FINA members have widely adopted a new “gender inclusion policy” that only permits swimmers who transitioned before age 12 to compete in women’s events.
World swimming’s governing body has effectively banned transgender women from competing in women’s events, starting from Monday.
“They’re not saying everyone should transition by age 11, that’s ridiculous. You can’t transition by that age in most countries and hopefully you wouldn’t be encouraged to. Basically, what they’re saying is that it is not feasible for people who have transitioned to compete without having an advantage.”Pearce confirmed there are currently no transgender women competing in elite levels of swimming.
Pearce told the AP that the open competition would most likely mean more events, but those details still need to be worked out.“No one quite knows how this is going to work. And we need to include a lot of different people, including transgender athletes, to work out how it would work,” he said. “So there are no details of how that would work. The open category is something that will start being discussed tomorrow.
FINA’s “deeply discriminatory, harmful, unscientific” new policy is “not in line with framework on fairness, inclusion and non-discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sex variations,” Anne Lieberman of Athlete Ally, a non-profit that advocates for LGBTQ athletes, said in a statement. The triple Olympic champion caused surprise in Budapest by ruling herself out of Sunday morning’s preliminaries of the 100m backstroke, the event she dominated in Tokyo and at which she holds the world record.
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