William “Lia” Thomas won’t be setting any international swimming records — at least not if he plans to continue masquerading as a woman. FINA, the international body governing swimming competitions, just enacted a new policy barring transgender “women” from competing in women’s events unless they can prove they did not go through male puberty.
On Sunday, 71.5 percent of the delegates to FINA’s general congress in Budapest, Hungary, voted in favor of the new policy, which was crafted with input from athletes, scientists, and human-rights experts.
“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 press release.
“Biological sex,” the policy explains, “is a key determinant of athletic performance, with males outperforming females in sports…. The extent of the male/female performance gap varies by sport and competition, but the gap universally emerges starting from the onset of puberty,” when males’ “testosterone concentrations increase 20-fold,” giving them larger bodies with greater muscle mass, on average, than females.
Sex-change treatments such as hormone therapy, if begun after the onset of puberty, “will blunt some, but not all of the effects of testosterone,” the policy adds. “There will be persistent legacy effects that will give male-to-female transgender athletes … a relative performance advantage over biological females. A biological female athlete cannot overcome that advantage through training or nutrition. Nor can they take additional testosterone to obtain the same advantage, because testosterone is a prohibited substance under the World Anti-Doping Code.”
“Without eligibility standards based on biological sex or sex-linked traits,” the policy declares, “we are very unlikely to see biological females in finals, on podiums, or in championship positions; and in sports and events involving collisions and projectiles, biological female athletes would be at greater risk of injury.”
All of this used to be common sense in addition to being scientifically accurate, but with transgenderism being pushed by nearly all major Western institutions, both science and common sense have gone out the window. Thus, Thomas, who wasn’t much of a threat during his three years on the University of Pennsylvania men’s swimming team, was allowed to compete in women’s events after “transitioning” to female, whereupon he trounced even the best female swimmers — and was promptly feted by the media.
FINA, however, has not fully capitulated to this nonsense. Its new policy allows female-to-male transgender athletes to compete in men’s competitions, where they are no threat. But it strictly limits male-to-female swimmers to men’s competitions unless they “can establish to FINA’s comfortable satisfaction that they have not experienced any part of male puberty,” whether because of a genetic condition or because of testosterone-suppressing treatments begun before the onset of puberty and continued to the present day.
The federation isn’t totally kicking trans swimmers out of the pool, though. It plans to develop open events for athletes who do not qualify for either the men’s or women’s competitions. In addition, it encourages those who choose not to compete because of the new policy “to consider coaching, officiating, administration, and/or other ways to stay involved with Aquatics.”
“FINA will always welcome every athlete,” said Al-Musallam. “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.”
FINA isn’t the only sports organization where common sense has prevailed recently. Last week, the International Cycling Union (UCI) announced that it was tightening its standards for male-to-female cyclists to participate in women’s events. The group doubled the number of years a man must “transition” and halved the maximum testosterone level he may possess before competing against women.
Those with nothing to lose by calling men women, and vice versa, will probably continue with the charade for some time to come. Those whose pursuits depend on the facts of biology, however, are slowly but surely beginning to assert themselves. After all, if anyone can recognize when society has gone off the deep end, it’s swimmers.
