In a gag-worthy twist, the latest from the PennU trans swimming pool is that Lia Thomas says he is the Jackie Robinson of transgender athletics. Strange, but I don’t recall anything about a “Jacquelyn” Robinson, major league baseball’s first black player with Brooklyn in 1947, later joining the Rockford Peaches women’s baseball team (1943-54) and batting .990!
Robinson was a man’s man, U.S. Army veteran and a great, Hall of Fame baseball player. He was hard as nails for taking the horrible racial abuse he suffered. He would have scoffed at the idea of men playing with the girls.
To be compared to Thomas, who previously swam on the Penn men’s team and now leaves female rivals in his distant wake, would be absurd, shocking and absolutely insulting to Jackie.
A Penn teammate has revealed that Thomas is quite the braggart. This anonymous swimmer told the Washington Examiner that Thomas said “she” “is like the Jackie Robinson of trans sports.”
“I try not to be around her because the whole situation makes me so mad,” the teammate said. “I don’t think Lia is a bad person. She’s very quiet and kind of introverted … It’s just really hard for me to respect her at all because of what she’s doing to my team and what she’s doing to women in general and not caring.” Also, the teammate stated:
All she does is make comments to people like, ‘At least I’m still No. 1 in the country,’ and those kinds of cocky things. She doesn’t care how all this is affecting us and how this is affecting our relationship to swimming. She doesn’t care, and it makes it really hard to like her.
Additionally, we learned from this Penn swimmer the self-absorbed Thomas is “not sympathetic or empathetic at all” and has never talked with teammates to find out if they accept a man on their team. It’s all about him.
Apparently, Thomas also repeatedly is above team rules against wearing team apparel in public. He does it to draw more attention to himself.
Last year when Thomas went public with his plan to switch from men’s to women’s swimming, he claimed he was a transgender woman. Playing both ends, he attended team dinners and functions for both squads during their training trip.
That really rubbed the anonymous female teammate the wrong way. She said the rules were bent to accommodate Thomas. She also claimed that team members are afraid of the LGBT pressure groups calling them “transphobic,” so most of the women are staying silent.
These women say they’re not getting a fair shake from the university, and it’s really frustrating.
