Transgender school swimmer Lia Thomas has been nominated by the College of Pennsylvania for the NCAA’s 2022 “Lady of the Yr” award.
Thomas, who received the 500-yard freestyle on the 2022 NCAA Girls’s Division I Swimming and Diving Championships earlier this yr, is considered one of 577 graduating feminine pupil athletes nominated by their colleges for the celebrated award, in response to the NCAA.
She graduated from UPenn this yr after the record-smashing season mired in controversy, with critics claiming she had an unfair benefit competing within the girls’s division when she was biologically born a male.
Caitlyn Jenner, a transgender activist and former Olympic gold medal-winning decathlete, called Thomas’ participation within the girls’s division “one of many worst issues to occur to the trans group.”
The swimmer’s UPenn teammates additionally voiced their considerations, with one saying the group’s wins felt “tainted.”
“I knew there can be scrutiny in opposition to me if I competed as a girl, and I used to be ready for that,” the 22-year-old Texan told “Good Morning America” in her first TV interview concerning the controversy sparked by her record-breaking performances within the pool.
“I intend to maintain swimming … It’s been a aim of mine to swim at Olympic trials for a really very long time, and I might like to see that by,” she stated.
Simply final month, the world swimming’s governing physique, FINA, successfully banned transgender women from competing in elite girls’s occasions, together with Thomas.
The brand new “gender inclusion coverage” solely permits swimmers who transitioned earlier than age 12 to compete in girls’s occasions. The group additionally proposed an “open competitors class.”
The award Thomas is up for “acknowledges feminine student-athletes who’ve exhausted their eligibility and distinguished themselves of their group, in athletics and in teachers all through their school careers,” the NCAA said in its announcement, itemizing all the nominees.
“Annually, NCAA member colleges are inspired to have a good time their high graduating feminine student-athletes by nominating them for the NCAA Lady of the Yr Award,” the group stated.
