UPenn swimmer breaks silence on sharing locker room with Lia Thomas

Former College of Pennsylvania swimmer Monika Burzynska stated she was assigned the locker only one over from Lia Thomas’ when the transgender athlete joined the ladies’s swim staff in 2021. Burzynska beforehand knew the athlete as Will Thomas, a member of the boys’s swimming staff at UPenn. 

“He wasn’t very social,” Burzynska advised Fox Information Digital, including she had solely ever had brief, passing conversations with Thomas. 

She thought Thomas had already graduated when her staff was dealt the information that the athlete can be transitioning to hitch the ladies’s staff beginning within the 2021-22 season. 

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When that season finally started, and Thomas turned a fixture within the ladies’s locker room, Burzynska usually retreated to the nook of the room to alter. Different instances, Burzynska timed precisely when she modified to coincide with when Thomas showered. Ultimately, Burzynska opted to solely change within the stalls or within the household locker throughout the corridor. 

“Round Lia, I wasn’t going to danger something,” Burzynska stated, relating to the potential of the trans athlete seeing her undress.

Burzynska has by no means spoken out about her expertise of being on a staff with Thomas till now, amid the current information that UPenn agreed to apologize to all the feminine swimmers, rescind Thomas’ program data, and undertake a brand new coverage that applies strict organic definitions for men and women.

She stated the information gave her “a deep sense of peace and validation.” 

“Not just for me, however for all the women on the staff, for all the women within the swim world and within the sport world. And I feel this choice, it introduced again – at the least for me – a way of equity that had been misplaced,” Burzynska stated. “Girls’s data belong to ladies and that defending the integrity of girls’s sports activities nonetheless issues.”

Nonetheless, the recollections of what Burzynska and others needed to endure lingers. 

Burzynska identifies as somebody with conservative values, however says she grew up feeling “compassion” for transgender folks. Her views modified when she was positioned subsequent to Thomas within the locker room. 

“I believed it should be horrible to really feel such as you’re trapped within the incorrect physique. Simply be so out of contact with who you actually are,” Burzynska stated. “You will have these points which can be from afar and also you by no means actually fairly suppose they are going to contact you personally till you are on a staff with Lia Thomas and your locker is straight subsequent to this organic male. And you’ll have by no means believed that you just’d be dealing with this problem straight.

“After which when that occurs, your views change the place you continue to really feel sorry for this particular person as a result of they’re clearly so deeply misplaced. However then it turns into extra, ‘OK, this isn’t honest,’” Burzynska added. 

As a local of Colonia, New Jersey, Burzynska defined that she grew up in a liberal surroundings with outstanding pro-LGBTQ sentiment. These values adopted her when she went to UPenn within the deep blue metropolis of Philadelphia. 

“We have now a really, very, how ought to I name it, like deep LGBTQ presence on campus the place the campus buildings or the dormitories, slightly than flying the U.S. flag, the trans flag, the LGBTQ flag [were flown]. Each time I go to Penn, I see it is like this large skyscraper dorm, and so they have the largest rainbow flag you can think about,” Burzynska stated. 

“So I suppose, in a way, you can say it encourages it if an individual may be very confused about their id, after which there’s this group that appears so accepting, so loving, telling you can be no matter you need to be… which may type of, yeah, encourage folks to show that manner.”

Burzynska, and the opposite feminine swimmers on the staff on the time, had been allegedly coerced into silence and submission by UPenn directors. 

A lawsuit by three different former Thomas teammates, Grace, Estabrook, Margot Kaczorowski and Ellen Holmquist, alleged that college officers pressured them to not converse out about their ideas on Thomas becoming a member of the staff publicly. 

“The UPenn directors went on to inform the ladies that if the ladies spoke publicly about their issues about Thomas’ participation on the Girls’s Crew, the popularity of these complaining about Thomas being on the staff can be tainted with transphobia for the remainder of their lives and they might most likely by no means be capable of get a job,’” the lawsuit alleged.

UPENN AGREES TO FOLLOW TRUMP’S MANDATE ON PROTECTING WOMEN’S SPORTS AFTER LIA THOMAS INVESTIGATION

Burzynska, having grown up in a liberal New Jersey city, was already accustomed to the results of sharing conservative values in a liberal setting. 

Burzynska recollects, from a younger age, usually being criticized for having “conservative or Republican values.” 

“I had been experiencing that without end. And even UPenn, I feel it is each college at this level, however UPenn may be very, very left-leaning. And so I used to be type of able to embrace that, that my views would not be welcomed as a result of, yeah, I have been conservative most of my life. My beliefs are grounded in religion.” 

Burzynska recollects a futile dialog she had along with her head coach, Mike Schnur, when she confronted him with issues about being on a staff with Thomas. 

“We had this lengthy assembly, I do not know, virtually two hours lengthy. And he stated, ‘Pay attention, Monika, I perceive all of your issues. They’re all legitimate. I do not suppose any of them would deter you from persevering with onto your senior yr and having a profitable senior yr. I feel the one factor that will deter you is that Lia is altering in your locker room and there is nothing you can do about it,'” Burzynska stated. 

“I advised him in that assembly, ‘What are you speaking about? Like, how is that this honest?’ And his response was, ‘It isn’t honest, however when you’ve got any points with it, come to me… Do not speak about it with everybody else. Come to me. We’ll speak by means of it'” 

Burzynska stated she by no means took Schnur up on that supply, believing that he would not do something about it anyway. 

Nonetheless, she alleges she witnessed her teammates having these futile conversations with Schnur, from a distance.

Then got here the directors that allegedly pressured the ladies’s swimmers who objected to Thomas to go to pro-LGBTQ counseling. Burzynska stated she known as the counseling session “brainwashing conferences.” 

She by no means attended the periods. 

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Burzynska has since moved on from the state of affairs and has embraced her life and profession past it.

Nonetheless, she admits that components of the state of affairs instilled “trauma” in her, and she or he is grateful that President Donald Trump’s administration made it a precedence to instill penalties on UPenn. 

“These [women’s] rights at Penn had been clearly compromised so it is superb that they appeared into it and Trump took it so severely,” Burzynska stated. 

Fox Information Digital has reached out to UPenn for a response to Burzynska’s statements. 

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