FINA Set to Announce Transgender-Participation Guidelines

[Helleofabore]

www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/fina-set-to-announce-transgender-participation-guidelines-standards-expected-to-be-strict/

On Sunday, during the World Championships in Budapest, FINA is expected to reveal its transgender-participation guidelines. For several months, the international governing body for aquatic sports has been working with national federations, including USA Swimming, to design competition standards for transgender athletes.

And

It is expected that the threshold for transgender inclusion will be challenging to meet, as FINA has discussed the issue closely with USA Swimming, among other national federations. USA Swimming’s guidelines for transgender participation require athletes to possess a testosterone level of less than 5 nmol/L for 36 months.

It will be interesting to see what they say. However, as many experts are now saying, it is pointless to keep reducing T levels and extending time periods.

Ultimately, I expect sports will get to a place in years to come where they will change the guidelines back to ‘female only’. This concept of inclusivity is not symmetrical. Even the UCI admitted that females will not have an ‘equal’ chance at success and they deemed that acceptable.

From the UCI document:

It is paramount, however, that all athletes competing have a chance to succeed, albeit not necessarily an equal chance and in line with the true essence of sport.

And this paper Why the Trans Inclusion Problem cannot be Solved by Tomas Bogardus might also be of interest.

philpapers.org/archive/BOGWTT.pdf

And no one says let's adjust men's sport so that transmen can 'have a chance to succeed' either.

Well, that would be ridiculous.

Well if they can come up with 15 different categories for Para Swimming to ensure fairness and equity:
Swimmers are classed in one of 15 groups based on their degree of ability, with each group indicating a different level of physical, visual, intellectual or hearing impairment
One would have thought they can grasp the concept of difference between a man and a woman. No?

Surely the poor little lambs should be allowed to play with the girlies. After all, the massive physiological advantages that they enjoy even with reduced testosterone must be offset with the massive sense of male entitlement that they drag around with them.

Interesting that FIFA has proposed changes that are going to consultation.

FIFA, however, following an internal review that began in 2020, have dropped their old limit of five nmole/L over 12 months and recommended that no threshold is adopted.

They have proposed that a transgender woman should not be allowed to compete in the female category if she has retained a competitive advantage as a result of male puberty. How that would be determined is unclear but a panel of independent experts from the fields of medicine, psychology, law and human rights would be called to assess each individual case.

www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/sportsnews/article-10930499/Experts-fear-FIFAs-make-easier-transgender-women-harm-female-football.html

On the face of it that will be really simple - there's not a single male (pre or post puberty) who hasn't received a competitive advantage from being male. But presumably that means measuring them against some kind of 'woman' standard. E.g. can you run given distance in a set time? Just get it under this threshold to qualify. I can't see any problems there.

So, if girls ID as boys and take testosterone and then stop ID ing as boys and start IDing again as girls, is it the female levels or the male levels they need to reach?

If it is the girls levels then that shows that sports bodies do indeed know the difference between the sexes right?

TBF FINA and IOC are still trying to decide what to do about the East German female swimmers who were routinely dosed with anabolic steroids in the 70's and 80's (which only came to light after the fall of the Iron Curtain).

FINA is stuffed full of middle aged committee members, mostly male, so they probably aren't up to speed with what's going on (particularly if they are from more conservative parts of the globe).

Busy googling a recipe for humble pie.

It looks as if FINA is heading in the right direction.