Lia Thomas

According to an archived page of the swimming data website Swimcloud, Thomas was ranked 89th among male college swimmers for that season.

In a race during January 2022 at a meet against UPenn's Ivy League rival Yale, Thomas finished in 6th place in the 100m freestyle race, losing to four cisgender women and Iszac Henig, a transgender man, who transitioned without hormone therapy.

In March 2022, Thomas became the first openly transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I national championship in any sport after winning the women's 500-yard freestyle with a time of 4:33.24; Olympic silver medalist Emma Weyant was second with a time 1.75 seconds behind Thomas.

Thomas did not break any records at the NCAA event, while Kate Douglass broke 18 NCAA records.

Thomas was 9.18 seconds short of Katie Ledecky's NCAA record of 4:24.06.

In the preliminaries for the 200 freestyle, Thomas finished second.

In the final for the 200 freestyle, Thomas placed fifth with a time of 1:43.50.

In the preliminaries for the 100 freestyle, Thomas finished tenth.

In the finals for the 100 freestyle, Thomas placed eighth out of eight competitors in 48.18 seconds, finishing last.

The March 2022 NCAA championship was Thomas's last college swimming event.

By the conclusion of Thomas's swimming career at UPenn in 2022, her rank had moved from 65th on the men's team to 1st on the women's team in the 500-yard freestyle, and 554th on the men's team to fifth on the women's team in the 200-yard freestyle.

According to the swimming data website Swimcloud, Thomas was ranked 36th among female college swimmers in the United States for the 2021–2022 season, and 46th among women swimmers nationally.

In March 2022, Sports Illustrated reported that Thomas applied for law school and planned to swim at the 2024 Summer Olympics trials.

In a May 2022 interview with Good Morning America, Thomas defended herself from criticism, said that "I intend to keep swimming", and that "It's been a goal of mine to swim at Olympic trials for a very long time, and I would love to see that through."

In an interview with ESPN, Thomas said "It has been incredibly rewarding and meaningful to be able to be authentic and to be myself.

In June 2022, the International Swimming Federation (FINA), an organization that administers international aquatic sports competitions, voted to bar all transgender athletes from competing in professional women's swimming, with the exception of athletes who "can establish to FINA's comfortable satisfaction that they have not experienced any part of male puberty beyond Tanner Stage 2 (of puberty) or before age 12, whichever is later".

Lia Catherine Thomas (born 1999) is an American swimmer.

She is the first openly transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I national championship, having won the women's 500-yard freestyle event in 2022.

During her swimming career, Thomas has been part of the public debate about transgender women in women's sports.

Thomas was assigned male at birth, grew up in Austin, Texas, and has an older brother.

Thomas began swimming at the age of five, and was sixth in the state high school swimming championships for boys' events, competing for Westlake High School.

In 2017, she started attending the University of Pennsylvania.

She graduated in 2022 and plans to attend law school, pursuing a career as a civil rights attorney.

Towards the end of high school, Thomas began to question her gender identity.

Thomas began swimming on the men's team at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017.

During her freshman year, Thomas recorded a time of eight minutes and 57.55 seconds in the 1,000-yard freestyle that ranked as the sixth-fastest national men's time, and also recorded 500-yard freestyle and 1,650-yard freestyle times that ranked within the national top 100.

After her freshman year at college, during the summer of 2018, she came out as transgender to her family.

On the men's swim team in 2018–2019, Thomas finished second in the men's 500, 1,000, and 1,650-yard freestyle at the Ivy League championships as a sophomore in 2019.

During the 2018–2019 season, Thomas recorded the top UPenn men's team times in the 500 free, 1000 free, and 1650 free, but was the sixth best among UPenn men's team members in the 200 free.

In the 2018–2019 season she was, when competing in the men's team, ranked 554th in the 200 freestyle, 65th in the 500 freestyle, and 32nd in the 1650 freestyle.

In the 2021–2022 season, those ranks are now, when competing in the women's team, fifth in the 200 freestyle, first in the 500 freestyle, and eighth in the 1650 freestyle.

Thomas began transitioning using hormone replacement therapy in May 2019, and came out as a trans woman during her junior year to her coaches, friends, and the women's and men's swim teams at the University of Pennsylvania.

She was required to swim for the men's team in the 2019–2020 academic year as a junior while undergoing hormone therapy and then swam on the women's team in 2021–2022 after taking a year off school to maintain her eligibility to compete while competitive swimming was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

By 2021, she had met the NCAA hormone therapy requirements to swim on the women's team.

Thomas lost muscle mass and strength through testosterone suppression and hormone replacement therapy.

Her time for the 500 freestyle is over 15 seconds slower than her personal bests before medically transitioning.

Thomas's event progression peaked in 2019 for distance swimming, with a drop in times during the 2021–22 season.

Her event progression for sprint swimming reflected a dip at the start of 2021–22 season before returning to near-lifetime bests in the 100 free and a lifetime personal best in the 50 free in 2021.

She began using her new name on New Year's Day in 2020.

In an interview with Sports Illustrated she said, "In a way, it was sort of a rebirth, for the first time in my life, feeling fully connected to my name and who I am and living who I am. I am Lia."