FFS Friday: Grace Estabrook, Margot Kaczorowski, and Ellen Holmquist

February 7, 2025

FFS (Female Free Speech) Friday honors women and girls who are speaking out about the harms that “gender identity” poses to women and girls as a sex class. FFS Friday posts are free and shareable. If you would like access to content that delves deeper into the movement to protect the sex-based rights of women and girls and to stop the abolition of sex, please consider a paid subscription.

Today’s FFS Friday honors Grace Estabrook, Margot Kaczorowski, and Ellen Holmquist, who are suing the University of Pennsylvania,¹ Harvard, the NCAA, and the Ivy League over their experience of being forced to share a pool and a locker room with Lia (Will) Thomas.

Lia (Will) Thomas is a man, and everyone knows it.

On February 5, the group Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS) announced that it was funding a lawsuit brought by Grace Estabrook, Margot Kaczorowski, and Ellen Holmquist, all swimmers at the University of Pennsylvania in 2021-2022.

Estabrook and Kaczorowski both competed at the University of Pennsylvania and in the 2022 Ivy League Championships at Harvard. Holmquist competed at the University of Pennsylvania and would have competed in the 2022 Ivy League Championships but for Thomas competing on the UPenn Women’s Team.

All three female athletes were forced at various times to share both a pool and a locker room with Thomas. They were forced to disrobe in front of a naked man. They were informed that if they had a problem with it, they needed to seek mental health treatment.

The complaint is nothing short of astonishing, and details all the ways in which the United States government has been complicit in denying the material reality of sex for purposes of NCAA events since at least 2010.

But these women aren’t having it. They’re suing the University of Pennsylvania (which all three attended and where they competed during the regular season), Harvard (which hosted the 2022 Ivy League Championships), the Ivy League itself, and the NCAA for this abuse.

The plaintiffs are asking the court (the District Court for the District of Massachusetts) to certify the matter as a class action. They allege that all of the defendants are guilty of violating Title IX during the 2022 Ivy League Swimming and Diving Championships by allowing Thomas to compete in the women’s category and use the women’s locker room.

The complaint states:

Now, three women swimmers from the 2021-2022 UPenn women’s swimming team who were discriminated against by the Ivy League, NCAA, UPenn and Harvard and harmed by Thomas depriving them of equal opportunities as women to compete and win, while being denied the opportunity to protect their privacy in separate and equal locker rooms, bring this lawsuit to establish that Thomas’s participation in college women’s swimming, including at the 2022 Ivy League Championships, injured them and violated federal law.

Grace, Margot, and Ellen are heroes for bringing this matter to court, using their real names. Female athletes should not have to do this. The authorities in charge long ago should have put a stop to the nightmare of male athletes competing with and against women and invading women’s locker rooms. But they didn’t. So female athletes are taking matters into their own hands. Grace, Margot, and Ellen, today’s FFS Friday is for you.

1. I attended law school at the University of Pennsylvania from 1996-1999.