Three former women’s swim team members from the University of Pennsylvania filed a lawsuit over self-described transgender swimmer Lia Thomas accessing female locker rooms.
Grace Estabrook, Ellen Holmquist, and Margot Kaczorowski claim in the lawsuit, filed last week by the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, that the NCAA and the Ivy League Conference fostered a “culture of intimidation while forcing young women to deny biology” and jeopardized their “opportunities, privacy, and safety” during the season that lasted between 2021 and 2022.
“I never expected my Ivy League education to teach me that women must silently accept losing their opportunities and privacy,” Estabrook remarked in a statement. “Women’s sports and the leaders who oversee them should not prioritize men’s feelings over fairness and integrity.”
The athletic leagues indeed allowed Thomas, a male who claims female identity, to access female locker rooms during that season. The lawsuit is the third filed by the Independent Council on Women’s Sports against college athletic conferences for “harm to female athletes.”
Riley Gaines, a former swimmer for the University of Kentucky, and eighteen other female athletes filed a lawsuit against the NCAA last year in Georgia, while another lawsuit was submitted by over a dozen female athletes against five universities in the Mountain West Conference over a male volleyball player who was allowed to compete against females.
The lawsuit was introduced as President Donald Trump signed an executive order prohibiting men from competing in women’s sports leagues, especially by taking “all appropriate action to affirmatively protect all-female athletic opportunities and all-female locker rooms and thereby provide the equal opportunity guaranteed by Title IX of the Education Amendments Act.”