A female swimmer on the University of Pennsylvania’s swim team said transgender athlete Lia Thomas “compares herself to Jackie Robinson” and makes arrogant comments about being “No. 1 in the country.”
The female swimmer, who spoke to the Washington Examiner on the condition of anonymity, explained in the second part of an exclusive interview that Thomas “compares herself to Jackie Robinson,” saying, “She said she is like the Jackie Robinson of trans sports.”
“I try not to be around her because the whole situation makes me so mad,” the swimmer said. “I don’t think Lia is a bad person. She’s very quiet and kind of introverted … It’s just really hard for me to respect her at all because of what she’s doing to my team and what she’s doing to women in general and not caring.”
The female swimmer also told the outlet that Thomas “laughs about” and “mocks the situation.
“Instead of caring or showing that she cares about what she’s doing or what she’s doing to her teammates, she’s not sympathetic or empathetic at all. Lia never addressed our team. She never asked if it was OK. She never asked how we felt. She never tried to explain how she feels. She never has said anything to us as a group. She never addressed anything,” the swimmer said.
“All she does is make comments to people like, ‘At least I’m still No. 1 in the country,’ and those kinds of cocky things,” the swimmer added. “She doesn’t care how all this is affecting us and how this is affecting our relationship to swimming. She doesn’t care, and it makes it really hard to like her.”
The swimmer also said Thomas has flagrantly ignored rules that everyone else followed, like on a recent trip to Florida where UPenn told the swimmers not to wear school gear – like they usually do – to avoid getting harassed, but Thomas ignored the rule and wore school gear every day while no one else did. She added that Thomas attended both the male and female swim team annual dinners after announcing the gender transition, even though swimmers are only supposed to attend one.
“When she first announced she was transgender and was still on the men’s team, she went to both the men’s and women’s swimming team dinners on our training trip,” Thomas’ teammate told the Examiner. “It really rubbed me the wrong way because if you’re saying you’re a woman, then why go to the men’s team? And if you want to go to the men’s team because all your friends are there, OK, understandable. But then why are you going to the women’s team dinner? You shouldn’t get to bend the rules.”
As The Daily Wire noted, the first part of the swimmer’s interview accused the NCAA of not caring about biological women “at all.”
“Yeah, it’s definitely really stressful. There’s a lot going on. And it definitely weighs on my mind a lot because it’s definitely hard to overcome the feeling of feeling completely overlooked, as if the NCAA just does not care about us at all. And nobody cares about how this is affecting us at all,” she told the Examiner.
“It just seems like if you say anything, everyone is just going to attack you and call you transphobic, and it’s not even true,” she added. “We just want to have what we were promised by joining the swim team, which is fair competition and equal opportunities. It’s been really frustrating because we all agree, and I have yet to meet anyone or talk to anyone who thinks what is going on is OK. But yet somehow, these are the rules and allowed.”