New World Sailing Guidelines Ban Most Trans Women
New participation guidelines published by World Sailing mirror de facto bans on trans women participating in competitive sailing, a move sure to harm cisgender competitors and the sport as a whole.
by Alyssa Steinsiek
Yet another worldwide governing body for sports has placed restrictions upon transgender competitors. This time it’s World Sailing, who are recognized by the International Olympic Committee as the premier authority on sailing, a sport included in the Summer Olympic Games. As is the case with previous governing bodies passing rules for transgender competitors, World Sailing’s new mandate exclusively targets trans women and disqualifies most out of hand.
World Sailing’s new restrictions on transgender competitors include specific measured hormone levels for at least 12 months prior to competing but, most concerning, stipulate that the competitor has never undergone ‘Tanner Stage 2’ puberty. Stage 2 of the Tanner scale for sexual maturity is reached at a very young age, sometimes as early as 11 years old, and the gender-affirming care that would prevent a transgender child from experiencing unwanted natal puberty is being heavily restricted, and sometimes flat-out banned, by right-wing legislators across the world.
The UK’s National Health Services officially stopped prescribing puberty blockers in March as a result of the deeply harmful Cass Report, even though Hilary Cass herself has admitted there are no clear risks in using puberty blockers. She also pointed out that the most common age young trans people were being prescribed puberty blockers was 15, far beyond the point at which they would be disqualified for competition by World Sailing.
Things aren’t any better in the US, where 24 states have banned gender-affirming care for transgender minors. An estimated 38% of trans youth, nearly 114,000 children and teens, live in these 24 states where doctors are prohibited from prescribing the necessary, life-saving medication these kids need. In some of those states, parents risk having their children taken away if they pursue gender-affirming care.
World Sailing isn’t the first world governing body for a sport to essentially ban transgender participation, however. In fact, they openly admit to taking “medical expertise and guidance” from other associations that have already enacted such prohibitory guidelines, like World Athletics and UCI, who passed their own discriminatory regulations in March and May of 2023. World Aquatics de facto banned trans women from competition in 2022, though former collegiate swimmer Lia Thomas is currently challenging that ban.
Typically, these bans are blatantly discriminatory and have no basis in reality. When transgender women are banned from competitive chess and cisgender people playing darts or pool refuse to compete against trans women, it becomes very clear what their true motivation is. Particularly when rigid guidelines barring competitors based on the hormones in their bodies can just as easily impact cisgender women.
World Sailing CEO David Graham said of the new rules, “The priority of World Sailing in formulating this policy has been to ensure fair competition at the elite level, where no participant has an unfair or disproportionate advantage over the rest. In particular, we have to uphold fairness and integrity in the female and mixed categories of competition.”
But is World Sailing ensuring fair competition? Stephanie Helms, a transgender woman and competitive sailor herself and a member of U.S. Sailing’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee doesn’t think so.
“I am deeply disappointed by this decision, which adopts a stance most unsuited to a sport like sailing that is deeply equipment-dependent and really not biased toward one sex/gender or another in terms of performance potential at any level,” she said. “Most competition from elite international to scholastic to fun, around-the-cans racing is mixed gender. Only in specialized categories in international and national governing body events that serve as qualifiers for them is gender-segregated competition even offered, and primarily so for historically social reasons.”
Rules like these exist primarily as a political statement, to assuage the fabricated concerns of a very loud minority who wish to see transgender people disappear from sport and social life entirely. They harm both transgender and cisgender competitors, and pointlessly drive people away from competition.
Sport and play are a human right, and whether or not you can compete shouldn’t be down to the whims of unscientific, biased rulemakers.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer and video games nerd who cohosts a podcast about trans news!
