAA championships in March, even as people inside and outside the sport debate her place on the pool deck."

In January 2022, the University of Pennsylvania, multiple organizations affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and the Ivy League issued statements supporting Thomas. In February 2022, in response to a proposed NCAA transgender athlete policy that could prevent Thomas from competing in the NCAA championships, sixteen anonymous members of the University of Pennsylvania women's swimming team sent a letter to the university and Ivy League officials asking them not to take legal action against the proposal. They said that Thomas's rank "bounced from #462 as a male to #1 as a female". 100 FR 47.15 College Station (M) February 4, 2017

200 FR 1:39.31 Tennessee Invitational (M) November 30, 2018 500 FR 4:18.72 2019 Ivy League Championships (M) February 28, 2019 1000 FR 8:55.75 2019 Ivy League Championships (M) March 1, 2019 1650 FR 14:54.76 2019 Ivy League Championships (M) March 2, 2019 200 IM 1:56.51 UPENN vs WCU Senior Meet January 27, 2019

Penn men's swim team records SCY

Event Time Date Notes 1000 FR 8:57.55 2018 Ivy League Championships 1650 FR 14:59.19 Ivy League Championships 500 FR 4:18.72 2019 Ivy League Championships 1000 FR 8:55.75 Ivy League Championships 1650 FR 14:54.76 Ivy League Championships

Penn women's swim team records SCY Event Time Date Notes 100 FR 47.37 2022 2022 NCAA Division I Women's Championship 200 FR 1:41.93 2021 Zippy Invite 500 FR 4:33.24 2022 2022 NCAA Division I Women's Championship 1000 FR 9:35.96 2021 Zippy Invite 1650 FR 15:59.71 2021 Zippy Invite 400 FR Relay 2:01.41 2022 Thomas, Kaczorowski, Kannan, Carter 800 FR Relay 4:16.14 2022 Thomas, Kaczorowski, Kannan, Carter