Thread by @KirstiMiller30

It’s really disappointing seeing so many transphobes going all in against Lia Thomas because they saw a picture of her with a gold medal and saw some claim that she went from “462nd as a male (completely unsourced by the way,

I challenge you to actually find when she was ever ranked 462nd (which, to be perfectly clear, 462 out of ~11000 college male swimmers is still in the top 5%)to 1st as a female (winning first place in one event & losing two events at a meet with 21 events doesn’t rank you #1)”.

I would put money down that most of those attacking don’t know the results from the 2022 NCAA D1 Swimming & Diving Championships, and they have only probably only heard about this one event that Thomas won.

A couple things:
-Lia Thomas finished 1st place in the 500 Yard Freestyle. She beat the second-place finisher by 1.75 seconds. She beat the last-place finisher by 6.84 seconds. She fell short of record time by 9.18 seconds.

-Lia Thomas tied for 5th place in the 200 Yard Freestyle. She lost the race by 2.28 seconds and fell short of record time by 4.3 seconds.

-Lia Thomas finished 8th (last place) in the 100 Yard Freestyle. She lost the race by 2.13 seconds and fell short of record time by 2.62 seconds, and in this race, she actually lost to Iszac Henig, a trans man, who still lost to 4 cis-women.

-Lia Thomas only competed in these 3 events, out of 21 total at the meet.

Where is the domination? It’s just factually non-existent.

Going back to the “ranked 462nd as a male” claim, I’ve searched extensively for the source to this and have only found the claim made from Lia’s 16 fellow teammates who wrote an open letter to the NCAA (which, of course, is not an actual source for that number).

What you will find, if you actually take a look at Lia Thomas’s page on Swimcloud is that she performed rather exceptionally when competing in male swimming from 2020 and earlier.
(swimcloud.com/swimmer/314430/

As a freshman, Thomas set a time of 8:57.55 seconds in the 1,000-yard freestyle, the 6th-fastest men's time in the country. Her times in the 500-yard freestyle & the 1,650-yard freestyle were among the top 100 in the country.

https://twitter.com/kirstimiller30/status/1496121109728882688?s=21

In fact, if you look specifically at the Ivy League Championships, you’ll notice that she placed 2nd in all the male events she participated in in 2019, 2 years before she would go to win 1st place in the women’s Ivy League Championships.

In those 2 years, for the same 500 Yard Freestyle event, her time went up from 4.18.72 to 4.34.32 (an increase of 15 seconds).

If your argument is that Lia Thomas transitioned so she could go from 462nd to 1st, even if the premise of that argument was true, why would someone go through all that just to go from 2nd to 1st? Why would they go through all that to end up adding 15 seconds to their time?

I know there’s still plenty of research to be done with regards to trans people in sports in general, & a lot of people might be confused in this area, but I assure you that opposing Lia , especially based on completely inaccurate arguments, is the wrong side of history to take.

Conservative politicians are working overtime to make sure you fear trans people. Plenty of trans athletes exist, yet you conveniently only hear about the ones who win anything.

And there are potentially trans people in your life who will see your thoughts on issues like this and feel even less safe than they already do.

I plead with you to please do your research on these topics. It’s easy to have a reactionary and uninformed take on issues like this. But it’s especially rich coming from people who I will see constantly post about “finding the truth” and “not believing what the media tells you”,

and then turn around and just lap up the lies being spread about transgender athletes.