More than 300 current and former NCAA, Team USA and international swimmers and divers signed on to an open letter sent to the NCAA on Thursday in support of Lia Thomas, an openly transgender swimmer competing on Penn’s women’s team. Athlete Ally, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group, and Schuyler Bailar, who swam for Harvard as the first openly transgender person to compete in the men’s category in Division I across all sports, organized the effort and sent the letter to NCAA officials including president Mark Emmert, chief medical officer Brian Hainline and director of policy, education and strategic engagement Anne Rohlman.
“With this letter, we express our support for Lia Thomas, and all transgender college athletes, who deserve to be able to participate in safe and welcoming athletic environments,” read the missive. “We urge you to not allow political pressure to compromise the safety and wellbeing of college athletes everywhere.”
Thomas has set multiple program records and qualified to compete in three D-I NCAA championship races, in the 200-yard, 500-yard and 1,650-yard freestyle events. Her eligibility for the March competition came into question in January after the NCAA announced a new policy deferring to the criteria set by individual national governing sporting bodies, like USA Swimming, for transgender eligibility in championship events. Shortly following that announcement, USA Swimming updated its own eligibility policy to require that trans women athletes have levels of testosterone lower than five nanomoles/liter for a period of 36 months. Thomas has said she started testosterone-suppression therapy in May 2019, 33 months ago. The NCAA has yet to clarify, though, how or when it will start to enforce a new policy, nor whether those new rules would affect Thomas’s eligibility to compete in national championship races.
The letter demands that the NCAA not adopt USA Swimming’s policy midseason; establish “clear and consistent” guidelines for eligibility policies, which should be communicated well before a season starts; and include trans and nonbinary athletes in the policy development process. The NCAA did not immediately respond to Sports Illustrated’s request for comment on the letter.
“The amount of discrimination [Thomas] has experienced, the amount of hatred, the amount of just blatant cruelty that has been projected and targeted at her, it is inhumane,” Bailar told SI. “It is unkind. It is horrible. It is really hard to see as another transgender athlete and person. And, to be quite honest and frank with you, it is life-threatening to trans people in general, because we already are at risk.”
The letter came after 16 of Thomas’s teammates anonymously supported another letter, sent to Penn and Ivy League officials by former Olympic gold medalist swimmer Nancy Hogshead-Makar of the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, that argues Thomas should not be allowed to compete and urged school and league officials to not legally challenge the NCAA’s new rules. Previously, another group of Thomas’s teammates put out an anonymous letter in support of her right to compete.
“I was fortunate enough to be welcomed with open arms in the swim community when I came out as gay,” said Erica Sullivan, who signed the letter as a Team USA Olympian who won a silver medal in Tokyo. “Just with my own personal good experience of coming out and feeling all that love and support within my swim community, I feel like [Lia] deserves the same thing.”
