‘I’m proud of my accomplishments’: Trans athlete Lia Thomas defends beating female swimmers – and slams critics who ‘I’m proud of my accomplishments’: Trans athlete Lia Thomas defends beating female swimmers – and slams critics who ‘poIice women’s bodies’ after attacking teammates

Transgender athlete Lia Thomas has defended her triumphs over her biologically female competitors as she hit out at what she deemed to be fake feminists who want to ‘police women’s bodies.’

The former University of Pennsylvania athlete joined the first NCAA transgender swimmer Schuyler Bailar on his podcast ‘Dear Schuyler’ Monday to discuss the controversy about allowing trans-female athletes to compete on women’s sports teams.
She said she believed that rather than be excluded from the sports, trans women should be ‘celebrated’ for their accomplishments as she called her former teammates ‘fake feminists’ for speaking out against her being on the women’s team.

The NCAA champion seemed gleeful and showed no remorse about beating biologically female athletes, despite constant criticism by her former competitor, Riley Gaines.
Her remarks came as she has become more of an activist for transgender athletes, even filming her own video in support of a measure that would prohibit any bans on trans competitors.
In the podcast, Thomas told Bailar she is ‘proud of my accomplishments,’ and claimed that as a transgender athlete, ‘we’re almost not allowed to celebrate our accomplishments.’

‘I felt I didn’t want to invite any more negativity,’ she said of her decision to not speak out about her victory in the past, ‘but I think trans women should be celebrated.’

Thomas then went on to say that critics of transgender athletes in sports are ‘policing women’s bodies,’ comparing the push to exclude transgender female athletes from sports to historic efforts to exclude black women from competing in women’s sports.

‘They’re using the guise of feminism to sort of push transphobic beliefs,’ she said.
‘I think a lot of people in that camp sort of carry an implicit bias against trans people, but don’t want to, I guess, fully manifest or speak that out. And so they try to just play it off as this sort of half-support.

‘You can’t do that you can’t sort of break down me as a person into little pieces.’

Bailar agreed with the controversial athlete, saying: ‘They’re coming from…this whole protect “protect women’s sports,” [which] has become a very big movement and that they do it under the guise of feminism. “Oh, we’re just feminists, we’re just fighting for women,” and whenever anybody says that I’m always [like]: ‘Okay, you’re fighting for women by excluding women so that’s not fighting for women.’
He continued to say that feminism has become ‘twisted’ and ‘turned into excluding women’ and reduced them to ‘reproductive capacity.’
‘At the end of the day, everybody’s trying to – under a true feminist – is everybody trying to come together to sort of break down these patriarchal ideals of what a woman is and who can be a woman and sort of open that up to to the very broad range of possibilities that there are,’ Thomas said.