Did a black swimsuit originally read "not a dude" in a photo of a female athlete circulating on social media? No, that's not true: Lead Stories found earlier versions of the same image without these words. The phrase was digitally added.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on Facebook on March 19, 2024. The image shared without any description showed a woman in a black swimsuit that read:
NOT
A
DUDE!
This is what it looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Tue Mar 26 15:26:18 2024 UTC)
However, a reverse image search (archived here) performed by Lead Stories led to a least two 2015 uploads of the same photo (here and here). Neither of them showed the phrase in question.
In January 2024, Lead Stories discovered another altered photo of a woman in a different -- pink -- swimsuit with the same inauthentic inscription on it. That story can be read here.
AFP Fact Check (archived here) debunked one more claim about an edited group image of female athletes, pointing out that the added words pushed the anti-trans sentiment.
Other Lead Stories fact checks about sports can be found here.
