The father of a female swimmer on the University of Pennsylvania’s swim team told me, on the condition of anonymity, that he felt Penn had failed to protect his daughter and violated his trust. This was because, in addition to forcing his daughter to compete against a male choosing to identify as a woman, his daughter was also forced to share the same locker room as Lia Thomas and be exposed to Thomas’s male genitalia.
Many have focused on Thomas’s exploits in the swimming pool while not realizing other issues that affect the college-aged women on the team behind the scenes. While it is important to protect the sanctity of competition in women’s sports, it is equally important to make sure young women aren’t traumatized by being forced to see naked male genitalia in an area that is supposed to be a safe space. Two women’s groups sent letters to the University of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia’s district attorney in February over concerns by female swim team members about being exposed to Thomas’s male genitalia in the locker room. The swimmer’s father couldn’t believe this was allowed to happen.
“I can’t say she’s been traumatized, but there was definitely a breach of trust and a failure on the part of Penn to protect her,” the father told me.
Additionally, he elaborated on how the university had told parents one thing and then did the exact opposite. “In the fall of 2019, when Lia first came out, the girls were told she would have her own separate space somewhere,” the father said. “For some reason, that obviously changed. I’m not sure why it changed. Was it money? Was it legal threats?”
Penn wouldn’t listen to any female swimmers’ complaints about having to be exposed to male genitalia, he said. Penn basically told them to shut up and deal with it.
“Regarding Lia in the locker room, Penn told any female swimmers who had issues to essentially ‘get over it,’” the father said. “They can’t ostracize Lia.”
“Multiple swimmers have raised it, multiple different times,” a Penn swimmer said of discomfort within the locker room. “But we were basically told that we could not ostracize Lia by not having her in the locker room and that there’s nothing we can do about it, that we basically have to roll over and accept it, or we cannot use our own locker room.”
It is a sad state of affairs when universities have to lie to parents in order to accommodate transgender students. The University of Pennsylvania prioritized one person suffering from gender dysphoria over its female students — and their parents, who pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition. Universities are supposed to protect students — all of their students, not just those who have been elevated to a protected class resulting from a warped and misguided sense of social justice.
