Grace Estabrook, Ellen Holmquist, and Margot Kaczorowski — three former Penn swimmers — have filed a lawsuit against Penn, Harvard University, and the Ivy League for violating Title IX by allowing a transgender woman Lia Thomas to compete in the 2022 Women’s Ivy League Swimming and Diving Championships.
The Austin-born Thomas began her hormone replacement therapy in 2019 and became the first openly transgender athlete to win a NCAA Division I national championship after winning the women’s 500-yard freestyle event in 2022.
The case was filed in the federal court on February 4, alleging the four defendants for violating the regulations by allowing a “trans-identifying male swimmer” to compete in the event.
The trio are seeking relief for “damages for pain and suffering, mental and emotional distress, suffering and anxiety, expenses costs and other damages against the NCAA, Ivy League, Harvard, and UPenn due to their wrongful conduct.”
The lawsuit highlights a major controversy running around the transgender in sports.
Riley Gaines, who also filed a lawsuit against Thomas, said the new lawsuit was filed with “serendipitous timing”.
The lawsuit claimed that being forced to share a locker room with man “was a disruption to (Estabrook’s) peace and preparation for her swim knowing that Thomas could walk in at any moment while she was changing.”
“For nearly three years following the Ivy League Championships, Plaintiffs and others similarly situated have dealt with feelings of abandonment, betrayal, humiliation, and harassment, and with the ramifications of losses of placement, ill treatment, emotional turmoil, and invasion of privacy generated by the Defendants’ purposeful actions of conspiring and collaborating in 2022 to allow Thomas to compete at the Ivy League Championships and use the women’s locker rooms at Harvard’s Blodgett Pool,” the lawsuit reads.
The Ivy League Council of Presidents members were also accused of laboring “for months behind the scenes to engineer a public shock and awe display of monolithic support for biological unreality and radical gender ideology by America’s oldest and most storied educational institutions.”
“Deviation from the biological line drawn by Title IX harms women and deprives them of equal opportunities to men by making them compete against men, which reduces women’s sport opportunities, is not fair, and in many cases can be unsafe,” the lawsuit reads.
“Despite the science-backed dividing line for eligibility in women’s sport provided by Title IX, which is sex and sex alone, the NCAA chose to define eligibility in women’s collegiate sport in terms of testosterone suppression by allowing men to compete as women by suppressing testosterone to a certain level that is still above the female range.”
Furthermore, the lawsuit alleges, “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”
“The UPenn administrators told the women that if anyone was struggling with accepting Thomas’s participation on the UPenn Women’s team, they should seek counseling and support from CAPS and the LBGTQ center,” the lawsuit stated. “The administrators also invited the women to a talk titled, ‘Trans 101.’ Thus, the women were led to understand that UPenn’s position was that if a woman on the team had any problem with a trans-identifying male being on her team that woman had a psychological problem and needed counseling.”
Adding, “Each of the Plaintiffs was repeatedly emotionally traumatized by the violation of her privacy and the requirement that she share the women’s locker room with a male.”