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Lia Thomas Teammate Speaks Out: ‘Women Are Now Third-Class Citizens’

   DailyWire.com
Lia Thomas of the Pennsylvania Quakers gets ready to compete in a freestyle event during a tri-meet against the Yale Bulldogs and the Dartmouth Big Green at Sheerr Pool on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania on January 8, 2022 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Hunter Martin/Getty Images

After University of Pennsylvania women’s swimming team member Lia Thomas, formerly known as Will Thomas, won two more events against female swimmers on Saturday, one teammate who preferred to remain anonymous spoke out, saying, “Women are now third-class citizens.”

Lia Thomas won the 100-yard and 200-yard freestyle races in the meet against Harvard University.

The anonymous teammate told The Washington Examiner, “Lia was not even close to being competitive as a man in the 50 and the 100. But just because Lia is biologically a man, [Lia] is just naturally better than many females in the 50 and the 100 or anything that [Lia] wasn’t good at as a man.”

The teammate continued, “The top people at NCAA, who are on the board of directors … they are not protecting women’s rights. Imagine if there was this kind of inequality in men’s sports. Or someone found out about doping in a men’s sport. It would be fixed in a blink of an eye. Everyone would be all over it. But because it’s women, they don’t care.”

“People have come up to me and said this is so wrong,” she said. “I am typically liberal, but this is past that. This is so wrong. This doesn’t make any sense. … I’m trying to do everything I can without harming my future from stopping this from happening. I can’t just sit back and let something like this happen. I’m not just going to sit back and say, ‘My rights are being taken away, too bad.’ It’s embarrassing that people aren’t speaking out more.”

“I can’t see how anyone could feel good about this,” she concluded..

The Examiner noted:

For the 2021-2022 University of Pennsylvania women’s swimming team, the top time for the 50 free is 22.78 seconds, accomplished by Thomas. Comparatively, the men’s top time in the same event during this season is 20.32 seconds. Thomas’s record time for women would have been the 17th best time for men this year. Furthermore, Thomas’s performance was the third-fastest time for the university’s women’s team in the last 13 seasons. 

On January 8, Thomas swam a race in which Thomas’ time was suspiciously slower than previous times, permitting Iszac Henig, a Yale swimmer who is biologically female but identifies as male, to win.

That prompted a young woman who is on Penn’s swim team with Thomas to surmise in an interview with Outkick last week that Thomas and Henig colluded before the race in order for Henig to win and thus disprove the assumption that Thomas, as a biological male, could not be beaten by a biological female competitor.

The swimmer, who preferred to remain anonymous out of fear from activists, told Outkick, “Looking at [Lia’s] time, I don’t think she was trying. I know they’re friends and I know they were talking before the meet. I think she let her win to prove the point that, ‘Oh see, a female-to-male beat me.’” Asked if she thought Thomas and Henig had colluded, she replied, “I do. I can’t say for sure, but I wouldn’t be shocked if I found out that was 100% true.”

Outkick noted, “In the 100 freestyle race, Henig finished with a time of 49.57; Thomas touched the wall in 52.84. During a November tri-meet with Princeton and Cornell, Thomas swam the 100 freestyle in 49.42.”

Thomas’ teammate also noted that in the January 8 200 freestyle race, Thomas only won by two seconds. She stated,  “I was on deck and said to a friend, ‘She’s literally not trying.’ You could just tell. It was blatantly obvious. I was watching the 200 free and she was literally keeping pace with the other girls.”

“She was No. 1 in the country at one point,” she continued. “These are definitely talented swimmers, but they’re not the caliber of being at the top in the country or anything like that. … You can tell when someone is dying and they’re swimming slow. You can also tell when someone is not trying and I could see [in the 200 freestyle] that Lia was not trying.”

In early December, Thomas utterly crushed the women competing with Thomas at the University of Akron’s Zippy Invitational, winning the 1650 free by a gargantuan 38 seconds ahead of the young woman finishing second, winning the 500 free by a whopping twelve seconds ahead of the woman finishing second, and winning the 200 free by a still-huge seven seconds, setting new Penn records along with meet and pool records.

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