Trans Swimmers Included in World Aquatics Competitions

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Facts

  • World Aquatics, the global governing body for swimming, announced on Tuesday that they will set up an “open category” that will include transgender competitors.1
  • World Aquatics president Husain Al-Musallam announced that a trial run for an “open category” would include transgender competitors for future competitions, but did not provide a timetable on when it would be implemented.2
  • The move comes a year after the organization announced that it would ban any transgender woman who went through male puberty or had gender-reassignment surgery after the age of 12 from competing in the female category at competitions.3
  • In his announcement, Al-Mussallam emphasized his commitment to fostering inclusion in the sport saying, "It was very important that we protected fair competition for our female athletes...Nobody should be excluded from our competitions."4
  • The British Triathlon Federation made a similar decision last year, saying that due to the "physiology advantages" that transgender women have, the Federation would be holding a separate "Open" competition for gender non-conforming triathlon competitors assigned male at birth including transgender and nonbinary people.3
  • The debate around the place of transgender athletes in competitive sports was stirred after American swimmer Lia Thomas won the women’s 500-yard freestyle at the 2022 NCAA championships in Atlanta, becoming the first transgender woman to claim a national title in swimming.4

Sources: 1NBC, 2Yahoo Sports, 3Forbes, and 4Associated Press.

Narratives

  • Right narrative, as provided by Forbes. Although transgender women may identify as women, that doesn't negate the fact that they have real physical advantages from going through male puberty. Allowing performance-advantaged transgender women to compete at the expense of cisgender women would violate the core reason that separate women’s competitions exist. Having a third category open for transgender athletes to compete in preserves the fairness of women's sports while still allowing these athletes to compete.
  • Left narrative, as provided by American Civil Liberties Union. Excluding women who are transgender harms all women and invites harmful gender policing. A person’s genetics and reproductive anatomy are not useful indicators of athletic performance, so there's no inherent reason why the physiological characteristics related to the athletic performance of a transgender woman should be treated any differently from the physiological characteristics of a non-transgender woman. Transgender women should be able to compete in women's sports.