Ron DeSantis' targeting of Penn swimmer Lia Thomas is a transparently cheap political ploy

Penn swimmer Lia Thomas is now a political pawn.

Thomas’ national championship in the women’s 500-yard freestyle at the NCAA championships on Saturday has made her a target for Republican politicians like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The potential candidate for president in 2024 signed a proclamation Tuesday claiming that Virginia swimmer Emma Weyant was the rightful winner of the event.

Weyant, a native of Florida, finished second, nearly two seconds behind Thomas, who was competing in her first NCAA championships as a woman. Thomas, who began her career as William Thomas on Penn’s men’s team, competed as a woman in 2021-22 after undergoing hormone treatments.

DeSantis’ proclamation is only for craven political gain. Weyant was not at his news conference. He has no authority over the NCAA’s championships and the event was held in Georgia, not Florida. You can say you won the 500-yard freestyle and your claim holds just as much weight as DeSantis’ claim that Weyant won does.

DeSantis knows this. He wants to be one of the first and loudest people “protecting women’s sports,” a phrase that has become a catch-all for transphobic attacks. So does Rep. Vicky Hartzler of Missouri. The Senate candidate recently began airing an ad featuring side-by-side pictures of Thomas throughout her Penn swimming career and with her former name at the bottom of one of them.

Thomas is an easy and undeserved target because she's an outlier. She is the first known transgender athlete to win an NCAA title and has helped cause the governing body to rethink its outdated rules governing the participation of transgender athletes. The NCAA said in January that it would defer to an individual sport’s governing body regarding its participation policy and allowed Thomas to compete at the national championships last week provided she met specific testosterone thresholds.

In its January statement, the NCAA said that it was “steadfast in our support of transgender student-athletes and the fostering of fairness across college sports.”

The debate surrounding the rules for transgender athlete participation is a nuanced one and best discussed and decided by athletes and those with leadership roles in sports, not by politicians. Constructive discussion on the issue can’t happen politically in today’s environment where a 22-year-old’s success in a sport is an immediate target for mainstream denigration.

It takes incredible courage to make the transition that Thomas has over the past couple of years. Making the transition to change from man to woman or woman to man isn’t one that’s made lightly. And besides, Thomas has met the established standards to compete as a woman ever since she rejoined Penn’s swim team.

And not only is Thomas’ success an outlier, but her presence in women's sports is also one as well. Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox vetoed a bill passed by his state’s legislature that would have barred transgender athletes from competing in girls' high school sports. In a letter explaining his veto, Cox noted that 75,000 kids play high school sports in Utah. Four of them are transgender athletes. One of those four is playing in girls' sports.

Trans teenagers and young adults are some of the most vulnerable populations in the country and they need our support, not denigration. According to the Trevor Project, transgender teens made up less than 2% of the teen population in 2019. Over 40% of those transgender teens surveyed said they had seriously considered suicide and over half had said they felt sad or hopeless for two weeks or more in the past year.

Yet politicians like DeSantis, Hartzler and others across the country have no problem cheaply targeting Thomas as an example of what's wrong with the U.S. today to boost their profiles and election hopes.

It's a disgusting message about a demographic in dire need of public support from all elected officials. Yet there's no sign of that support happening in sports anytime soon.

Bills like Utah’s have been passed in Republican-dominated legislatures across the country and become law in multiple states despite the similarly small numbers of transgender athletes in high school sports. DeSantis signed Florida’s “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act” last summer despite the fact that just 11 athletes had been subject to the Florida High School Athletic Association’s transgender athlete policy since it was implemented in 2013.

Women's sports are not suddenly at risk of becoming unfair because of Thomas' success or other transgender teens continuing their athletic careers in women's sports. But that's not what many politicians across the country want you to blindly believe.