Sharing a locker room with transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has become a point of contention for some of her University of Pennsylvania teammates, who feel uncomfortable changing in the private space with someone undergoing gender transition, the DailyMail.com can reveal.
'It's definitely awkward because Lia still has male body parts and is still attracted to women,' one swimmer on the team told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview.
Lia has told her teammates that she dates women.
While Lia covers herself with a towel sometimes, there?s a decent amount of nudity, the swimmer said. She and others have had a glimpse at her private parts.
She stated that team members have raised their concern with the coach, trying to get Thomas ousted from the female locker room, but got nowhere.
'Multiple swimmers have raised it, multiple different times,' the UPenn swimmer said. 'But we were basically told that we could not ostracize Lia by not having her in the locker room and that there's nothing we can do about it, that we basically have to roll over and accept it, or we cannot use our own locker room.'
'It's really upsetting because Lia doesn't seem to care how it makes anyone else feel,' the swimmer continued. 'The 35 of us are just supposed to accept being uncomfortable in our own space and locker room for, like, the feelings of one.'
