In 2021, Lia made waves in the USA after she competed in the Zippy Invitational, finishing first place in the 500 free. Unfortunately, it wasn’t her accomplishments that made the news nearly as much as the backlash she received for competing in the women’s category. This article is meant to look at the situation as a whole without any interpretation nor any judgment.
Her birthday is not known, but Lia was born between 1998 and 2000. She is the youngest of two children in her home, raised in Austin, Texas, USA. She started swimming in kindergarten and began competing in high school where she went on to place 6th place in the state high school swimming championships in 2017. She started her educational career at Penn, where she initially was enrolled while identifying as her gender assigned at birth: Male. She spent three seasons competing as a man against other men, including the 2018-2019 season where she placed second place in a few men’s freestyle categories in the Ivy league championship races.
She told Sports Illustrated that she began questioning her identity by the end of her high school career. In the same interview, Lia confided that she began her medical transition into womanhood in May of 2019 and her social transition was complete by January of 2020.
She took a year off of school so that she wouldn’t miss her last year of eligibility by graduating during a time when she was in between gender categories, being a senior. Returning in the late 2021 season, Lia began training with her female counterparts. At the time that she joined the women’s swimming team in a professional capacity, Lia had been on hormones for a little over two years and it had already impacted her performance in the water at that point.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has a bylaw stipulating that a male-to-female transgender athlete can compete in their identified gender category if they have completed one full year on testosterone suppression therapy. No rules were broken by Lia when she competed on behalf of the University of Pennsylvania Swimming and Diving Team in the Zippy Invitational swimming competition. Her 2021 team, The Quakers, was also made up of Keara McGowan, Margot Kaczorowski, and Hannah Kannan. They were coached by Mike Schnur.