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”.
Intersex people exist and the variation of people assigned one sex or the other is damn near infinite so no, the assertion that sex is binary is really only ever used to exclude transgender people and intersex people from rights and to assert that there is a biological basis for assigned gender roles. Sex is dimorphic because we choose to describe it that way, we could just as easily have more sexes just by creating more categories based on aspects of human physiology.
And I’m female, so the only ethical rationale would be that I would compete with other people that we consider female.
If I’m born crippled, I can’t compete in the Olympics. It happens. We can only produce the closest thing to fair that we all agree on. It’s not to exclude transgender people, it’s simply that the exclusion just happens to exist based on how we determine eligibility.
So yeah it isn’t fair, so we can stop saying that excluding trans women is about fairness then.
If the variation is so wide, then gendered sports are completely pointless. With such a wide variation, and the non binary nature of sex you describe, we could either make a ton of pockets, or simply not make any.