The US swimmer Lia Thomas, who rose to global prominence after becoming the first transgender athlete to win a NCAA college title in March 2022, has lost a legal case against World Aquatics at the court of arbitration for sport – and with it any hopes of making next month’s Paris Olympics.
The 25-year-old also remains barred from swimming in the female category after failing to overturn rules introduced by swimming’s governing body in the summer of 2022, which prohibit anyone who has undergone “any part of male puberty” from the female category.
Thomas had argued that those rules should be declared “invalid and unlawful” as they were contrary to the Olympic charter and the World Aquatics constitution.
However, in a 24-page decision, the court concluded that Thomas was “simply not entitled to engage with eligibility to compete in WA competitions” as someone who was no longer a member of US swimming.
The news was welcomed by World Aquatics, who hailed it as “a major step forward in our efforts to protect women’s sport”.
That article says there’s no such thing as fully discreet categories of male and female. True!
So we either have to separate athletes into two separate categories of biological male and female that applies to 99% of people in order to give biological females a chance to compete at all, -OR- we have to say that since the biological male/female categorization system doesn’t apply to 100% of people then there is no basis for separate male/female sports and everyone just competes in a single event, in which case the only people who get to be on the team will wind up being close to 100% cis or trans males, with essentially no females ever getting to do professional sports.
Yeah, I think this is something that people continously fail to realize, sports have been split by sex/gender so that sport events aren’t dominated by one sex/gender. If you’re drawing lines to protect one group you’ve opened up the can of worms about where that line is drawn.