Lia Thomas is an accomplished athlete.

She’s also a brave woman.

But her achievements in the swimming pool this year raise legitimate questions about equality in sports.

And although it’s unfortunate that Thomas has become a symbol for the much broader social and political divides that define America these days — and much worse, that she’s become a focus for bigots — this ought not deflect from the reality that she and other transgender athletes can potentially tilt what we’ve come to think of as a level playing field that affords women the same opportunities that men have had for much longer.

This is an appropriate discussion, and one which does not deserve to be branded as bigotry — not, at least, when the conversations are between reasonable people who accept fundamental physiological truths rather than indulge in euphemism lest the overly sensitive take offense.

Thomas was born a male.

After undergoing hormone replacement therapy, she now identifies as a woman.

Thomas, who attends the University of Pennsylvania, competed against men in swim meets for her first three collegiate years. She was the runner up in three events in the 2019 Ivy League men’s championships.

During her senior year, starting in the fall of 2021, and more than two years after starting hormone replacement therapy, Thomas competed as a woman.

Although she swam slower than she had before hormone therapy, Thomas was faster than most of the women she competed against.

As an example, before hormone therapy, when Thomas competed as a man, her best time in the 500-yard freestyle race was almost seven seconds faster than seven-time Olympic gold medalist Katie Ledecky’s NCAA record. While competing as a woman, and in winning that event at the NCAA Division I championships earlier this month, Thomas’ time was almost nine seconds slower than Ledecky’s record. A group of researchers found that Thomas’ best times when competing against other women are about 5% slower on average than when she swam against men, and before hormone therapy suppressed her testosterone production.

Thomas broke two Penn school records and won three races in a November 2021 meet. In the 500 freestyle race, Thomas touched the wall almost 13 seconds ahead of the runner-up.

Thomas was not so dominant, though, against higher-level competition.

At the NCAA championships, in addition to her national title in the women’s 500, she finished fifth in the 200 freestyle and eighth in the 100 freestyle.

This hardly qualifies as ruining competitive sports for women, as some hysterical commentators have suggested.

Thomas won only one race.

And although the feats of top-level swimmers are impressive, the sport rarely gains much attention in the U.S. except during the Summer Olympics.

The notion that hordes of biological males, enticed by Thomas, will subject themselves to the effects of hormone therapy and the inevitable tide of nasty comments, just so they can excel in a more popular sport such as basketball, seems farfetched, if not downright farcical.

Still and all, it would be unfair, it seems to me, to consider this matter exclusively from the standpoint of trans athletes such as Thomas.

Her decision to compete as a woman affects all of her fellow swimmers. Ensuring equal opportunities for women to compete was the purpose of Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments, the federal law that prohibits gender discrimination, in academics and athletics, in institutions that receive federal financial aid.

To suggest that Thomas’ being born a male had nothing to do with her recent success in the pool is as silly as ignoring that her genome contains a Y chromosome.

Politics frequently aims to interfere with biology, but the former can’t actually change the latter.

That said, I see no clean, easy answer to this dilemma.

I respect Thomas’ decision. I don’t condone telling her she has to compete against men solely because of that aforementioned chromosome.

But neither can I blithely pretend that this single biological fact doesn’t afford Thomas an advantage that some — and probably many, based on her race results this past season — of her fellow female competitors, no matter how prodigious their natural talent and no matter how diligently they toil in the pool and the weight room, can offset.

This seems to me wrong.

Yet I can’t think of how to make it right.

The voters who choose inductees to the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame — professional athletes, of course, not amateurs like Thomas — have in effect punished several of the sport’s greatest performers who were either accused of or confirmed to have used performance-enhancing substances. The punishment was refusing to vote for them, and thus excluding many, so far, from induction.

That list includes Barry Bonds, who has hit more home runs than any other major leaguer.

But denying an honor to athletes who cheated, and doing so after they retire, is no solution to the conundrum of transgender athletes competing now and in the future.

Thomas didn’t cheat. Or lie.

Indeed, telling the truth was perhaps her bravest act.

Creating a separate competitive category for trans athletes, as some have suggested, is similarly unsatisfying. Whether the roster of such athletes would be sufficient to create true competition is questionable at present, for one thing. Worse still, the concept of a separate category perpetuates the notion that Thomas and other trans athletes ought to be segregated.

Another compromise feels to me like a copout — continuing to allow Thomas to compete against women but affixing to her results an asterisk. This strikes me as merely a diluted form of the segregation I mentioned in the previous paragraph.

I have no idea whether Lia Thomas will turn out to be an outlier, or whether her experience as a college swimmer is the vanguard of a major change, and challenge, for sports in general.

But it seems likely that preserving the notion of fairness in the pools and fields and courts of the future, while also respecting athletes’ gender choices, will be a more complicated task than it has been up til now.

Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.