World Swimming Bans Trans Athletes From Elite Women’s Competitions

  |  
Jun 20, 2022

FINA, the world’s top international swimming association, has just effectively banned transgender women from competing in women’s events. This move will prevent biological men like Lia Thomas from competing against females in elite swimming competitions beginning on Monday.

“We have to protect the rights of our athletes to compete, but we also have to protect competitive fairness at our events, especially the women’s category at FINA competitions,” FINA President Husain Al-Musallam said in a statement.

Per the new policy, FINA will also consider an “open” category for transgender athletic competition. This new policy proposal is 24-pages long, and the organization said it was setting up “a new working group that will spend the next six months looking at the most effective ways to set up this new category.”

“FINA will always welcome every athlete. The creation of an open category will mean that everybody has the opportunity to compete at an elite level. This has not been done before, so FINA will need to lead the way. I want all athletes to feel included in being able to develop ideas during this process,” Al-Musallam added.

In addition to the “open competition category,” the Associated Press highlighted that FINA members widely adopted a new “gender inclusion policy” on Sunday. This policy will only permit swimmers who transitioned before age 12 to compete in women’s events.

“This is not saying that people are encouraged to transition by the age of 12. It’s what the scientists are saying, that if you transition after the start of puberty, you have an advantage, which is unfair,” James Pearce, a spokesperson for Al-Musallam, told The Associated Press.

“They’re not saying everyone should transition by age 11, that’s ridiculous. You can’t transition by that age in most countries and hopefully you wouldn’t be encouraged to. Basically, what they’re saying is that it is not feasible for people who have transitioned to compete without having an advantage.”

Many eyes are on transgender swimmer Lia Thomas right now who said in an interview with Good Morning America that he wanted to use his platform to advance the movement of trans people in sports. He even went as far as to say he was considering Olympic trials in the future if possible – WATCH:

Per Thomas, “trans people don’t transition for athletics. We transition to be happy and authentic and our true selves.”

“I don’t need anybody’s permission to be myself,” he added.

Thomas then proceeded to defend trans people in female athletics, despite posing sizeable and record-breaking achievements for the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swimming team.

“Trans women competing in women’s sports does not threaten sports as a whole because trans women are a very small minority and the NCAA rules regarding trans women competing have been around for 10 plus years and we haven’t seen any massive wave of trans women dominating,” he stated.

This new policy from FINA may have just upended all of Thomas’ plans.

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