NCAA, UPenn face lawsuit from female swimmers over having to undress in front of male competitor
Three former female athletes at the collegiate level have filed a lawsuit after they were forced to compete against and share a locker room with a trans-identified male athlete.
Grace Estabrook, Ellen Holmquist and Margot Kaczorowski filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts last week against the University of Pennsylvania for allowing trans-identified athlete Lia (Will) Thomas to compete on the women’s swimming team at the school. Estabrook, Holmquist and Kaczorowski were teammates of Thomas’ on the UPenn women’s swimming team.
The complaint is asking a federal judge to issue a ruling declaring that the defendants violated Title IX, which requires schools that receive federal funding to provide equal opportunities for women and girls in education, by allowing Thomas to compete on the women’s swimming team. The National Collegiate Athletics Association, Harvard University and the Ivy League were also named as defendants.
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The lawsuit also seeks a declaration that Thomas was ineligible to compete on the women’s swimming team, erasure of all the records Thomas set when competing on the women’s swimming team and the awarding of reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs.
While Estabrook, Holmquist and Kaczorowski are the named plaintiffs in the lawsuit, the class-action complaint was also filed on behalf of “all others similarly situated,” referring to female athletes harmed by Thomas’ competition on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swimming team. The document discusses what unfolded during the 2022 Ivy League Championships, which consisted of a mixture of group and individual events.
The plaintiffs maintain that Thomas’ participation on the women’s swimming team enabled the team to score higher in group events while depriving female athletes of the opportunity to earn honors that rightly belonged to them.
“During their participation in their relays, both Estabrook and Kaczorowski felt shame for swimming with Thomas, recognizing that Thomas tainted the results of their swims and made the competition unfair for opponents,” the lawsuit states.
“Female participants in the 2022 Ivy League Championships saw their most important athletic competition purposefully turned into a public spectacle geared to maximizing Thomas’ notoriety and support for Thomas shattering sex-based gender norms,” the lawsuit argues. The document contended that defendants were preoccupied with “maximizing the exposure of, and public accolades for, Thomas, while in comparison largely ignoring the accomplishments of female athletes.”
Statistics provided in the complaint showed that Thomas dominated every individual event at the Ivy League Championships, which took place at the Blodgett Pool at Harvard University.
According to the lawsuit, “In every individual event that Thomas swam at the Ivy League Championships, Thomas set a pool record — that is, the best women’s time ever swam in the Harvard Blodgett Pool.”
“In the 200-yard freestyle event, Kaczorowski would have finished sixth instead of seventh but for Thomas’ participation in that event,” the lawsuit adds. While Holmquist was one of five swimmers who competed in a “swim-off” to determine which member of the UPenn women’s swimming team would fill the school’s 17th and last spot in the Ivy League Championships, she learned that she missed out on making the cut by one spot.
“In other words, Thomas competing on the UPenn women’s team deprived Ellen Holmquist the opportunity to compete in the 2022 Ivy League Championships as a member of the UPenn team,” the suit continues, adding that “Holmquist was devastated by not making the UPenn 2022 Ivy League Championships team and her confidence was shaken.”
Thomas’ membership on the UPenn’s women’s swimming team also meant that the trans-identified athlete got to use the women’s locker room. While Estabrook “chose to use the Locker Room assigned to UPenn because her events generally did not overlap with Thomas’” at the Ivy League Championships, the lawsuit described it as a “disruption to her peace and preparation for her swims knowing that Thomas could walk in at any moment while she was changing.”
“Kaczorowski’s events did overlap with Thomas and she could not avoid changing at the same time that Thomas did,” the complaint added. “Accordingly, Kaczorowski chose not to use the locker room assigned to UPenn to protect her privacy and avoid the disruption and distraction of sharing a locker room with a man.”
During the regular season, “Kaczorowski only learned that Thomas had been authorized by UPenn to use the women’s locker room when she walked in the women’s locker room to find Thomas in front of her changing his clothing.” The lawsuit provided details of how Kaczorowski was “shocked” and in “tears” because of the experience.
“For nearly three years following the Ivy League Championships, Plaintiffs and others similarly situated have dealt with feelings of abandonment, betrayal, humiliation, and harassment, and with the ramifications of losses of placement, ill treatment, emotional turmoil, and invasion of privacy generated by the Defendants’ purposeful actions of conspiring and collaborating in 2022 to allow Thomas to compete at the Ivy League Championships and use the Women’s Locker rooms at Harvard’s Blodgett Pool,” the complaint proclaimed.
The complaint was filed the day before President Donald Trump signed an executive order vowing to withhold federal funds from educational institutions that allow trans-identified males to compete in women’s sports. The day after the executive order, the NCAA prohibited trans-identified males from competing in women’s sports.
Efforts to prohibit trans-identified males from competing in women’s sports stem from concerns about the fairness for female athletes in light of the differences between men and women that give men an advantage in athletics.
The lawsuit also cites a report detailing how “On average women have 50% to 60% of men’s upper arm muscle cross-sectional area and 65% to 75% of men’s thigh muscle cross-sectional area, and women have 50% to 60% of men’s upper limb strength and 60% to 80% of men’s leg strength” while “on average men are 7% to 8% taller with longer, denser, and stronger bones, whereas women have shorter humerus and femur cross-sectional areas being 65% to 75% and 85%, respectively, those of men.”
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
