TWIBS: Lia Thomas Fights Back Against Olympic Trans Ban
The swimmer is arguing the rules that prevent her and other trans women from competing are discriminatory.
by Alyssa Steinsiek
Lia Thomas is in the news once more and, incredibly, it isn’t because Riley Gaines woke up and felt like talking shit about her!
Former NCAA athlete and University of Pennsylvania swim team member Lia Thomas, the first transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division-I title, is challenging the 2022 policy that functionally bans trans women from competing in the Olympics instituted by World Aquatics, the governing body allowed by the International Olympics Committee (IOC) to oversee international competitions in water sports. World Aquatics spun this as a policy on “gender inclusion,” despite the blatant truth that the policy explicitly excludes trans women on the basis of a presupposed ‘biological advantage,’ a pseudoscientific belief for which there is no basis.
The policy Thomas is challenging establishes that transgender women cannot compete in World Aquatics events if they “experienced any part of male puberty,” or more specifically, medically transitioned after the age of 12.
You could be forgiven for believing that the IOC’s stated belief that sport and play are a human right should preclude blanket bans on categories of people from competing! Unfortunately, they’re more than happy to entertain the bigoted delusions of transphobes, as evidenced by the international governing bodies for competitive cycling and running issuing similar bans on participation by trans competitors that remain unchallenged by the committee.
Once more suffering a spotlight to champion trans women’s right to participate in public life, Lia Thomas has filed a case with the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in an attempt to overturn World Aquatics’ ban on prospective trans Olympians. A hearing date has yet to be set, and CAS has stated that they cannot publicly comment on the specifics of arbitration, but they insist that Thomas accepts “some regulation of transgender women in swimming is appropriate,” but that “the challenged provisions are invalid and unlawful as they discriminate against her.”
screenshot from Reuters
It’s unclear what specific changes to the rules Thomas is seeking, but for an idea of more reasonable, less restrictive policies, we can look back at the 2016 IOC-implemented rules for trans competitors. These rules eschewed a longstanding requirement for trans women to undergo sexual reassignment surgery in favor of allowing them to compete after at least two years of testosterone-suppressing hormone replacement therapy. Trans men were allowed to compete without restriction.
Shockingly, the sky did not fall.
But in 2019 the IOC replaced those rules with new guidelines that abdicated responsibility for regulation by deferring to the decisions of bodies like World Aquatics, thus paving the way for the discriminatory policies that we’re seeing today. Rather than take a firm stance supporting the inclusion of diverse athletes in the Olympics, the IOC offered a ten-page list of gentle suggestions that bigots have unsurprisingly decided to ignore.
This discrimination should stand on its own merit as abhorrent and unacceptable, but I would be remiss if I failed to mention that these bans don’t just impact explicitly transgender women. Like Thomas, Olympic champion Caster Semenya has challenged unreasonable blanket bans based on testosterone levels, filing a case with CAS in 2019 that, unfortunately, she lost.
Semenya has what is considered an intersex condition, though she rejects the label of intersex for herself. She and other competitors who possess “disorders of sex development” (DSD) have been directly targeted by these policies and put in the unenviable position of deciding whether or not to undergo medical intervention, like taking testosterone suppressing medication, if they want to compete. For most trans women, the idea of suppressing our testosterone isn’t novel; it’s a standard part of the typical approach to medical transition. But for women like Semenya, it’s an invasive demand that they conform to stereotypes of womanhood rooted in white supremacy. Black women in pursuit of equality are, yet again, degendered or masculinized by a group composed almost entirely of non-Black men.
Last November, having appealed her discrimination case, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Caster Semenya “had not been afforded sufficient institutional and procedural safeguards in Switzerland to allow her to have her complaints examined effectively and that the domestic remedies available to the applicant could not be considered effective in the circumstances of the present case.”
It’s a hollow sort of victory, in which the ECHR has acknowledged that Semenya is the victim of a human rights violation, but the intent of her challenge to the CAS—that she and other DSD women be allowed to compete—remains unrealized. It is unlikely that she will be allowed to compete as a middle-distance runner in Paris this year.
I don’t know that I anticipate Lia Thomas’s case with the CAS to produce better results. Since Semenya lost her case in 2019, I fear the world has only grown more hostile to women who are not cisgender or do not conform to white European beauty standards. We haven’t seen significant gains for trans people in other arenas… would it be foolish to hope for progress on this front?
But I do have hope, all the same. Whether or not Thomas wins her case, it matters that she filed it, that she has been fighting for her rights, that she will continue to fight for the rights of trans women in sports. Like Semenya, Thomas serves as an inspiration to marginalized women everywhere who are told that they aren’t pretty enough, that their shoulders are too broad, that their hands are too big.
It matters that we fight, always, even if a win isn’t assured.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer and video games nerd who hails from Appalachia but lives, laughs, loves in Rapid City.