Transgender-identifying male swimmer Lia Thomas surfaced to double down on his trans activism and accept an award at an LGBTQ+ event sponsored in part by the Los Angeles Dodgers and Los Angeles Football Club.
“On Thursday night in Los Angeles, the former UPenn swimmer, born William Thomas, arrived at the Serra on Vine, wearing a purple dress and stilettos — standing about 6-foot-5 — to accept the ‘Voice of Inspiration Award’ at the 2025 Violet Visionary Awards,” reported OutKick, which attended the 2025 Violet Visionary Awards organized by the nonprofit Rainbow Labs.
Thomas took the stage to accept the award after two drag performances and a video montage honoring Thomas’s path from competing on the men’s team as William, to competing in a women’s competition as Lia. Per OutKick, the event and montage portrayed Thomas “as an athlete fighting for acceptance while facing backlash.”
“Incredible shout out to everybody at Rainbow Labs for bringing me here and everybody and putting this all together,” Thomas’s acceptance speech began.
“It makes me very emotional because I remember all too well not that long ago being 18 and just realizing that I’m trans,” he continued.
Thomas, who is now 26 years old, reflected on being “so excited at the prospect of being able to be who I am, but feeling so terrified to take those steps because I didn’t know any other trans people. I didn’t — I barely knew what being trans meant.”
“Being open and out in myself felt like this impossible mountain to climb, and I didn’t know if I had the strength to do it.”
Thomas credited having trans-identifying “mentors” who essentially convinced him to participate in women’s athletics to honor his self-proclaimed female identity.
“It’s only because of so many amazing, amazing trans mentors that I was able to find that strength and that courage to go out and be myself and finally reconcile my ‘transness’ and my swimmer identity and be able to compete as a now trans woman,” he said.
Thomas’s insistence on dominating women’s athletics and sharing intimate spaces with biological female athletes was a major turning point in the national resistance to transgender athletes infiltrating women’s sports. President Donald Trump’s support of women’s sports gave his presidential campaign a major boost, and after he was elected he signed an executive order banning biological males from competing in women’s events.
Thomas spoke about receiving a “message of violence” on social media and said he wishes there was an organization like Rainbow Labs when he was a child to “give me the knowledge and language to describe my transness.”
Thomas said despite the controversy surrounding his sports victories against women, he called his platform as an influential transgender person “my purpose.”
“But I owe so much to those mentors before me that it sort of was clear that I had to be that next beacon in a line of torches going back hundreds of years of trans people. That was my purpose. That was what I was here to do,” he said.
“And so to be able to be that next light for people is an honor I can’t describe. It means more than anything. And I’m so grateful for the opportunity to do that. And so thank you all so much,” he continued.
Other speakers at the event painted LGBTQ+ Americans as living under oppression and hailed transgender-identifying people as the heroes of the event, according to the report.
LA Football Club spokeswoman Daisy Chavez talked about supporting “queer folks” in the L.A. community and about how the group is a “community of queer fans, local leaders, supporters, and activists.”
“And if you don’t know, we follow sports because we’ve always been here. We’ve been athletes, we’ve been fans, we’ve been lovers of the sports,” she said.
“And so our presence with this club reminds not just the club, the community, but the world that we’ve always been here. And so we cheer, full of joy and love for our local community, but also we represent for our queer folks, and we’re so proud of being there every step of the way,” she added.
After the awards ceremony, there was reportedly a stripper show that included a women wearing pasties with her breasts exposed surrounded by topless men.
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.
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