Former University of Pennsylvania swimmer Monika Burzynska said she was assigned the locker next to Lia Thomas when the transgender athlete joined the women's swim team in 2021. Burzynska previously knew the athlete as Will Thomas, a member of the men's swimming team at UPenn. 

"He wasn't very social," Burzynska told Fox News Digital, adding she had only ever had short, passing conversations with Thomas. 

She thought Thomas had already graduated when her team was dealt the news that the athlete would be transitioning to join the women's team starting in the 2021-22 season. 

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When that season eventually began, and Thomas became a fixture in the women's locker room, Burzynska often retreated to the corner of the room to change. Other times, Burzynska timed exactly when she changed to coincide with when Thomas showered. Eventually, Burzynska opted to only change in the stalls or in the family locker across the hall. 

"Around Lia, I wasn't going to risk anything," Burzynska said, regarding the possibility of the trans athlete seeing her undress.

Burzynska has never spoken out about her experience of being on a team with Thomas until now, amid the recent news that UPenn agreed to apologize to all the female swimmers, rescind Thomas' program records, and adopt a new policy that applies strict biological definitions for males and females.

She said the news gave her "a deep sense of peace and validation." 

"Not only for me, but for all the girls on the team, for all the girls in the swim world and in the sport world. And I think this decision, it brought back – at least for me – a sense of fairness that had been lost," Burzynska said. "Women's records belong to women and that protecting the integrity of women's sports still matters."

Still, the memories of what Burzynska and others had to endure lingers. 

Burzynska identifies as someone with conservative values, but says she grew up feeling "compassion" for transgender people. Her views changed when she was placed next to Thomas in the locker room. 

"I thought it must be terrible to feel like you're trapped in the wrong body. Just be so out of touch with who you really are," Burzynska said. "You have these issues that are from afar and you never really quite think they're going to touch you personally until you're on a team with Lia Thomas and your locker is directly next to this biological male. And you would have never believed that you'd be facing this issue directly.

"And then when that happens, your views change where you still feel sorry for this person because they're clearly so deeply lost. But then it turns into more, ‘OK, this is not fair,’" Burzynska added. 

As a native of Colonia, New Jersey, Burzynska explained that she grew up in a liberal environment with prominent pro-LGBTQ sentiment. Those values followed her when she went to UPenn in the deep blue city of Philadelphia. 

"We have a very, very, how should I call it, like deep LGBTQ presence on campus where the campus buildings or the dormitories, rather than flying the U.S. flag, the trans flag, the LGBTQ flag [were flown]. Whenever I visit Penn, I see it's like this huge skyscraper dorm, and they have the biggest rainbow flag you could imagine," Burzynska said. 

"So I guess, in a sense, you could say it encourages it if a person is very confused about their identity, and then there's this group that seems so accepting, so loving, telling you could be whatever you want to be… that might kind of, yeah, encourage people to turn that way."

Burzynska, and the other female swimmers on the team at the time, were allegedly coerced into silence and submission by UPenn administrators. 

A lawsuit by three other former Thomas teammates, Grace, Estabrook, Margot Kaczorowski and Ellen Holmquist, alleged that university officials pressured them not to speak out about their thoughts on Thomas joining the team publicly. 

"The UPenn administrators went on to tell the women that if the women spoke publicly about their concerns about Thomas’ participation on the Women’s Team, the reputation of those complaining about Thomas being on the team would be tainted with transphobia for the rest of their lives and they would probably never be able to get a job,’" the lawsuit alleged.

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Burzynska, having grown up in a liberal New Jersey town, was already accustomed to the consequences of sharing conservative values in a liberal setting. 

Burzynska recalls, from a young age, often being criticized for having "conservative or Republican values." 

"I had been experiencing that forever. And even UPenn, I think it's every university at this point, but UPenn is very, very left-leaning. And so I was kind of ready to embrace that, that my views wouldn't be welcomed because, yeah, I've been conservative most of my life. My beliefs are grounded in faith." 

Burzynska recalls a futile conversation she had with her head coach, Mike Schnur, when she confronted him with concerns about being on a team with Thomas. 

"We had this long meeting, I don't know, almost two hours long. And he said, 'Listen, Monika, I understand all your concerns. They're all valid. I don't think any of them would deter you from continuing onto your senior year and having a successful senior year. I think the one thing that would deter you is that Lia is changing in your locker room and there's nothing you could do about it,'" Burzynska said. 

"I told him in that meeting, ‘What are you talking about? Like, how is this fair?’ And his response was, 'It's not fair, but if you have any issues with it, come to me… Don't talk about it with everyone else. Come to me. We'll talk through it'" 

Burzynska said she never took Schnur up on that offer, believing that he wouldn't do anything about it anyway. 

Still, she alleges she witnessed her teammates having those futile conversations with Schnur, from a distance.

Then came the administrators that allegedly pressured the women's swimmers who objected to Thomas to go to pro-LGBTQ counseling. Burzynska said she called the counseling session "brainwashing meetings." 

She never attended the sessions. 

Burzynska has since moved on from the situation and has embraced her life and career beyond it.

Still, she admits that parts of the situation instilled "trauma" in her, and she is grateful that President Donald Trump's administration made it a priority to instill consequences on UPenn. 

"Those [women's] rights at Penn were clearly compromised so it's amazing that they looked into it and Trump took it so seriously," Burzynska said. 

Fox News Digital has reached out to UPenn for a response to Burzynska's statements. 

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Two hundred and forty-nine years ago, 56 men met in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia to commit treason against the most powerful empire on Earth. 

Representing 13 colonies of that empire, these men – a mix of landowners, entrepreneurs, politicians and others – had become enamored with a new set of ideas flowing from enlightenment thinkers and Christian teaching. Those convictions led them to start a war no sane person believed they could win.

Remember what government looked like back then. We now live in the world those 56 men created – a world in which even dictatorships like North Korea cloak themselves in the language of "republic." 

But in 1776, freedom, equality and self-governance were nascent concepts espoused by philosophers and adopted only incompletely in a few small enclaves. The vast majority of countries in the world were hereditary monarchies and empires under which equal rights and individual liberty were not contemplated. The Founders’ fight seemed incomprehensible.

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In launching it, the Second Continental Congress largely tasked one man – Thomas Jefferson – with drafting the document that would articulate their vision for humanity and this new country and reshape history.

Imagine how he must have felt. Jefferson secluded himself from June 11 to June 28 in a rented home on Market Street to draft the document. He was 33 years old at the time. In isolation in that rented townhome he drafted what I think is one of the most beautiful passages in history:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Read it again. Read it as if you were living under a Spanish colony in South America or under the iron fist of the Qing dynasty in China. Read it as if you were a poor tenant farmer under the oppressive rule of King George in Virginia or an enslaved person in Georgia (whose freedom under the principles of the Declaration was still decades away). 

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Read it as if you grew up in a system that assumed you were worth less than your neighbor by virtue of your social station, and under which your future was limited by the circumstances of your birth.

The Declaration was, in fact, a "revolutionary" statement articulating the ideological and factual basis for a coup against empire. But spiritually, it was more important than that. 

It was a revolution against history. It was a revolution against the idea that some men (and women) are worth more than others. It was a revolution for the idea of dignity, human rights, and equality before law.

And when Jefferson submitted his document to the Congress, and those 56 men signed it and shipped it off to King George and to others rulers around the world, they ignited a war in the America colonies that would become a centuries-long war to transform the globe from tyranny to liberty.

READ: THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

War they got. Five of the signers were captured, tortured and killed. Nine died from wounds or hardships fighting in the war. All were impacted – raked by violence, their homes and property ravaged, their children thrust into the violence they created. They starved. They lost battles.

They must have wondered if it was worth it – these ideals that had caused them to plunge a nation into violence. And then, unexpectedly, they won.

In creating America, those Founding Fathers reshaped history. We now live in a world in which nearly half of countries are democracies. The combination of political freedom, free markets and the technological innovation unleashed by those systems has lifted billions of people out of poverty – creating a world more than 100 times richer than the one that existed at the time of the Declaration of Independence. 

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The dominant ideology now globally is the one articulated in the Declaration. And the revolution in America has become a revolution in human history.

This weekend in the United States we celebrate Independence Day. We celebrate 56 men who risked everything. But we also solemnly reflect on the charge of the Declaration and its authors.

All people are created equal. We are all endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights. Each of us deserves life, liberty, and the ability to pursue our own unique paths to flourishing. But those inalienable rights are not guaranteed. As our forebears, we are called to embrace and fight for them. 

Abraham Lincoln once noted that great men "thirst and burn for distinction" and will have it, "whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving free men." And around the world the powers that oppose liberty, dignity and opportunity fight ceaselessly to dominate others.

May we, on this Independence Day, fight back. May we have the audacity and conviction to oppose the enemies of liberty and to continue to fight for the promise of the Declaration and America’s spiritual foundation. May we do so out of love – for our neighbors and for the blessings of the Creator. And may we gain courage from the example of those 56 men, their hundreds of thousands of compatriots, and the unwinnable war they won. Happy Independence Day.

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