'The Statement for Women is You Don’t Matter': USA Swimming Official Who Quit Over Trans Swimmer Speaks Out

The USA Swimming official who resigned over transgender U Penn swimmer Lia Thomas is speaking out, saying that allowing men to compete as women is “destroying women’s swimming.”

Cynthia Millen resigned last week, saying she could not support allowing Thomas to compete as a woman. But now, Millen is speaking out, revealing more of her disagreements with college sports for allowing the transgender swimmer to decimate women’s swimming records this season.

Millen told Fox News host Sean Duffy that puberty is one of the defining factors in classifying swimmers.

“I’ve gotten a lot of kind comments from fellow officials, former officials, and from parents of swimmers and swimmers,” Millen told Duffy on Monday evening’s Tucker Carlson Show. The fact is that swimming is a sport in which bodies compete against bodies. Identities do not compete against identities. And from the very beginning, when you start out as an age-grouper, swimmers are divided by sex and by age group: eight and under, nine-ten, etc., all the way up, because from the very beginning, this is just accentuated when boys and girls go through puberty.

“Boys will always have larger lung capacity, larger hearts, greater circulation, a bigger skeleton, and less fat,” Millen added. “Girls go through puberty, and they have a double whammy; they not only have breasts and hips, but they have periods, and they often have a totally different center of gravity; they have to learn how to swim over again.

“So while Lia Thomas is a child of God, he is a biological male who is competing against women. And no matter how much testosterone suppression drugs he takes, he will always be a biological male and have this advantage,” Millen continued. “And it’s horrible; the statement for women then is you don’t matter, what you do is not important, and little girls are going to be thrown under the bus by all of this. He’s going to be destroying women’s swimming.”

The women are in second place after day one of the Zippy Invitational.

Lia Thomas set a pool and meet record in the 500 free!

὏ https://t.co/8ECO8Dts6b#FightOnPenn pic.twitter.com/4V4wjhnkOf

— Penn Swimming & Diving (@PennSwimDive) December 4, 2021

Millen said that she is hearing from many parents and others who agree with her, saying, “I’m getting great letters from dads of daughters and also moms of daughters, but we’re also seeing some past Olympians stepping up and saying, ‘No, this is wrong.’

“We must remember that Olympic swimming for women was built on great swimmers like Jill Sterkel, Shirley Babashoff, Janet Evans, Jenny Thompson; all of these women who worked so hard before Title IX when they didn’t have the opportunities that men had. And It would be such a shame, it would be such a travesty to throw it all away now,” she said. “And this is what will happen. We must face facts: Men are different from women; men swimmers are different from women, and they will always be faster than women.”

Thomas competed on the university’s men’s team for nearly three seasons before taking a year off to “transition” as a woman. This season, Thomas joined the women’s team and has been smashing records, and not by mere seconds.

Millen is not alone in speaking out. One of Thomas’ teammates told the media that “everyone knows” it is wrong for Thomas to compete as a woman.

Since joining the team this season, Thomas set a new 500 freestyle Ivy League record and the next day crushed the female record in the 200 freestyle, setting an all-time record that will likely be hard for natural-born female swimmers to beat.

Big thanks to #liaThomas for saving women’s sports by showing just how preposterous it is for a strapping athletic young biological man to compete with biological women.

Margin of victory, 40 seconds.#saveWomensSports pic.twitter.com/AFAZlH5QWt

— End the Mandates (@weRessential) December 9, 2021

Another of Thomas’ teammates who has commented anonymously even revealed that Thomas has bragged about beating his natural-born female opponents.

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