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OutKick attends Dodgers-sponsored awards show honoring trans swimmer Lia Thomas: Here’s what happened
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HOLLYWOOD – Trans swimmer Lia Thomas has resurfaced after largely disappearing from public view.
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.
The event, organized by the nonprofit Rainbow Labs, was sponsored in part by Los Angeles sports organizations such as the Dodgers and LA Football Club.
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Penn Quakers swimmer Lia Thomas finishes eighth in the 100 freestyle at the NCAA Swimming & Diving Championships at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Georgia, on March 19, 2022. (Brett Davis/USA TODAY Sports)
Leading up to Thomas’ speech, a mention of the Dodgers’ sponsorship drew light applause from the crowd, though no one from the team spoke during the program.
LAFC, Dodgers Among Those Backing Thomas And LGBT Activists
After mingling with the crowd and two drag performances, Lia Thomas took the stage to accept the Voice of Inspiration Award and proceeded to double down on finding purpose in trans activism.
But before that, a video montage played about Thomas, tracing the path from competing on the men’s team as William Thomas, to entering the women’s competition in 2022 as Lia Thomas.
Thomas was portrayed 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 started.
Thomas, 26, accepted the “Voice of Inspiration Award” at the 2025 Violet Visionary Awards in Los Angeles on Thursday night. (Alejandro Avila/OutKick)
“It makes me very emotional because I remember all too well not that long ago being 18 and just realizing that I’m trans.”
Thomas, 26, continued, “And feeling 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 mentors who helped the swimmer reconcile a trans identity with athletics.
Thomas said, “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.”
Lia Thomas Calls Trans Platform ‘My Purpose’
After Thomas joined the competition, female athletes, including OutKick’s Riley Gaines, spoke up to denounce men playing in women’s sports.
During the 2024 campaign trail, then-President-elect Donald Trump proved to be a big supporter of Gaines and other women, raising concerns about competing against men.
Their influence led to Trump’s executive order banning biological males from competing in women’s sports.
The president even paused federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania over allowing Thomas to compete with women, though eventually UPenn became the third school to reject the president’s funding conditions.
“And I’m so grateful for them — for those people and those mentors — and I’m so happy that organizations like Rainbow Labs exist,” Thomas added, saying people reached out on social media with “messages of violence.”
Thomas, 26, accepted the “Voice of Inspiration Award” at the 2025 Violet Visionary Awards in Los Angeles on Thursday night. ( Alejandro Avila/OutKick)
“If I had had an organization like that as a kid to give me the knowledge and language to describe my transness, how important that would have been. Because I faced a lot of harassment. I got a lot of messages of violence against me in my Instagram comments and DMs. I didn’t know what to do.”
Speakers throughout the night cast LGBT Americans as living under oppression and celebrated transgender-identifying people as the event’s heroes.
Nearly 70 percent of Americans oppose transgender athletes competing in women’s sports, and Thomas’ inclusion has also sparked controversy over allowing men to share women’s locker rooms.
Thomas remains undeterred, even after all the controversy, calling a platform as an influential trans figure “my purpose.”
EX-UPENN SWIMMER LIA THOMAS TO RECEIVE ‘VOICE OF INSPIRATION’ AWARD AT DODGERS-SPONSORED EVENT
Penn transgender swimmer Lia Thomas speaks to her coach after winning the 500-meter freestyle during an NCAA college swimming meet with Harvard at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Jan. 22, 2022. (AP Photo/Josh Reynolds)
“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,” Thomas stated.
“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.”
Since Thomas’ inclusion in collegiate women’s swimming (presided over by the NCAA), women’s rights activists like Riley Gaines — having competed against Thomas — have called out the loss of opportunities and awards for women due to the inclusion of trans athletes, which networks like ESPN have promoted.
Lia Thomas Was Quiet, But Won’t Go Away
As more people spoke up against Thomas and similar cases, like trans volleyball player Blaire Fleming, Thomas started to lose some of the favor awarded by the media.
The tone of the evening reflected an effort to move mainstream American culture toward a fuller embrace of LGBT identity and activism.
Also speaking at the event, on behalf of an LA Football Club group, spokeswoman Daisy Chavez shared a commitment to supporting “queer folks” within the Los Angeles community.
“We are a community of queer fans, local leaders, supporters, and activists of the Los Angeles Football Club. 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.
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“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.”
Once all the awards were presented — one also went to a gender-nonconforming trans female named “Alok” — the event ended with a stripper show.
For an evening devoted to inspiration, the show’s final acts offered a strikingly different kind of message.
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MUNICH — Modern football hype prefers it when we place everything in a convenient box that doesn’t always reflect reality. I suppose it’s understandable.
Covering the German game as a commentator, however, you quickly resist the temptation to make Bayern Munich vs. Borussia Dortmund what advertising moguls might have us do with a fixture that has come to be known as der Klassiker.
It doesn’t lend itself to a simplistic “clash of the titans” narrative. Nuance and context are needed when understanding what this confrontation is.
Yes, it is the most-high profile Bundesliga fixture that the wider world often associates with the league and it features two heavyweight clubs, indeed the two most avidly followed in the Bundesrepublik. The action — as was the case last season in a pair of thrilling score draws — can be highly absorbing in front of some of the largest crowds in the world and offers a window into who is currently the best team in Germany.
However, this is not the German rivalry to end all rivalries along the lines of Real Madrid against Barcelona, Celtic vs. Rangers or Galatasaray against Fenerbahce. Nor should we pretend it is. Bayern fans simply don’t obsess on a weekly Schadenfreude basis over BVB, and the same is true of those of a schwarzgelb persuasion with regard to the Rekordmeister.
Some would argue that calling it a rivalry is stretching it, although it is certainly a Spitzenduell (a duel of top teams).
The fixture began to gain prominence in the 1990s with the threat to Bayern from the industrial west under the aegis of Ottmar Hitzfeld, who would later take his coaching talents to Munich. Back then, Bayern were not as dominant as they are now and players didn’t view Bayern-BVB as a cut above other matches.
Arguably the greatest era for this tussle was during Jürgen Klopp’s time in charge of BVB. Dortmund lifting the Meisterschale in 2011 and 2012 added spice and tension and it set the table for the all-German 2013 Champions League final at Wembley. This time, Bayern were victorious in a nailbiter.
The fact remains that BVB have come up empty in their Bundesliga title quest since 2012, most painfully in 2023, when they failed to play the considerable cards in their deck and gifted Bayern a winning hand on the final day.
In the past two seasons, der Klassiker, while still the most watched fixture in the Oberhaus, has played second fiddle on a competitive basis to Bayern’s meetings with 2024 champions Bayer Leverkusen.
This term, there’s no doubt the pecking order has shifted again. Bayern, under Vincent Kompany appear to have one of their most formidable formulas in several years. It raises the question: Can anyone get close to them in the Bundesliga?
The evidence of the first six matchdays is that BVB are likely the only team with a chance of preventing a Bayern runaway. They lack Bayern’s overall quality but there is a tenacity and defensive resilience about Dortmund in their current guise under Niko Kovac that makes you think they could, on a very good day, end Bayern’s flawless record in all competitions so far this season.
I find there is a general erroneous belief among casual fans that Bayern almost always beat BVB, and certainly in Munich. In fact, Dortmund’s past two visits have produced a 2-0 win and a 2-2 draw, the latter well merited with the pressure on to lift themselves up into a Champions League place against the odds.
Bayern will be firm favorites on Saturday, though. How could it be otherwise considering their 10 straight competitive wins to start the season with 38 goals scored?
The loose ends from Kompany’s first campaign at the helm have been tightened up to the point where it’s difficult to discern a weakness. Even with Jamal Musiala, Alphonso Davies and Hiroki Ito still on the sidelines, and Thomas Müller no longer part of the equation, Bayern are markedly better than they were up and down the pitch when the Belgian took over.
It’s natural to highlight Harry Kane, whose tally of 11 goals from six Bundesliga matches so far puts him on a pace to obliterate Robert Lewandowski‘s 41-goal single-season record. I’ve spoken at length in this space about Kane’s increased versatility with adept long-range passing and dropping into the Musiala position for increased effectiveness part of his repertoire.
But it’s also worth taking note of Bayern’s improved team statistics in the running and sprinting department. Rarely does the team with the highest possession percentage lead the field in distance covered, a category normally reserved for a team designed to play gegen den Ball (against the ball).
Dortmund don’t play with an especially high line and it’s to be expected that their Dreierkette (back three) will follow similar tactics at the Allianz Arena, while hoping to make the Umschaltmomente (transitional moments) count. This plays to the strength of the speedy Karim Adeyemi and natural line leader Serhou Guirassy.
To me, this encounter doesn’t actually need a vapid wrestling style introduction. It’s surely enough to make it about perfect Bayern and unbeaten Dortmund, first vs. second, on a collision course and an engrossing football contest.
And the German language has the perfect word for the occasion: richtungsweisend (pointing the way ahead).
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OutKick attends Dodgers-sponsored awards show honoring trans swimmer Lia Thomas: Here’s what happened
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