Swimming body to tighten rules

[tabbycatstripy]

In The Times this evening: rules to be tightened by Fina, the swimming governing body, to ‘raise the bar’ for transgender inclusion so that (according to the article) competitors in the female competition will not be able to participate with the advantage of male puberty.

‘A source close to those devising the rules told The Times that under the proposed regulations Thomas — who won the 500 yards event at the NCAA championship — “would not have been able to compete with women . . . and the female category will be protected from athletes who have male advantages from male puberty and development”’.

This seems a massive development. If the article (which has now been muddled up with an intro about EB being banned ) is accurate, then American swimming is completely rowing this all back.

While it's not the complete ban I'd like, the suggestion from an ex 3 times Olympic champion swimmer, now a lawyer and involved in drawing up the policy Nancy Hogshead - Makar is that I think that showing ‘no advantage’ is impossible so there’s the high bar: no boy grown through puberty to man can possibly be allowed into a women’s sport like swimming on race day .

Share token:
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/88e0a5e0-b026-11ec-8b8c-0207c0fd6104?shareToken=f2611c2eac3c21dc25d01acd58b444b6

Thanks for the share token. It seems massive to me. A complete ban would be ideal but the next best thing is making it situationally impossible.

This is a really interesting development. Some friends and I were talking about this issue recently and all pondering how long before a fairly mediocre male tennis player self identified as female and blasted a hole through womens tennis. Even a very low ranked man would surely beat any women on the tour?

If it's true, and the Times are very good with their investigations, this will blow apart all the bullying and silencing of women swimmers and athletes that's happening.Those courageous young women (and their parents) taking on the toxic groups eroding women's swimming have actually made an impact. And it will start to roll over into other sports.

Maybe responsible adults can step up on these sports governing bodies instead of the self interested men running the inclusion / diversity gravy trains.

Sport brings it out like nothing else. It’s public and the women being disadvantaged (cheated) are ‘high status’. People often don’t care as much as they should about women in prison, sick women in hospital wards, raped women. But often they can be moved to care more about women who should have medals for sporting achievements, but don’t because the medals went to a cheat.

Swimming is divided into sex categories in galas even before puberty because otherwise even then the boys would thrash the girls.

Sport provokes a reaction in men more than any other area. They easily grasp and relate to concepts of fairness and cheating where as the things pertaining to safety, privacy and dignity are often a bit more abstract for them I think.

And they also feel much more comfortable discussing sport than they do (for example) sexual assault.

It's under the sporting columns in the Times where I've seen the clearest disapproval from men about what's happening to women. We've often said on here that it's sport that will lead the nation up those mountains... I wish it was what was happening to children but accept we have to start somewhere. And at least the Cass Review's initial findings are so damning, that change will happen there as well eventually.

Better news, that's for sure. It was posted earlier too. Have also just read that a certain cyclist has been barred but not sure of the whole story.

On the removal of EB from Saturday’s competition, apparently they are “no longer eligible”. I mean, they’ve never been eligible to compete as a woman since they are biologically male but we’ll take our wins where we can:

www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cycling/60934099

This is definitely a ‘tide-turning’ sign. The whole rhetoric has changed from ‘Obviously we all agree that TWAW and inclusion is very important’.

I see that sport is being hived off and treated as a separate issue, but yes it's a positive development. Perhaps the impact of the egregiously corrupt IOC and their rulings of 2003 and 2015 can be reversed.

This is such good news. I do wonder why it’s taken them this long, I feel they probably haven’t thought it through, because you know misogyny.

"Fantina

Swimming is divided into sex categories in galas even before puberty because otherwise even then the boys would thrash the girls."

You only have to attend your local parkrun to see that 9/10 year old boys can easily appear at the finish a long time before the girls of the same age.

The local county champ times for girls in the 10/11 age groups are faster than the boys due to earlier female development. The girls times in the races were also faster than the boys. Big difference swinging to the boys being faster at 12 onwards though