Lia Thomas calls out 'anti-feminists' for pushing 'transphobic beliefs,' showing 'half support' to trans women

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Lia Thomas, the transgender swimmer who won a women's NCAA Division I championship in 2022, called out women who argue only athletes born girls should be competing in female sports.

Thomas said some of her University of Pennsylvania teammates were "half" supportive of the swimmer, who was competing against women despite being a biological man. She did not compete against women until the 2021-22 season.

"They’re like, ‘Oh, we respect Lia as a woman, as a trans woman or whatever. We respect her identity. We just don’t think it’s fair.’ You can’t really have that sort of half support where you’re like, ‘Oh, I respect her as a woman here, but not here,'" Thomas said on fellow trans swimmer Schuyler Bailar's podcast "Dear Schuyler."

"You can’t sort of break me down as a person into little pieces, and you’re like, ‘OK, this is OK, this is OK, that’s not.’ It’s pretending to be supportive on some level but, in reality, it just sort of falls flat.

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Pennsylvania's Lia Thomas prepares to swim the women's 500-yard freestyle final at the NCAA swimming and diving championships. (AP Photo/John Bazemore)

"They’re using the guise of feminism to sort of push transphobic beliefs. I think a lot of people in that camp sort of carry an implicit bias against trans people but don’t want to, I guess, fully manifest or speak that out. And so they try to just play it off as this sort of half support."

Thomas' gripes with her teammates stem from when 16 of them wrote a letter to the school saying they felt it was unfair Thomas was competing in the women's division.

"They think about how twisted ‘feminism’