Lia Thomas, the male UPenn swimmer who identifies as female and has been permitted to compete on the female team, is not only depriving his female teammates of a fair chance at winning, but also their right to privacy. “It’s definitely awkward because Lia still has male body parts and is still attracted to women,” one of his teammates told DailyMail.com.
The teammate said that “multiple swimmers” had raised the issue on multiple occasions but that they were “told that we could not ostracize Lia by not having her in the locker room and that there’s nothing we can do about it, that we basically have to roll over and accept it, or we cannot use our own locker room.”
This is not a reasonable accommodation of Thomas’s feelings. A reasonable accommodation might be giving him a separate, private space if he is uncomfortable using the men’s room. However, allowing a male to infiltrate women-only locker rooms is sexist and, in any other context, would be considered illegal. In the locker room, the emperor is literally not wearing any clothes. And there’s nothing like dangling male genitals to dissipate the notion that “trans women are women.”