On Monday, FINA, the international governing body for swimming, enacted a new policy restricting transgender female athletes from competing against women in elite aquatics competitions.
For a transgender female to qualify for women’s events, the athlete must have transitioned before the age of 12 or not have undergone male puberty. Under these new guidelines, transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, who won the NCAA women’s 500 freestyle event earlier this year and who has voiced aspirations of competing in the 2024 Olympics, will no longer be able to compete in the women’s category.
The guidance offers a positive step forward in the name of restoring fairness and science-based directives to women’s sports. FINA’s gender-inclusion policy points out that high levels of testosterone during male puberty create vast sex differences that cannot be ignored, particularly in a sport like swimming. Transitioning post-puberty can lessen some of the associated biological advantages bestowed upon male-bodied people, but structural and functional differences will nevertheless remain. Importantly, the document points out that a female athlete cannot overcome this male-associated advantage through nutrition or training.
Critics were quick to call the new policy discriminatory, failing to account for the ways in which prioritizing gender self-identification in sports discriminates against women. Others voiced concern that such a policy will encourage gender dysphoric boys to transition at a younger age. Since research has shown that puberty is the process by which gender dysphoria resolves in most children, failing to undergo this process means a child won’t know whether or not they would have desisted.
One would hope that parents making decisions pertaining to a child’s treatment will do so independently of a secondary issue such as which sports category he or she would prefer to compete in. One would hope. As I’ve written before, 10% of people say they know a child under the age of 18 who identifies as “transgender.” This is not a negligible fraction of the population — it is a sizable number of children.
If similar policies for transgender athletes requiring the absence of male puberty become a common standard across the board, one has to wonder whether unscrupulous activists will jump on them to justify earlier transitioning in gender-questioning children or any feminine boy showing an interest in sports.
Athletic organizations shouldn’t be afraid to put their foot down and only allow women who were born women to compete in elite women’s sports.
Dr. Debra Soh is a sex neuroscientist, the host of The Dr. Debra Soh Podcast, and the author of The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths About Sex and Identity in Our Society.
