Female University of Pennsylvania teammates of trans swimmer Lia Thomas are hailing the school’s move to ban biological men from competing on women’s teams.
The female Ivy League swimmers were forced to share their locker room with Thomas — who is biologically male but identifies as female — and would often change in bathroom stalls or wait until the trans athlete was in the shower to undress.
“Around Lia, I wasn’t going to risk anything,” former UPenn swimmer Monika Burzynska recently told Fox News.
Burzynska, whose locker was right next to Thomas’ when they both joined the team in 2021, said she was uncomfortable changing in front of the trans swimmer, so at first, she would hunker in a locker-room corner to change.
But Burzynska said that as the season dragged on, she became less and less comfortable with the situation and started waiting for Thomas to be in the shower and away from their lockers to change.
Before long, she was removing herself entirely to get away from Thomas — retreating into bathroom stalls or a private bathroom across the hall from the women’s locker room whenever she needed to undress, she said.
“He wasn’t very social,” Burzynska added of Thomas, explaining that even though their lockers were right next to each other, they never exchanged more than passing words.
Burzynska’s comments comes several days after UPenn caved to pressure from the Trump administration and banned biological men from competing in women’s sports — and even stripped Thomas’ titles away and issued formal apologies to women who were ever beaten by trans athletes.
It’s a move Burzynska said gave her “a deep sense of peace and validation,” explaining that many teammates shared her uneasiness with the Thomas situation.
“Not only for me, but for all the girls on the team, for all the girls in the swim world and in the sport world,” she said. “And I think this decision, it brought back – at least for me – a sense of fairness that had been lost.
“Women’s records belong to women, and that protecting the integrity of women’s sports still matters.”
As a man, Thomas was ranked 554th in the 200 freestyle in college — but soared to among the top of the women’s division when allowed to compete as a female, according to Swimming World.
UPenn’s shocking turnaround on the controversy followed an investigation by the federal Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights into the Philadelphia school, which was launched after the Trump administration threatened to pull federal funding for schools that allow trans swimmers to compete in sports that are not aligned with their biological sex.
The OCR probe found that the Ivy League school violated Title IX by “allowing a male to compete in female athletic programs and occupy female-only intimate facilities,” with UPenn later agreeing with those findings.
But Burzynska said that when Thomas was swimming, the school’s administration pressured her and her teammates into keeping quiet about what they really thought of the situation.
Burzynska claimed her coach advised her to bring any complaints directly to him and that anybody who did speak up publicly would be advised to attend LGBTQ counseling sessions, which she described as “brainwashing meetings.”
Three of her teammates, Ellen Holmquist, Margot Kaczorowski and Grace Estabrook, sued the school over its previous stance.
“The UPenn administrators went on to tell the women that if the women spoke publicly about their concerns about Thomas’ participation on the Women’s Team, the reputation of those complaining about Thomas being on the team would be tainted with transphobia for the rest of their lives and they would probably never be able to get a job,’” their lawsuit claimed.
Burzynska said she grew up feeling “compassion” for trans people but that after the situation with Thomas, her thoughts became much more complicated.
“You have these issues that are from afar, and you never really quite think they’re going to touch you personally until you’re on a team with Lia Thomas and your locker is directly next to this biological male,” she said. “And you would have never believed that you’d be facing this issue directly.
“And then when that happens, your views change where you still feel sorry for this person because they’re clearly so deeply lost. But then it turns into more, ‘OK, this is not fair,’ ” she said.
Thomas — who swam for UPenn’s men’s team before joining the women’s — sparked intense controversy after taking gold in the women’s 500-yard freestyle at the NCAA Division I national championships in 2022.
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