Is it truly fair play when a single policy shift can rewrite years of hard-fought records and reshape the lives of an entire team? That’s the question echoing through the University of Pennsylvania’s swim community after the school’s recent decision to ban biological men from women’s teams—an about-face that’s left former teammates of Lia Thomas feeling, as Monika Burzynska put it to Fox News, “a deep sense of peace and validation.”
For Burzynska and her fellow female swimmers, sharing a locker room with Thomas—who had previously competed on the men’s team before transitioning—was more than a logistical challenge. It was an emotional tightrope. She described how she would “hunker in a locker-room corner to change” and, as the season wore on, started waiting for Thomas to be in the shower before she dared to undress. Eventually, Burzynska found herself retreating to bathroom stalls or even a private bathroom across the hall, just to reclaim a sense of privacy and comfort. “Around Lia, I wasn’t going to risk anything,” she told Fox News.
The tension wasn’t just about personal space. Many on the team felt pressure from the university administration to stay silent. According to a lawsuit filed by teammates Ellen Holmquist, Margot Kaczorowski, and Grace Estabrook, “The UPenn administrators went on to tell the women that if the women spoke publicly about their concerns about Thomas’ participation on the Women’s Team, the reputation of those complaining about Thomas being on the team would be tainted with transphobia for the rest of their lives and they would probably never be able to get a job.” For Burzynska, who grew up feeling “compassion” for trans people, the experience forced her to wrestle with complicated feelings. “You have these issues that are from afar, and you never really quite think they’re going to touch you personally until you’re on a team with Lia Thomas and your locker is directly next to this biological male,” she reflected.
The school’s reversal came after a federal Title IX investigation found UPenn had violated the law by “allowing a male to compete in female athletic programs and occupy female-only intimate facilities.” The university not only banned biological men from women’s teams but also stripped Thomas of her titles and issued apologies to women who had lost to trans athletes. For Burzynska and her teammates, the decision restored “a sense of fairness that had been lost.” She emphasized, “Women’s records belong to women, and that protecting the integrity of women’s sports still matters.”
The story doesn’t stop at the pool’s edge. The NCAA’s 2023 guidelines on transgender athlete eligibility have fueled a nationwide debate, with each sport now setting its own rules. Science, meanwhile, offers a nuanced view. According to Dr. Bradley Anawalt, an endocrinologist at the University of Washington, “there appears to be no competitive advantage between boys and girls before they undergo puberty around the ages of 11 or 12.” But for trans women who transition after puberty, studies show some physical advantages—like strength and aerobic capacity—can persist for years, even after hormone therapy. As Dr. Anawalt told NPR, “trans women remained faster for up to two years after the initiation of gender affirming hormone therapy. At four years, trans women continued to do more sit ups and push ups” than their cisgender peers.
Yet, the science isn’t black and white. Some research suggests that after several years of hormone therapy, many—but not all—performance differences narrow, especially in endurance sports and strength-based events. Still, as elite competitions are often decided by margins of less than 1%, even small residual advantages can have outsized impacts on records and scholarships and the perception of fairness.
The NCAA and other sports bodies are left walking a tightrope between inclusion and fairness. Some experts, like Dr. Anawalt, highlight that “we have two virtues, two values that are in conflict with each other. One is whether or not it is fair for trans women to compete in sports as females. And then there’s inclusivity. One of the beauties of sport is let’s let everybody play.”
For now, the UPenn swimmers are celebrating a policy that, for them, restores the spirit of competition and the sanctity of women’s records. But as debates continue and science evolves, the question of how to balance fairness and inclusion in women’s sports remains a fiercely contested—and deeply personal—arena.
