In the past couple months, there has been controversy over a transgender swimmer for the University of Pennsylvania. The swimmer, Lia Thomas, competed for the men's team for three years while undergoing hormone replacement therapy due to transitioning from male to female. After more than two years of this transition process and hormone treatment, Thomas now competes for the women's team and has swam the fastest times for all female college swimmers in two different events. This sparks the conversation of whether or not this makes for fair competition. Thomas' teammates wrote a letter to school and Ivy League officials questioning the fairness of Thomas' competition status and asked for her to be sidelined for the NCAA Championships coming up soon.
Her teammates requests are very valid, and it brings up the question of transgender people competing throughout all collegiate sports. It is not fair for them to be competing with and against someone who was born a male. A person born a male who goes through puberty as a male will always have remnants of male chemical-composition, even after going through the transition process to female. Therefore, there is an unfair competitive advantage for the transgender swimmer. How is this fair for a female-born athlete? It's not. There needs to be rules and regulations to prevent this from happening across sports. From a recent article from The Washington Post, there are steps being established to combat this issue.
"Last month, the NCAA established a new sport-by-sport policy in which transgender athletes’ participation will be determined by the policy set by each sport’s governing body. On Tuesday, USA Swimming issued a new policy that establishes eligibility criteria for transgender athletes in elite events.
To determine a transgender swimmer’s eligibility at the elite level, a three-person panel of independent medical experts will determine whether the swimmer’s prior physical development as a man gives the athlete a competitive advantage over her cisgender female competitors. The swimmer also must show the concentration of testosterone in her blood has been less than 5 nanomoles per liter continuously for at least 36 months."
It is not fair, and not morally right, for a male-born athlete to compete against females in sport. The competitive advantage is sufficient enough to make a real difference. In Thomas' case, the female records that were broken should not be valid, and Thomas should not be allowed to continue to compete in the NCAA Championships meet. The choice to transition from male to female is Thomas' personal choice, but the fact that she competes against female-born athletes is outright ridiculous.
This is an extremely difficult and sensitive matter to comment on due to how inflammatory debates on this subject tend to get. I think that people in support of Lia Thomas competing with biological women are neglecting the biological differences between men and women. In today's society progressives are trying to dismantle the patriarchy and push for equality for women in the workplace, which I think is a great thing. However, when it comes down to athletic performance, men tend to have an advantage in many categories. When Thomas was in the men's division for the 200 meter race she ranked 554th. When competing in the women's division she ranked 5th. This is not to discredit her accomplishments but I…
We discussed this in class, but I could not agree with you more. The sheer physical advantage that she has over her competitors is definitively unfair. While I do not believe that it is her decision to be trans (as clearly she did not feel comfortable in the body she was born in) the fact that she was born and raised a male, having the transformation surgery only a few years ago, gives her an extreme advantage of stature, muscular development, and testosterone. While I am in full support of the trans community and anybody who does go through the transition, I do not think that those who were born male should be able to compete against female athletes at…
This is a very interesting post and it brings about a lot of discussion on this topic. I concur with the argument that sports are "unfair to begin with", as an individual's genetic capabilities are decided at birth and hard to control. And while the Micheal Phelps argument does bring up a good point regarding fairness, I believe that with a huge biological difference between males and females it is also worth considering. In a way, athletics should seek to minimize differences between competitors for the sake of fairness, and in the case of gender, there should be a divide in competition as it minimizes the drastic biological differences. In other words, while athletic events may still have inequalities in…
It is not fair, nor morally right, to ban transgender people from competing in sports on the basis of their gender. This argument is not about morality or fairness in sports, it is about the rights of transgender people to live without discrimination. Katie Ledecky has extremely faster times compared to Lia Thomas, and she is a cis woman. Micheal Phelps was known to have biological advantages over most other men. If we want fairness in sports, then we should divide by weight classes rather than such an arbitrary thing as gender. Continuing rhetoric that trans athletes existing harms women is what contributes to the large scale stripping of rights for trans people in the US.