Lia Thomas Is the N.C.A.A.’s First Transgender Swimmer to Lose Everything From Her Win

Lia Thomas has been swimming since she was five years old. As a high schooler, she was one of the top swimmers in Texas, an All-American. She followed her older brother onto the men’s team at the University of Pennsylvania, and established herself as a strong competitor in distance races; in her sophomore season, at the Ivy League championships, she finished second in three events. Out of the pool, though, she was struggling. Her body, with its solid pectorals and compact, muscled hips, characteristic traits of a male athlete, didn’t align with her sense of who she was, she later told the podcast SwimSwam, in one of the two interviews she has given this season. She read the personal stories of trans women online, and was paired with a trans mentor through a group at Penn. She saw her own feelings reflected in their stories, she recently told Sports Illustrated. In the summer of 2018, after her freshman season, she realized that she was a woman, not a man.

It took her a while to come out to her teammates and coaches. She didn’t want to jeopardize her swimming career. And she was swimming well: setting personal bests, breaking pool records. Still, the suffering became too much; knowing that she was a woman and competing as a man “caused me a lot of distress,” she has said. In May, 2019, she decided not to put off hormone-replacement therapy any longer. Almost immediately, she told Sports Illustrated, she felt better. She was determined to hold on to that part of herself that was a competitive swimmer. She came out to her coaches. They were immediately supportive, she said, and they stood by her when she decided to join the women’s team. So were her friends.

The N.C.A.A. allowed a path for people like her to join the women’s team, but it was not quick or easy. In general, élite male athletes have considerable physical advantages over élite female athletes. People who have gone through testosterone-driven puberty have, on average, more cardiovascular capacity, greater muscle mass, higher tendon mechanical strength, and denser bones. They tend to be stronger and taller, with longer wingspans. In many sports involving timed races, men are roughly ten to twelve per cent faster than women. The Olympic track champion Allyson Felix’s lifetime best in the four hundred metres is 49.26; in one year, 2017, that time was bettered by men and boys more than fifteen thousand times. In sports involving jumping and pure strength, the gap is even greater. As trans women have fought for inclusion in women’s sports, various governing bodies have implemented rules for mitigating any physical advantages that they might have. But just what those advantages are and how to counteract them—and whether that is necessary or even possible—has been fiercely debated.

The International Olympic Committee began allowing trans athletes to compete in 2004. At first, the I.O.C. required athletes to legally change their gender and undergo genital surgery, as if a mislabelled passport and the presence of a penis gave them a leg up on the competition. The N.C.A.A., six years later, took a different approach. After consulting with students, medical experts, and people from the L.G.B.T.Q. community, the association announced that trans women would be able to compete on collegiate women’s teams after one year of testosterone suppression. Other governing bodies, including the I.O.C., went on to adopt similar rules.

The focus on testosterone seemed, to many, straightforward: on average, men have testosterone levels around fifteen times that of women, and the competitive advantages of taking testosterone—at least exogenous testosterone, a steroid—were well established. But the research concerning endogenous testosterone, the kind that the body makes naturally, was less settled. There is a gap between the range of testosterone levels in men and the range in women—one researcher described it to me as a “chasm”—but there is enough variability among élite athletes to create some small degree of possible overlap between sexes, and researchers have not been able to establish a definitive causal relationship between individual testosterone levels and athletic performance. Bodies produce differing levels of the hormone, and have differing abilities to make use of it; comparing the testosterone levels of eight cisgender runners or swimmers of the same sex before a race does not tell you who will win it.