66
best to inch closer to coming out to close friends, a
couple of coaches,” she says. “But in that depressive,
very struggling state of mind, it’s hard to make progress
when so much of my energy was trying to get through
each day.” At one practice, Thomas had a panic attack
in the pool and bolted. “I was too scared to tell Mike
why,” she says of her coach.
Thomas initially put off hormone replacement therapy
because she worried that it could end her swimming
career. But she began HRT in May 2019. She knew how
the regimen would affect her body—that she wouldn’t be
as strong, that it would take more time to recover after
workouts, that it would change her in other ways. But
she also knew that it might ease what she was feeling.
“I did HRT knowing and accepting I might not swim
again,” she says. “I was just trying to live my life.”
Almost immediately, her negative feelings began to
subside. “It surprised me,” she says. “I felt, mentally, a
lot better and healthier pretty quickly. The relief it gave
me was quite substantial.”
She worked out in the pool between her sophomore
and junior years and found that her mind was clearer
than it had been in months. She realized she desper-
ately needed competitive swimming—and that she
wanted to do it as her authentic self. As a member of
the women’s team.
She came out to her coaches during her junior year.
Like her parents before, the Penn coaching staff was
immediately supportive. Thomas began coming out to
more friends. Hey, guys, she’d say. I’m trans.
NCAA rules allow athletes to change gender categories,
but Thomas needed a year of HRT before she’d be eligible
to compete against other women in championship events.
During two meetings, with Schnur at her side, she came
out to the men’s team and then the women’s team. Schnur
told the women Thomas would eventually join them. You
couldn’t hope for a better teammate, he told them.
For her junior year, though, she’d compete with
men—but it would be on her terms. At the team’s first
Ivy League meet, on Nov. 9, 2019, Thomas put on a
women’s suit and swam the 1,000-yard freestyle against
the Columbia men. She swam sporadically at meets after
that, pulling back as she got used to her body and the
slower times she produced.
During conversations with her parents, Thomas rolled
through a list of potential names. None seemed to cap-
ture her spirit. Carrie came up with “Lia,” and Thomas
immediately liked it. She chose “Catherine” as a middle
name—her mother’s birth name. “That meant so much
to me,” Carrie says.
Lia Catherine Thomas began to use her name on
New Year’s 2020. “It’s a milestone in a very long process
of transitioning where you feel like this is who I am, and
I’m going to live this,” she says. “In a way, it was sort of
a rebirth, for the first time in my life, feeling fully con-
nected to my name and who I am and living who I am.
“I am Lia.”T
HOMAS DESPERATELY WANTED to swim with the women’s
team. With COVID-19 threatening to interrupt the
2020–21 college season, Thomas took what would
have been her senior season off as a hedge to keep her
final year of eligibility.
When she started practicing with Penn again in the
late summer of 2021, she felt physically different from the
person who’d come close to hitting NCAA championship–
qualifying times in men’s distance races. She’d been on
HRT a little more than two years by then. Thomas says
she shrunk about an inch. She noticed her strength wasn’t
the same; fat had also been redistributed within her body.
Holding her old practice paces was an impossibility.
She realized she couldn’t obsess over what she could no
longer do. “I feel disconnected from them,” she says of
her old race times. “It was a different moment in my life.”
Against other women, though, she was still extremely
fast in the water. At a November 2021 meet against
Princeton and Cornell, Thomas posted the NCAA season-
best times in the 200-yard freestyle and the 500-yard
freestyle, set Penn records in those events and won three
individual races. In the blowout 500 free, she beat the
second-place finisher by nearly 13 seconds.
Those triumphs garnered little attention outside the
insulated swimming world. Two weeks later, at the
Zippy Invitational in Akron, Ohio, Thomas dropped
another second from her NCAA-leading time in the
500 freestyle. She knocked off nearly another second and a
half on her 200 free. Her 1,650 freestyle (66 laps) pushed
her up to sixth among college swimmers to that point in
the season. With her 200 and 500, Thomas was within
reach of collegiate records set by Ledecky and Franklin.WI
NS
LO
W
TO
WN
SO
NAMONG
HER PEERS
Since Thomas
(without cap)
came out, the
swimming
community has
been a source
of both support
and stress.LI
ATHOMAS