Lia Thomas, the biological male on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swim team who engendered national outrage by blowing away the competition, was rejected as the Ivy League’s nominee for the NCAA’s “Woman of the Year.”
Thomas, who won the 500-yard freestyle event at the NCAA Division I national championships, had been nominated by UPenn earlier this month. The award recognizes “female student-athletes who have exhausted their eligibility and distinguished themselves in their community, in athletics and in academics throughout their college careers.”
But the Ivy League, comprised of Penn, Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University and Yale University, chose as its nominee fencing champion Sylvie Binder of Columbia University/Barnard College.
Binder, who hails from Armonk, New York, is a three-time first team all-American who won the NCAA women’s foil title in 2019, and the bronze medal in 2018 and 2022. She finished her undergraduate college education with a stellar 3.91 grade point average.
In her bio after winning a Leadership and Excellence Award, Binder wrote, “To my family and their unconditional love and support for the past 5 years: Dad, Mom, Abby, and Zach, I owe it all to you.”
After Penn nominated Thomas for the “Woman of the Year” award, former Fox News anchor and current podcast host Megyn Kelly blasted the university. She snapped on her podcast:
After a season of dumping on its female swimmers, forcing them to compete against a biological man who now says he is a woman, forcing them to share a locker room with said swimmer, dismissing their and their parents’ concerns summarily at every turn, even telling the female swimmers what they needed if they objected to the trans swimmer was therapy, the university now sticks a final thumb in the woman’s eyes, nominating this trans swimmer who goes by the name Lia Thomas as the University of Pennsylvania’s NCAA “Woman of the Year.” This is a disgrace. Lia Thomas is not a woman.
In February, 16 members of the Penn Women’s Swimming Team sent a letter to the University of Pennsylvania and the Ivy League in which they wrote, “Biologically, Lia holds an unfair advantage over competition in the women’s category, as evidenced by her rankings that have bounced from #462 as a male to #1 as a female. If she (Thomas) were to be eligible to compete against us, she could now break Penn, Ivy, and NCAA Women’s Swimming records; feats she could never have done as a male athlete,” as Swim Swam reported.
Source: Dailywire
