Several women who were former college athletes filed a lawsuit Tuesday after being forced to compete against a man and share changing rooms and bathrooms with him in 2022.
Grace Estabrook, Ellen Holmquist and Margot Kaczorowski all competed on the University of Pennsylvania’s (UPenn) swim team when transgender-identifying male athlete Lia Thomas was allowed to join the team and use the women’s facilities. The women are suing UPenn as well as Harvard University, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and the Ivy League Council of Presidents for allegedly violating Title IX by discriminating against women and causing them “emotional harm,” the lawsuit states.
Many of the details included in the suit stem from the 2022 Ivy League Championships at Harvard during which Thomas shared changing spaces with the female athletes. The university did not provide any separate changing space for Thomas or any female athlete that did not feel comfortable changing in front of the male since all locker rooms were converted into women’s spaces for the competition, the court documents state.
Riley Gaines, a former athlete who also competed against Thomas, said the lawsuit was filed with “serendipitous timing,” as she plans to attend the signing of an executive order Wednesday barring men from competing in women’s sports.
A new bombshell lawsuit has just been filed by three UPenn swimmers against the Ivy League, Harvard, and the NCAA, citing Title IX violations.
More of THIS. Serendipitous timing.
It’s due time to hold accountable those who declared womanhood was nothing more than a feeling. pic.twitter.com/ft9ZeEENsF
— Riley Gaines (@Riley_Gaines_) February 5, 2025
The lawsuit claimed that being forced to share the locker room with a man “was a disruption to [Estabrook’s] peace and preparation for her swim knowing that Thomas could walk in at any moment while she was changing.”
“For nearly three years following the Ivy League Championships, Plaintiffs and others similarly situated have dealt with feelings of abandonment, betrayal, humiliation, and harassment, and with the ramifications of losses of placement, ill treatment, emotional turmoil, and invasion of privacy generated by the Defendants’ purposeful actions of conspiring and collaborating in 2022 to allow Thomas to compete at the Ivy League Championships and use the women’s locker rooms at Harvard’s Blodgett Pool,” the lawsuit reads.
The suit also accused members of the Ivy League Council of Presidents of laboring “for months behind the scenes to engineer a public shock and awe display of monolithic support for biological unreality and radical gender ideology by America’s oldest and most storied educational institutions.”
During his time competing on the UPenn women’s team, Thomas managed to break several female records and even caused Holmquist to not qualify for the championships event. Thomas’ presence at the competition resulted in several women losing their places on the podium and being unable to set pool records when beaten out by Thomas’ scores.
“Deviation from the biological line drawn by Title IX harms women and deprives them of equal opportunities to men by making them compete against men, which reduces women’s sport opportunities, is not fair, and in many cases can be unsafe,” the lawsuit reads. “Despite the science-backed dividing line for eligibility in women’s sport provided by Title IX, which is sex and sex alone, the NCAA chose to define eligibility in women’s collegiate sport in terms of testosterone suppression by allowing men to compete as women by suppressing testosterone to a certain level that is still above the female range.”
The women were also allegedly not allowed to voice concerns about Thomas joining their team and were forced participate in a workshop pushing them to accept concepts of gender ideology.
“The UPenn administrators went on to tell the women that if the women spoke publicly about their concerns about Thomas’ participation on the Women’s Team, the reputation of those complaining about Thomas being on the team would be tainted with transphobia for the rest of their lives and they would probably never be able to get a job,” the lawsuit alleges.
“The UPenn administrators told the women that if anyone was struggling with accepting Thomas’s participation on the UPenn Women’s team, they should seek counseling and support from CAPS and the LBGTQ center,” the lawsuit stated. “The administrators also invited the women to a talk titled, ‘Trans 101.’ Thus, the women were led to understand that UPenn’s position was that if a woman on the team had any problem with a trans-identifying male being on her team that woman had a psychological problem and needed counseling.”
The lawsuit alleges “Each of the Plaintiffs was repeatedly emotionally traumatized by the violation of her privacy and the requirement that she share the women’s locker room with a male.”
The plaintiffs asked the court to vacate the records set by Thomas and declare that UPenn, Harvard, NCAA and Ivy League violated Title IX by allowing him to compete.
Former President Joe Biden during his time in office attempted to rewrite Title IX to include protections for transgender individuals, which was widely criticized for effectively undermining the protections meant for women and faced numerous legal challenges. The rule was heavily challenged and eventually dropped.
President Donald Trump, upon returning to office, signed executive orders to help curtail some of the issues mentioned in the suit, declaring federal recognition of only two sexes, male and female, and preventing child sex changes.
UPenn, Harvard, NCAA and the Ivy League Council did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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