I don’t want trans athletes excluded. But we must have fair sport for females. It’s bodies that ‘do’ sport, not feelings
After controversy over a US trans swimmer, SHARRON DAVIES makes a heartfelt and deeply personal plea
THE atmosphere when a trans swimmer controversially triumphed at the United States college championships last week was uncomfortable at best and I am amazed the sporting authorities did not act sooner to prevent it. It has been obvious for several years that the rules around transgender participation in sport were unfair to biological females and promised to create the kind of mess that we have seen in the Atlanta pool.
When Lia Thomas competed as a man before her transition two years ago, she was an average swimmer at university level, outside the top 500 for the National Collegiate Athletic Association. In Atlanta on Thursday, she won the women’s 500-yard freestyle while appearing to hold back and was met with near silence on the podium, going from 554th as a man to first in the women’s category.
Lia has been taking testosterone suppression medication for the required last 12 months, as stipulated in the NCAA rules, but no amount of it can reverse the physical benefits of male puberty. She has greater upper-body strength and significantly more muscle mass than a woman of the same weight and height. She has a greater lung capacity, better VO2 uptake, different bone density, she is nearly 6ft 4in tall and has large hands and feet that act like paddles.
She is a male competing against females and it is hugely unfair. Take the 500yd freestyle, for example, which is just one of her three events at the NCAA championships.
She beat one female athlete to a place on the Pennsylvania team. She kept a second out of the semifinals and another out of the final. The fourth-placed swimmer was denied a place on the podium and runner-up Emma Weyant, the first actual female in the race, lost out on being the NCAA champion. Lia also had to beat three Olympic silver medallists from Tokyo to win, having been an unremarkable male athlete two years ago. That’s five female athletes who have lost places and medals as a result of Lia’s participation in one event.
I could see this happening when the International Olympic Committee changed the rules so that trans women could compete in the women’s category as long as they underwent a very limited period of testosterone suppression. I organised and signed a letter with 60 friends of mine, all world champions or Olympic medallists, urging the IOC to rethink the guidelines. We simply asked them to listen to the science around male puberty and its irreversible benefits.
They didn’t. In fact, last year they dropped testosterone suppression as a requirement and prioritised the inclusion of transgender athletes over fair sport for females, in the process discriminating against half of the world’s population.
It’s the IOC’s job to protect all athletes, females too. Instead they abdicated responsibility and left it up to individual ruling bodies to do all the work. It was cowardly and it helped to create this situation.
Sadly, the IOC constantly shirk their responsibility to protect the integrity of sport, as they did with the 15-year-old Russian ice skater, Kamila Valieva, who failed a drug test at the Beijing Winter Games.
UK Sport commissioned a lengthy report that was published last year. It concluded that you cannot allow trans women to compete in the female category without compromising fairness, and that athletes and coaches were being intimidated into not speaking out. The only truly fair solution is to create a protected biological female category, and an open, welcoming and inclusive category where trans women and trans men can compete. I do not want to see trans athletes excluded. I never have.
I would like Lia to be free to compete in a category appropriate to her biological sex and I want her to feel welcome when doing it, not to touch the wall to silence. I have always wanted fair sport for females — they must have an equal chance of success in sport, where physiology is vital to performance. Bodies do sport, not feelings.
This must apply across all forms of competition, and not merely the elite. Otherwise you risk excluding young girls from their own sport at a time when it is imperative to both their physical and mental health. We already struggle to keep young girls engaged in sport. What’s more, in contact sports this situation is a serious accident waiting to happen.
All that said, I’m optimistic we’re turning a corner, both within swimming and beyond. The US senator Tommy Tuberville recently proposed an amendment bill to protect women’s and girls’ sport in the Senate. A women’s group last week filed a civil complaint against the University of Pennsylvania for allowing Thomas to compete on its team for breaking Title 9, which was introduced to stop sexual discrimination in sport.
The World Swimming Coaches Association is drawing up a new policy to protect the integrity of
Thomas went from 554th in rankings as a man to first in the women’s category
Every athlete I talk to thinks this situation is wrong, but they are too scared to speak out
biological women in sport. USA Swimming have a system in which the burden of proof is on the trans athlete to demonstrate that they have mitigated against the performance benefits of male puberty, though the NCAA championships chose not to adopt it last week.
FINA, swimming’s ruling body, is also introducing a new set of rules that they say will go further than USA Swimming. But why has it taken so long to grasp what we have always known, that males are faster and stronger than females because of their biological sex, which cannot be changed?
The progress made is encouraging. It makes me think it has been worthwhile speaking out on behalf of women on this issue for so long. I feel strongly because I competed in an era when female swimmers raced against opponents from the old East Germany, who had been placed on a dreadful doping programme during puberty.
Both in the 1976 and 1980 Olympics, the East German women won 11 out of 13 events, and 90 per cent of the medals. In 1980 in Moscow, I was beaten to gold by Petra Schneider, who later admitted to using steroids, and asked for her national record in the 400m individual medley to be struck off.
It was a familiar story throughout my career. To lose consistently to opponents who you know are cheating was incredibly frustrating and disheartening.
Other British athletes were denied medals altogether, and we
simply don’t know their names because of this injustice. I have been determined this wouldn’t happen to another generation of young women.
We all knew what was going on then, but nobody was allowed to call it out. My dad, Terry, was marginalised as an international coach because he was one of the few people in swimming who dared to question publicly the sudden success of the East German women.
Every athlete I speak to thinks this situation is wrong, but they are too frightened to voice their opinion. Likewise every coach and official. Parents come up to me in the street and thank me for speaking out. No parent wants to see their children denied the right to fair sport. Those that understand sport know that this is wrong. They are afraid to speak up because of the abuse they would get. Swimmers in the US have been told they’ll be stripped of their scholarships if they criticise what is going on. Coaches and officials fear losing their jobs were they to take a stand.
We’re supposed to have free speech in the West, but we’re not allowed to talk about a biological reality, and this has meant we haven’t been able to come up with a better solution.
The trans activists are very vocal, often intimidating. They can be extremely abusive and have even threatened my children. Just as worrying is that this abuse is mostly coming from men, and is incredibly misogynistic. It’s the worst I’ve ever known. Most hide behind social media.
I’ve learned to ignore it but it isn’t easy. I’m always careful in what I say. I stick to the facts, and I use peerreviewed
science. I never insult anyone or rise to any provocation. But I refuse to back down because it’s an important issue for the next generation of young women. Women like my own daughter, Grace, who was an athlete. I will always wish someone had shouted louder for my generation in the 1970s and 80s.
I have no gripe with Lia Thomas. I wish her luck living her authentic life. She should be safe to do that. She is not breaking the NCAA’s rules as they stand.
It’s a shame that they didn’t adopt the USA Swimming policy but maybe the world needed to see how ridiculous this was always going to be. The rules need to change across all sport before more female athletes suffer because of them. Lia needs to be in a race where the crowd won’t respond to her success with silence.