From Fox News: Former University of Pennsylvania swimmer Monika Burzynska said she was assigned the locker just one over from Lia Thomas’ when the transgender athlete joined the women’s swim team in 2021. Burzynska previously knew the athlete as Will Thomas, a member of the men’s swimming team at UPenn.
“He wasn’t very social,” Burzynska told Fox News Digital, adding she had only ever had short, passing conversations with Thomas.
She thought Thomas had already graduated when her team was dealt the news that the athlete would be transitioning to join the women’s team starting in the 2021-22 season.
When the season started and Thomas became a regular, Burzynska would often change in the corner, and at other times, she would time her changing to coincide with Thomas showering. Eventually, Burzynska changed only in the stalls or the family locker.
“Around Lia, I wasn’t going to risk anything,” Burzynska said, regarding the possibility of the trans athlete seeing her undress.
Burzynska has never spoken out about her experience on the team with Thomas until now, amid UPenn’s apology and new policy on biological definitions.
She said the changes leave her with “a deep sense of peace and validation.”
“Not only for me, but for all the girls on the team, for all the girls in the swim world and in the sport world. And I think this decision, it brought back – at least for me – a sense of fairness that had been lost,” Burzynska said. “Women’s records belong to women and that protecting the integrity of women’s sports still matters.”
While Burzynska says she has leans conservative, she has compassion for transgender individuals. Having Lia in the locker room affected that.
“I thought it must be terrible to feel like you’re trapped in the wrong body. Just be so out of touch with who you really are,” Burzynska said. “You have these issues that are from afar and you never really quite think they’re going to touch you personally until you’re on a team with Lia Thomas and your locker is directly next to this biological male. And you would have never believed that you’d be facing this issue directly.
“And then when that happens, your views change where you still feel sorry for this person because they’re clearly so deeply lost. But then it turns into more, ‘OK, this is not fair,’” Burzynska said.
She recalled a conversation with her head coach.
“We had this long meeting, I don’t know, almost two hours long. And he said, ‘Listen, Monika, I understand all your concerns. They’re all valid. I don’t think any of them would deter you from continuing onto your senior year and having a successful senior year. I think the one thing that would deter you is that Lia is changing in your locker room and there’s nothing you could do about it,'” Burzynska said.
“I told him in that meeting, ‘What are you talking about? Like, how is this fair?’ And his response was, ‘It’s not fair, but if you have any issues with it, come to me… Don’t talk about it with everyone else. Come to me. We’ll talk through it'”
Two other former teammates of Lia’s, Margot Kaczorowski and Ellen Holmquist, were guests on Fox & Friends . Joined by their attorney, they commented on the University of Pennsylvania’s decision. WATCH:
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