Pretense of Trans-Only Athletic Category Laid Bare
There aren’t enough trans people in sports to support a separate category, and never were,
by Evan Urquhart
A plan by World Aquatics to host segregated races for transgender swimmers has been scrapped after nobody signed up to compete. World Aquatics’ plan for a new “open” category, was created as a fig leaf to make room for discriminatory treatment of trans women by the sport’s governing body in July. “Our sport must be open to everybody,” World Aquatics president Husain Al-Musallam told the Associated Press then, as part of his announcement that trans competitors would be banned from normal competition but the pretense of accommodation and openness would be maintained by a fake category no one wanted.
The hollowness of this charade was exposed as soon as they instituted this “open” category because there aren’t any trans swimmers to compete, a fact which would have been obvious to anyone who counted the number of transgender swimmers competing in swimming before creating a category supposedly for them.
The creation of this “open” category was an act of breathtaking cynicism. There have never have been enough transgender athletes to sustain separate categories just for them, and there may never be. In swimming specifically there are no trans women in elite swimming today. Contrary to reports of trans women dominating the sport, the most accomplished trans woman in swimming, Lia Thomas, broke no major records and won only a single, solitary NCAA college championship race, before retiring from swimming to pursue being harassed by unhinged perverts full time. There was never going to be an open category. The open category was a joke.
When transphobes are challenged on the fact that trans women can’t compete with men fairly because after undergoing hormone therapy they lose muscle mass and their performance is comparable to that of cis women, rather than cis men, a common fallback position is that trans women should compete in a separate category. This is, and always has been, a troll line. Trans people are a small percentage of the population, and their marginalized position in society further ensures that a separate trans category could ever be on equal footing with the major categories as currently constituted. By creating an open category no one entered, World Aquatics has proven how hollow and inadequate the idea of separate categories for trans competitors always was. There are genuinely nuanced and complicated questions when it comes to trans people competing in sports. However, the answer was never going to be tacking a fake extra category for nobody onto elite sporting events.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article said that Lia Thomas only won a single NCAA college race. We inadvertently left the word “championship” out of that sentence. Thomas won additional races on the way to the championship.