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”.
Most of the trans community absolutely does not agree that trans women should be excluded from women’s sports, no clue where you’re getting that from.
And trans women are women, excluding us from women’s sports is literally not fair. We are not men, nor are we male. So we are not going to compete in men sports or male categories.
And if we don’t make sports fair for everyone then why are you talking about fairness?? If it’s not fair already then what materially is lost by trans women competing?
Say a transgender woman wins at a competition in women’s sports, what materially has been lost here? A woman won a women’s sporting event. What is happening that is unfair?? She’s female, she’s a woman, so how can you assert that she shouldn’t be able to participate in women’s sports? To what end? What is lost by letting the half a dozen trans female athletes in the world compete?
The literal only justification for it is a fundamental belief that trans women are not female or are not women. Any other attempt at justifying it falls apart at the seams because there are more outlier women physically than there are transgender women at all, so banning transgender women but allowing outlier women to compete is literally just banning us cause we’re trans.