Cheating or Fair Competition? A Structuration Analysis of Social Media Responses to Lia Thomas’ NCAA Swimming Championship

Abstract

In March 2022, Lia Thomas of the University of Pennsylvania became the first openly transgender woman to win an NCAA swimming championship. Using Giddens’ structuration theory as a theoretical lens, this analysis employs Latent Dirichlet Allocation to examine how tweets about Thomas and transgender athletes contain toxic discourses based on established sports structures of fairness and sex separation of sports .