The Penn parents tell me there’s yet another letter coming down the pike, this one organized by them with the help of former Olympian Nancy Hogshead-Makar, which argues that Thomas’s participation is unfair. That one has 3,000 signatures, including from more than 100 olympians and Hall of Fame swimming coaches.
These are Ivy League parents. They have opinions about everything. They will tell you that lanes four and five have the least turbulence. They will explain how there’s a $400 swimsuit that you can only wear once, but that might be worth it for the tenth of a second.
But as history unfolds in front of their noses, they refuse to comment.
One mom told me that she was happy that Lia gets to compete as her true self, before changing her mind and insisting that I delete my recording of our interview. After I spoke to one dad, his wife contacted me begging to take his name off the record. She thought that the consequences for speaking would be “severe” and texted: “Please don’t hurt my child!”
As much as wingspan, heart size, lung capacity, bone density, or nanomoles of testosterone per liter of blood, the story of Lia Thomas is a story about the Ivy League and the class of people that tends to populate it. These kids and their parents are ultra-competitive—in swimming, in schooling, and socially. In some cases, these families passed up scholarships to D1 schools so that the kids could swim for Columbia, or Dartmouth or Cornell or Yale and pick up a more elite diploma along with a varsity letter. Getting here meant a decade or so of early practices, endless carpools, faraway meets, college visits, charity projects, SAT prep and AP classes.
But getting in doesn’t mean an end to the prep and the striving. There are still job prospects, summer internships, and graduate school admissions to worry about. They love prestige, and they love rules. Rules got them and their kids where they are; these are the highest-scoring rule-followers in the country. But now the rules—Thomas has followed all of the Ivy League and NCAA ones—have turned on them. “Whether you think it or not, you can’t go against her,” says the Brown dad. “No one wants to take the hard stance because they don’t want to be demonized.”
One of the Penn moms says her own daughter warned her against speaking out. “She’s worried about getting into grad school, and she doesnt want my name or hers to come up on Google attached to this.” (Her daughter is hoping to get a graduate degree in biology.)
The parents say their daughters know it’s wrong that Thomas is swimming against them but that they will not risk getting smeared with the label transphobe.
What about Mike Schnur, the Penn’s coach, who is wearing a mask with a trans flag on Saturday night, where Thomas swims in the 100 yard freestyle? “Politically, he’s as conservative as they come,” says a Penn dad. “He just loves winning and loves his job.” A Penn mom stares at me. “Everyone’s just faking everything.”